D&D General why do we have halflings and gnomes?

[Minigiant]

That’s a thing in...one edition of D&D , basically.

Issa joke? Gotta be.

Curiosity and a greatly reduced fear response, certainly would. And curiosity would be...the most prominent common trait amongst adventurers.

And you keep ignoring all the other traits of halflings, like fierce loyalty, being quick to form bonds, a sense of community and especially duty to the community (ie, thing needs doing, I can do it, therefor I am obligated to do it. And bonus, I’m not afraid of doing it).

Seriously the only thing counting against halfling adventurers is “they love a hot meal and a warm fire”, while the stack of traits pointing them toward adventure is at least half a dozen very compelling traits.

Lemme say it again.
Halfling are great adventurers. However halfling society as written discourages many of the popular drives and motivation to be an adventurer.
Power
Glory
Wealth
Revenge
Perfection
Protection
Knowledge

And replaces them with Curiosity and Companionship.

And that's seems weird to me to have your top 4 iconic race so limited.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I must admit dwarves, gnomes and halflings sort of float around in my homebrew, and don't seem as anchored as some of the others, but here is what I've basically gravitated to.

Dwarves draw in a lot of Old Germanic and Scandinavian mythology, playing up their links to crafting and precious jewels and metals. In my world they are the hybrid descendants of a strange, subterranean earth race and human women, who over thousands of years, now breed true.

Gnomes are in effect a subrace of dwarves, a smaller, slimmer group who have been exiled from dwarven kingdoms for some unspecified trangression, and now live in a '"diaspora". They obviously draw heavily from the history and culture of the Jewish people, but also add in element of Chaldeans, Parsis and other "middle-man" minorities of the Medieval Period. They live mainly in the "egyptian" styled nation in my world, where they serve as advisors, scribes, and other niche intellectual roles. They tend to be bearded, but with shaved head, meaning they resemble the real world god Ptah.

Halflings I see as the ultimate in mixing of bloodlines: human, gnome (and hence dwarf) and some elf. They tend to live in small communities of their own. In my campaign they are very East-Asian themed (but with some traveller bits mixed in), and where in our world many nations have historic Chinatowns, in my homebrew you see man "Hsientowns" (Hsien being the name halflings have for themselves)

 

[Charlaquin]

Lemme say it again.
Halfling are great adventurers. However halfling society as written discourages many of the popular drives and motivation to be an adventurer.
Power
Glory
Wealth
Revenge
Perfection
Protection
Knowledge

And replaces them with Curiosity and Companionship.

And that's seems weird to me to have your top 4 iconic race so limited.

This is just not a compelling argument at all. Curiosity, wanderlust, restlessness, these things are also drives to adventure that halflings share, and they lack the fear that would discourage them from following those drives. Do they enjoy homely comforts? Sure, but so does literally everyone. And, again, even if that wasn’t the case, it makes sense for one of the iconic races’ shtick to be the simple farm boy thrust into adventure despite being more comfortable in their quaint little hamlet. Because as I’ve said many times and you keep ignoring, that’s an iconic hero archetype that deserves representation in the core races.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So a race of people with no ambition, no urge to protect themselves, and no desire to engage in wold politics seems odd.

Where do you get “no urge to protect themselves” or “no desire to engage in world politics”? Hell, even “no ambition” is a leap that only follows if you view conquest as the only avenue of ambition.
And what about any of that, even if it made sense, would be related to their propensity to adventure!?

Lemme say it again.
Halfling are great adventurers. However halfling society as written discourages many of the popular drives and motivation to be an adventurer.
Power
Glory
Wealth
Revenge
Perfection
Protection
Knowledge

And replaces them with Curiosity and Companionship.

And that's seems weird to me to have your top 4 iconic race so limited.

But they aren’t even so limited, they just don’t culturally focus on most of those drives. They don’t need a broad cultural focus on soemthing to produce people who exemplify it. There is nothing the least bit weird about a genius with a passion for knowledge coming out of a bucolic pastoral culture.

What’s more, neither do most other races.

Even further, curiosity, lessened susceptibility to fear, and companionship, are literally enough to explain a people producing a fair number of adventurers. Hell, it justifies a higher rate of adventurers than in the human population. It’s just that they’re even more likely than a human to just...go home and raise some kids and work a plot of land after a stint of adventuring, and be less internally wounded by the experience probably. The time they barely escaped the dragon is a fun story for them that they tell their kids about, while the dwarf has night terrors about it for the rest of his life.

 

[Minigiant]

Where do you get “no urge to protect themselves” or “no desire to engage in world politics”? Hell, even “no ambition” is a leap that only follows if you view conquest as the only avenue of ambition.
And what about any of that, even if it made sense, would be related to their propensity to adventure!?

the books
The books paint halflings as short people who don't do anything and let the bigger races handle everything complex. They don't want money, power, glory, empires, magic, or even armies.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

the books
The books paint halflings as short people who don't do anything and let the bigger races handle everything complex. They don't want money, power, glory, empires, magic, or even armies.

They do want to protect what they have though, which is reason enough to fight if that is threatened.

 

[Charlaquin]

the books
The books paint halflings as short people who don't do anything and let the bigger races handle everything complex.

I haven’t read any D&D novels if that’s what you mean, but this seems unlikely. If you’re talking about the rule books, I don’t agree with that assessment at all.

They don't want money, power, glory, empires, magic, or even armies.

These aren’t the only reasons someone might adventure. Indeed, most beloved heroes don’t want any of those things. The existence of a race that adventures for less selfish reasons is nothing but a positive.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

In my campaign the halflings are played pretty straight from the book. They live in smaller villages in a land called The Greenway sandwiched between the much larger empires of the Elves and the Humans. They mostly live of of the trade with those two neighbors, and the constant caravans going back and forth who stay in the villages to rest from the road.

Most halfling villages have businesses that cater to the large folk passing through.

Gnomes, on the other hand, had an actual empire. They shared a border with the hobgoblin empire and built up a military that used gnomepowder weapons (gnomes can use firearms but creating gnome powder to shoot them is a gnome only racial ability, it being semi magical) to offset their small numbers and stature.

When the equivalent of Fantasy WW2 broke out and the hobgoblins invaded the gnomish capitol, the king stayed behind and detonated a huge cache of gnomepowder, rendering the city a giant ruin and taking out a large hobgoblin army in the process.

The gnomish refugees relocated to the elf and human lands during the war and decided not to resettle at its conclusion. They attempted to rebuild on the edge of the human lands but the local Baron (one of my PCs) tried to force them out.

The leader of the new gnomes (a different PC) declared a revolution and was captured and sentenced to death for treason in the human domain. The remaining gnomes were forced to head south to the uncivilized lands.

There they were met by a recruiter for an army building up off the mainland dedicated to overthrowing the current human Emperor (the head of militant crusading Tempus theocracy). The gnomes are gladly aiding this army and hope to gain a new homeland as spoils.

Meanwhile....the hobgoblins have found a way to stretch one gnomish captives life into several thousand pounds of gnomepowder for their army. They are slowly rebuilding with firearms for their next campaign.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Power
Glory
Wealth
Revenge
Perfection

These are all pretty evil motives for adventuring. I don't think any of them are common in a typical good inclined party.

But you missed the biggest reason why anyone does any job - force of circumstance.

Very few people in my experience do their job because they want to do it. They do it because they have to do it. I know I would rather be sitting at home in front of a fire with a nice cup of tea than standing in front of a bunch of 30+ teenagers trying to convince them that Science aint boring.

 

[Chaosmancer]

2 I’ll grant you, but even fools can see that a small fertile valley isn’t worth losing a fight over. (It’s not like halflings need a ton of land, after all)

1 It’s my opinion that halflings are the single worst enemy to try and take on in the phb.

Okay, I don't see it. How is fighting a town of halflings worse than taking out a goblin cave or dealing with a village of Wood Elves?


And, crops and farmland would be close to the same size. Halflings (if we look at just rules) need to eat about the same as humans.