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

[Chaosmancer]

Without knowing the intimate details of the setting, the promise of a disproportionate response can be an effective deterrent. If you know that raiding that village means that a force will be dispatched to kill you, your families, and salt the earth where you laid, you just might spend your time on targets where the reprisal is unlikely to be an existential threat to you and your way of life.

Which would be small towns without protection... like Phandalin. Which is too far away to be effectively defended.

Also, a lot of these monsters aren't exactly the type to fear what humans will send after them. Heck, the Goblinoids in the Neverwinter Woods are fighting the Fey and the Elves and getting driven out. They are losing their homes, which makes a good reason to attack Phandalin.

 

[squibbles]

dropping a Bag of Paladins^tm on the problem.

That imagery is priceless. It should be a standard magic item.

the books kinda says halflings don't keep up politics of that level to have Harper or Paladin strike teams on call.

That's my point. The races is not written to match default D&D. It's like 3 of 5 editions just drops hobbits in the games, adds more Frodos and Pippens, scratches off the names, and does nothing else to fit the race in the game.

They leave making sense of halflings to DMs and worldbuilders rather than giving them a solid framework.

Agreed, I feel like the arguments in this thread are about people's head cannon of halflings and not the contents of the published products.

I just skimmed their sections in Mordy's and the PHB and, dang, there's not much. They found so many different ways to repeat "these people are the idealized Tolkienesque view of the English countryside, Merrie England, Merrie England, Merrie England!"

Those of you who like halflings may have an impressive ability to explain them and flesh out their role in a fantasy setting, but the quality of ideas in 5e's halfling content is all rubbish and handwaving.

 

[Tonguez]

Averaging 40 pounds, they burn significantly less calories than larger sized creatures. The many meals a day si not detailed in the PHB, just outside sources like Tolkien, and that also doesn't mean that those are large meals. One real world diet method is eating lots of small meals during the day in order not to feel hungry and binge.

Please, try to discuss in good faith. When there isn't any discussion about food consumption in general for the races, using weasel words of "I've seen nothing to state that" as a method of overruling both common sense and what we observe in the modern world of calorie consumption of smaller mammal bipeds - that's just trying to win an argument, not actually trying to be right.

Err, no, its looking to the source material which is Tolkien, since Halflings didnt exist before Tolkein created them. In that story Tolkien specifically describes the Hobbits as liking to eat and drink “often and heartily”. In LotR they are horrified and openly weep when they learn that the other members of the Fellowship dont know about second breakfast and wont be stopping for a meal break.

While you’re right that Halfling grazing might involve many small meals, they at least need to be hearty small meals. Theres also nothing to say they need less calories than humans. If you want to look at real world bipeds then despite being leaner overall Male chimps tend to need more calories than average humans. However humans also appear to burn about 30% more calories per day than chimps (and even more compared to other apes). The extrapolation there is that we cant do a 1:1 comparison between humans and other humanoids and say ‘because they are 50% smaller they need 50% less food” - D&D is silent on how much land is needed to feed a halfing, but what we do know if that in Medieval England peasants often survived on about 15 acres per family (and were often hungry) and ate only one meal per day, why would we assume a Halfling needs less than that amount to feed themselves?

 

[Stormonu]

This is from 2E, but for comparison:

Halfings, 2E Monstrous Manual

Spoiler

Halflings will fight with great ferocity in defense of good or their homes. They are very skilled with both the sling and the bow (receiving
a + 3 bonus on all attack rolls), and use these weapons to great advantage in battle. Their tactics often involve feints to draw their attackers into the open where they can be subjected to a volley of fire from cover. When equipped for battle, halflings wear padded or leather armor. A halfling force is usually armed with short swords and hand axes. In addition, two-thirds of the halflings will be carrying either a sling or short bow.

Halfling villages will generally have between 30 and 300 (30d10) individuals living in them. For every 30 halflings in a particular community there will be two 2nd-level fighters and a 3rd-level priest. If more than 90 halflings are encountered there will be an additional leader of 3rd-level fighting ability. If more than 150 are encountered there will also be the following additional halfling warriors in the group: one 9th level fighter, two 4th-level fighters and three 3rd-level fighters.

Dwarves, 2E Monstrous Manual

Spoiler

Dwarven armies are well-organized and extremely well disciplined. Dwarven troops usually wear chain mail and carry shields in battle. They wield a variety of weapons. The composition of a typical dwarven army by weaponry is axe and hammer (25%), sword and spear (20%). sword and light crossbow (15%), sword and pole arm (10%). axe and heavy crossbow (10%).axe and mace (10%). or hammer and pick (10%).

For every 40 dwarves encountered, there is a 2nd- to 6th-level fighter who leads the group. (Roll Id6 to determine level, with a roll of 1 equalling 2.) If there are 160 or more dwarves encountered, there are, in addition to the leaders of the smaller groups, one 6th-level fighter (a chief) and a 4th-level fighter (lieutenant) commanding the troops. If 200 or more dwarves are encountered, there is a fighter/priest of 3rd- to 6th-level fighting ability and 4th-to 7th-level priest ability. If a dwarven army has 320 or more troops in it, the following high-level leaders are in command of the group: an 8th-level fighter, a 7th-level fighter, a 6th level fighter/7th-level priest, and two 4th-level fighter/priests.
The commanders of the dwarven troops wear plate armor and carry shields. In addition, the fighters and fighter/priests leading the dwarven troops have a 10% chance per level of fighting ability of having magical armor andlor weapons. The fighter/priests who lead the troops also have a 10% chance per level of priest ability of having a magical item specific to priests (and thus not subject to malfunction).

If encountered in its home, a dwarven army has, in addition to the leaders noted above, 2d6 fighters of from 2nd- to 5th-level (ld4+1for level), 2d4 fighter/priests of from 2nd- to 4th-level (in each class), females equal to 50% of the adult males, and children equal to 25% of the adult males. Dwarven women are skilled in combat and fight as males if their homes are attacked.

Usually constructed around profitable mines, dwarven cities are vast, beautiful complexes carved into solid stone. Dwarven cities take hundreds of years to complete, but once finished they stand for millennia without needing any type of repair. Since dwarves do not leave their homes often and always return to them, they create their cities with permanence in mind. Troops guard dwarven cities at all times, and sometimes (60% chance) dwarves also use animals as guard.-either 2d4 brown bears (75% chance) or 5d4 wolves (25% chance).

Dwarven society is organized into clans. A dwarven clan not already attached to a city or mine travels until it finds an outpost where it can begin to ply a trade. Clans often settle close together since they usually need the same raw materials for their crafts. Clans are competitive, but usually do not war against one another. Dwarven cities are founded when enough clans move to a particular location.

While it's clear that the dwarves keep a standing army, halflings aren't a bunch of pig farmers armed with rocks and makeshift pitchforks. There's actually a entry for "Farmer" under the Human page, it should be noted (and that entry has no attack, whereas the halfling entry does)!

 

[tetrasodium]

There are still barbaric tribes, violent monsters, and evil cults ready to pounce deep in every wilderness of FR.

POL isn't the assumption but from 1e to 5e, "out there" is dangerous.

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

more importantly there is not one single thing approaching a country trying to do things like provide law enforcement... the peace of having a military... or heck even codified laws. Eberron & ironically darksun are the only settings where those are really a thing but in dark sun it's so awful outside the walled cities that nobody needs to draw borders so anything resembling a town just gives whatever tribute to the SK army that shows up to protect the local mine or whatever & might sometimes patrol the nearby desert to provide some semblance of security

FR & most of the other semi-FR compatible settings are basically governed by a rotating system of murderous warlords who kill off the last warlord's figurehead every so often whenever someone can find a new band of warlords to be known as adventurers. Oh that & the occasional massacre of someone's neighbors because they are just bad people are living on land that someone swears was theirs or maybe stole someone

 

[FrozenNorth]

So now the goalposts have shifted from “halflings are written like NPCs” to “halflings have fewer sentences written about why they might go adventuring than elves and dwarves do.”

Different people have been making different points in this thread: it’s not shifting goalposts.

 

[FrozenNorth]

By itself that seems an ok niche, but to your point, i can see how it feels that the investment isn't proportional.

Which is weird: if a race’s reason for adventuring is less obvious, the book should spend more time on it, not less.

 

[tetrasodium]

Which is weird: if a race’s reason for adventuring is less obvious, the book should spend more time on it, not less.

There are plenty of reasons, they would just require admitting that eberron & darksun style hakflings exist & to be fair the darksun style ones are a bit extreme into the capital E Evil end of the spectrum in ways that would take some development to tone down.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Wait are we arguing that

1) Halflings aren't well described at a cultural level and not integrated into the setting OR
2) Faerun, as presented in the RPG, doesn't make sense, due to the juxtaposition of large metropolises and somehow monster-infested wildernesses.

Because 1) is false and 2) is true but neither is related to the other.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Which is weird: if a race’s reason for adventuring is less obvious, the book should spend more time on it, not less.

I fail to see any evidence that it is not obvious, nor the choice of any individual halfling necessarily reflect some sort of whole of race tendencies.