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

[LuisCarlos17f]

Possible but not probable.

We are talking about peaceful citizens blessed by their gods. If these wanted, the mayor's child with prophetic dreams would warm against the future natural disaster or raid. Halflings don't live in fallen states, and when a evil tribe attack or pirates, you can wait an (almost genocide) counter-strike by the human lord, dwarfs or the elves.

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And kobolds are starting to evolutionante. Now they are subject of the dragons, but also creating their own culture and civilitation, and building their own farms is better than always hunting. (Somes a rat plague is caused by an accidental escape from those farms).

 

[Vaalingrade]

That is the complaint.

Halflings are listed as an iconic PC race but played and function in the world like NPC monsters converted to PC rules.

Unless you're referring to some pre-3E NPC rules concepts I was never privy to, literally everyone that isn't the PCs are just NPCs. It doesn't matter of they're elf or orc or bugbear, they just plain aren't like PCs.

PCs are the special, they're the outliers, they're the scumbags their mothers told would never amount to anything what with their 'survivable amount of HP' and their ability to accomplish simple tasks more than 50% of the time.

You don't even need to formulate a death world to kill NPCs are written, you just need a cat with a particular set of skills.

I don't see how NPC halflings are different from any other NPCs or how that informs how a PC halfling is going to be like.

And honestly, given the last few threads I've followed her, we can't afford to throw away any more races for arbitrary reasons. Dragonborn, teiflings, tabaxi and tortles are all out for being too 'weird'. Elves and dwarves are out for being too traditional. Now we're getting rid of halflings and gnomes for not being sufficiently violent or because halflings NPCs are NPCs?

I guess this is where I draw my line in the sand.

I... I like fantasy, okay?

I don't want to take away magic and magic items to make them 'special'; I don't want to make life harder and more tedious for the PCs to be 'gritty' or 'realistic'; I am confused and enraged by the idea that feats are optional', and you can take my Small rogues when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

You can have the gnomes though. I'm still bitter at how they've historically been used to impose medieval stasis by portraying technological advancement as silly, bumbling and self-destructive. Looking at you, Dragonlance.

 

[Magister Ludorum]

I like gnomes better than halflings from a story point of view, but I detest silliness and gnomes have been treated as comic relief since Dragonlance. I prefer the more adventurous 3e halflings to the Tolkien version that we seem to have regressed to in 5e.

That said, in the game worlds I create, gnomes have a reputation as clever inventors who create devices that work properly, and no one thinks halflings are weak or naive.

 

[tetrasodium]

I like gnomes better than halflings from a story point of view, but I detest silliness and gnomes have been treated as comic relief since Dragonlance. I prefer the more adventurous 3e halflings to the Tolkien version that we seem to have regressed to in 5e.

That said, in the game worlds I create, gnomes have a reputation as clever inventors who create devices that work properly, and no one thinks halflings are weak or naive.

I like to channel the "Gangsta" gnomes in the monster hunter international books but replace the guns used there with wands & such. They make a great fit for some of eberron's gnomes too. Plus when you really go into detail about the obsidian staff with silver inlay being carried by the gnome at the door the players have no idea how to react when the bouncer known as "G-Gnome" later walks up to the disturbance to say something like "yo dawg you best step off 'stead a walkin round all tall thinkin your hot naughty word or I'll dust the lot of you" while his fingers make threatening gestures on the staff Eventually the players stop laughing, close their mouths, & take the scary scary bouncer seriously for once

 

[Minigiant]

I like to channel the "Gangsta" gnomes in the monster hunter international books but replace the guns used there with wands & such. They make a great fit for some of eberron's gnomes too. Plus when you really go into detail about the obsidian staff with silver inlay being carried by the gnome at the door the players have no idea how to react when the bouncer known as "G-Gnome" later walks up to the disturbance to say something like "yo dawg you best step off 'stead a walkin round all tall thinkin your hot naughty word or I'll dust the lot of you" while his fingers make threatening gestures on the staff Eventually the players stop laughing, close their mouths, & take the scary scary bouncer seriously for once

"Gnomes been making g signs with their fingers since the first Fey Wars, ya hear. But the g is normally silent. So if you hear the g or see the g, there's about to be a trouble. Not an illusion, it's war."

- Little Beaver the Meat Cleaver

 

[FrozenNorth]

What makes any race, other than the defining attributes that set those races apart, different from a human?

The way they are described in the write-up.

 

[FrozenNorth]

There are NPC monsters converted to PC rules that fit better than halflings, volos has a bunch

Careful, I may have to post an exceedingly bitter rant about Volo’s goblins.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I was with you until the end. It can be D&D if people want to play that way. D&D is very flexible and can be lots of different things.

Yes, but there is still a large gap between being attacked once every twenty years (a generation) and getting attacked about every 2 years. Or every 5 years.

And the sheer number of threats, between wild beasts, evil hordes, and evil empires is staggering. And every single one of them seems to be either a conqueror, a raider, or a slaver.

Orcs and Goblinoids alone are very commonly found enemies, whose entire culture seems to revolve around raiding and pillaging.

To give a historical equivalent, let us use the Vikings. They were raiders, it wasn't all they did, and they had to sail across ocean waters multiple weeks to reach their targets, instead of being within a few days march, but it should give a decent number.

Doing a fast google search for some famous raids in England, the vikings seemed to have attacked in 789, 793, 794, 795, 802, 806. With it being more than likely (according to the sources) that more raids happened that we did not have records for.

17 years, 6 raids, that is about 1 major attack every 3 years.

If we assume goblins and every other single threat to the villages account for another major attack every 3 years... that is 2 attacks every 3 years, or one attack every 18 months.

Now, I could grab more comparisons, look towards the age of Piracy perhaps for how often pirates attacked settlements in the Caribbean, but I think this highlights my point. The Viking raids, which was one attack every three years, were such a massive blow to the people of England that over a thousand years later we are still talking about them, and vikings inspired the Berserker Barbarian class. DnD worlds would be at least that dangerous, if not more.

And the response to those attacks? Pay them off, build defenses, mobilize troops. These are the things you do to protect yourself from outside threats. I'm not trying to make a death world, I'm just trying to put the square peg of monster populations full of raiders, slavers and conquerors into the board where it fits.

Making sure I am on the same page as you are...you are saying that there was a major viking raid in England approximately every 3 years. Because you consider the base D&D world to be "more deadly" than the real world circa 800ce, we are going to double the frequency to a major raid every 1.5 years.

I am going to attach a map of ALL the evidence of vikings in Wales (found in internet, cannot claim the source is 100% accurate). I am going to include a second map I put in MS Paint for 5 minutes to add in some D&D words. I'm going to attempt to show you the extent of "raids" into an area, and how a small population of little folk could exist fairly safe tucked away from the action.

 

[Bohandas]

Regarding the commoner weapon proficiencies thing from page 31 of this thread, in 3.5 commoners are only proficient in a one simple weapon each

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Regarding the commoner weapon proficiencies thing from page 31 of this thread, in 3.5 commoners are only proficient in a one simple weapon each

And that weapon: A handful of mud. At least, they hope it's mud.