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

[FrozenNorth]

My point was that all that addition does is give you explicit license to disengage from logic.. with no additional reasoning or explanation provided.

All those wheel marks and smoke plumes that would be "dead giveaways" for our naturally stealthy types who are good at hiding and being out of the way, can simply be ignored for our magic folks who aren't naturally stealthy and good at being out of the way.

Saying “magic” is a hacky, lazy, vague, handwavy workaround... but it is a workaround.

You could say “if all it takes is a lazy workaround, is it really a problem?”. Or you could say “anything worth doing is worth doing properly, let’s give them a decent write-up from the get-go”.

Also worth pointing out that some of the proposed solutions in the earlier posts “Yondalla protects them more than other deities protect their favoured” and “druid gave them a magical spice-bearing plant” are precisely using “magic” as hacky, lazy workarounds.

 

[Don Durito]

If it was universally "good" we wouldn't be on page 67 right now discussing how a supposedly setting neutral core book left out halflings(any everything else) from settings that differ from FR/Greyhawk after you brought up the need for e GM to apply setting specific deities to the ones in that setting neutral core rulebook for the shire halfling described to work. Settings like eberron, darksun, & others existed well before 2014 & the omission was still a frustrating obvious omission to anyone who preferred those settings.

Halflings are a weird point to focus on. As I sad earlier Dwarves are just as bad. The whole thing is really.

When it comes to setting material the 5E approach is safe, familiar and shallow as a puddle.

 

[Maxperson]

I don’t have the Eberron book, but the write-up of the “Halflings of the 5 Nations” is a much better write-up than the halflings in the PHB, despite being shorter.

The PHB and Mordenkainen's are just the default lore for Halflings. Settings are a case of specific beats general and most, if not all races see changes that are setting specific.

 

[Maxperson]

Humans have nobles and knights and rangers and men at arms protecting their lands.

They also make the enemies necessary to need them.

 

[Maxperson]

Right, just remember that all gnomes can use magic to hide themselves because forest gnomes have a 5 ft square illusion that lasts for a whole minute.

The lore says that they take their penchant for illusions and expand on it, becoming Illusionists. So they have wizards with much better illusions. The problem is the blatant hypocrisy involved with accepting that Gnomes have Illusionists(adventurers) because the lore says so, but refusing to accept that Halflings have adventurers, despite the lore saying so AND their being in the top 4 most numerous adventuring races.

 

[tetrasodium]

Halflings are a weird point to focus on. As I sad earlier Dwarves are just as bad. The whole thing is really.

When it comes to setting material the 5E approach is safe, familiar and shallow as a puddle.

Halflings aren't the only race with overly setting specific writeups in the phb. Dwarves specifically were poorly drawn out as to how they were different in eberron & the darksun ones are not as different from phb dwarves as halflings or elves. Elves are another race that like halflings was well defined in both settings as something viscerally different but completely omitted. Fans of greyhawk & fr might like to call those settings generic, but they are generic in hughly specific ways that are incompatible with many of wotc's other settings making it a case of specific against a different specific where the core book focused exclusively on one.

 

[Oofta]

The lore says that they take their penchant for illusions and expand on it, becoming Illusionists. So they have wizards with much better illusions. The problem is the blatant hypocrisy involved with accepting that Gnomes have Illusionists(adventurers) because the lore says so, but refusing to accept that Halflings have adventurers, despite the lore saying so AND their being in the top 4 most numerous adventuring races.

Halflings also have a strong literary tradition and an association with bards. Depending on the style of bard they could provide just as much protection.

If, of course, there's a leveled NPC of any type in a village with less than 100 people.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Saying “magic” is a hacky, lazy, vague, handwavy workaround... but it is a workaround.

You could say “if all it takes is a lazy workaround, is it really a problem?”. Or you could say “anything worth doing is worth doing properly, let’s give them a decent write-up from the get-go”.

Also worth pointing out that some of the proposed solutions in the earlier posts “Yondalla protects them more than other deities protect their favoured” and “druid gave them a magical spice-bearing plant” are precisely using “magic” as hacky, lazy workarounds.

What I'm saying is that in comparing gnomes and halflings, we're willing to blindly accept one lazy hacky workaround (vaguely described illusion proficiency), but not another (natural stealthiness, luck, and insularity)...and there is no good reason that the former is better than the latter.

They have equivalent amounts of logical support. There is no larger leap here.

 

[Maxperson]

Halflings also have a strong literary tradition and an association with bards. Depending on the style of bard they could provide just as much protection.

If, of course, there's a leveled NPC of any type in a village with less than 100 people.

Given 1) Halflings being in the top 4 most populous adventuring races, and 2) their love of hearth and home, I'd say that a Halfling village is very likely to have retired adventurers living there. Not all, but most.

 

[Don Durito]

It should be obvious how Halflings would hide their villages. They do it by living in holes in the ground.

Think of the fancy houses of hobbitton as a middle class evolution of the original hobbit hole in an environment where halflings no longer feel under threat.

In areas where they do, they would have one or two entraces for the whole village and they would be well hidden.