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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8189759" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Okay, now we are getting to some ideas. Most of which seem to involve growing a screen of trees around the entire village thick enough to block line of sight or building hills. Both of which are long, arduous processes that would take decades to finish. And it somewhat ignores some of the issues beyond that. Let's say that you don't grow a forest around your village, and instead go and build a village in the forest. Sounds much easier right? Well, to get actual farmland you would need to clear out the forest. If I assume a very small homestead of 2 acres per farm, ten families and their houses, looking at close to 50 acres. Which is roughly 50 acres of forest you need to clear. That is a rather noticeable dent in the forest. And that doesn't make it safe, especially considering that many goblin tribes and other forces seem to find ruined castles in the forest with some regularity, and the largest castle in the world is only 13 acres of land. Or maybe they have tunneled over a mile underground, to make a small road underground to avoid anyone finding them, but that involves there being no other real way to find the village, like being in a secluded valley between some hills. But... that doesn't do anything if someone happens to go over a hill, or if they go around it to the inside instead of the outside. And, that underground path would need to have an entrance. You could just grow over the entrance with bushes so thing you can't see the cave mouth, not sure how you'd get livestock through it, but that isn't even the bigger problem. You know who tends to find out of the way caves to live in? Goblin tribes. And, since the underground road isn't visible, you can't see people approaching. So if anyone did find it, they are going to be on top of you before you know anything is wrong. And remember, this isn't just talking about a single village. We need to extrapolate this for every halfling shire. They all either found or created deep forests and hidden valleys for them to live in, and unless they are deep in civilized lands, those are exactly the sort of places that we tend to find monsters.As I said, if you want to change human nature, that is fine, but I am willing to assume that humans in DnD are humans. The Opium Wars were England companies going to war with China over Tea. The Exploration of the Americas was because of the Ottomans controlling the spice trade routes, and European powers wanting to get cheaper spices. The Ottoman empire seemed to partially destroy itself in a war over wine. Egypt was conquered for grainsPope went to war over salt, as did a lot of other people at various points in historyHumans could have easily said, "You know, I am content with rosemary and thyme, I don't need cumin and cayene for my food" but we didn't. We fought and died over these things. Yes, halflings are specifically called out to love food. And humans aren't specifically called out, but I'm willing to bet that humans are humans. And taking the stance that humans wouldn't go forward in cultivating crops that could provide them with spices, when that was literally the biggest driver of trade in the history of the world, and literally reshaped the world as we know it due to the imports of foreign foods, I'm going to say that doesn't hold water.</blockquote>

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