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Post by Stahlseele »

Tell that to old Drac turning into vermin, bats and insects . . yes, in addition to a man sized batmonster and a wolf.
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Post by Jason »

Stahlseele wrote:Tell that to old Drac turning into vermin, bats and insects . . yes, in addition to a man sized batmonster and a wolf.
To be fair, that's a relatively new fiction (1890s).
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Post by Starmaker »

Jason wrote:
Stahlseele wrote:Tell that to old Drac turning into vermin, bats and insects . . yes, in addition to a man sized batmonster and a wolf.
To be fair, that's a relatively new fiction (1890s).
Kitsune. Also, from a casual read of Wikipedia and previous original research, it's the correlation of toothy/harmless to male/female which appears to be relatively new. There are plenty of swan dudes and wolf ladies in myths.
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Post by Jason »

Starmaker wrote:Kitsune. Also, from a casual read of Wikipedia and previous original research, it's the correlation of toothy/harmless to male/female which appears to be relatively new. There are plenty of swan dudes and wolf ladies in myths.
I meant Dracula as a vampire associated with his enourmous array of shapechanging powers is a relatively new fiction. Specifically I was referring to Stahlseele's comment on what Eikre said:
Eikre wrote:Basically, turning into something without big teeth is an effeminate quality.
The Idea of a Vampire not only turning into a wolf, but also into insects (namley things without teeth) is relatively new and not part of old folklore.

Selkies, Merrows, Sylphs, Nymphs and Mermaids are ancient myths by comparison. Same holds true for Kitsune and Swan Maidens, further displaying the effeminate nature of shapechangers not turning into monsters made of claws and teeth and fury.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Voss wrote:But it still isn't about the niche of having a dex bonus. It's about the feel and cultural baggage, which aren't even vaguely related.
Nobody cares about the "cultural baggage" of halfling. That's why it changes every edition, sometimes it changes during the course of an edition, and it changes in many settings.

Saying "my character is a halfling" is saying nothing more than "my character is small and dexterous"; the character may be a fat villager who never travel and eat 7 times per days or a nomad or a sadistic cannibal, all of those archetypes are different flavors of halflings.

Tolkien's hobbit's main cultural characteristic is "not being adventurers". It's a shitty archetype in a game where you're supposed to play an adventurer. People may want to play Merry backstabbing a nazgul, or Sam killing Shelob alone, but they don't want to play some random fat dude who isn't an adventurer at all and who has to wait the very end of the campaign to do something useful. That's why D&D's halflings have a different "cultural baggage" than hobbits. But there's no consensus in "what an interesting halfling culture should be in the context of D&D", so it always changes depending on the authors.
Last edited by GâtFromKI on Sat Dec 24, 2016 1:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Having common races that don't produce adventurers terribly often isn't stupid at all. It allows lower level PCs to be portrayed as unusual due to their actions or easily underestimated rather than be treated as completely commonplace or unusual only due to the rarity of their race. By contrast nobody is surprised when a Klingon spends their whole life pursuing prestigious military posts.
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Post by SlyJohnny »

I like the cultural baggage of halflings and the like. Especially dwarves I only wish the demihumans were more alien/culturally distinct from comparable human communities.
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Post by Voss »

GâtFromKI wrote:
Voss wrote:But it still isn't about the niche of having a dex bonus. It's about the feel and cultural baggage, which aren't even vaguely related.
Nobody cares about the "cultural baggage" of halfling. That's why it changes every edition, sometimes it changes during the course of an edition, and it changes in many settings.

Saying "my character is a halfling" is saying nothing more than "my character is small and dexterous"; the character may be a fat villager who never travel and eat 7 times per days or a nomad or a sadistic cannibal, all of those archetypes are different flavors of halflings.

Tolkien's hobbit's main cultural characteristic is "not being adventurers". It's a shitty archetype in a game where you're supposed to play an adventurer. People may want to play Merry backstabbing a nazgul, or Sam killing Shelob alone, but they don't want to play some random fat dude who isn't an adventurer at all and who has to wait the very end of the campaign to do something useful. That's why D&D's halflings have a different "cultural baggage" than hobbits. But there's no consensus in "what an interesting halfling culture should be in the context of D&D", so it always changes depending on the authors.
Ah. So besides again decreeing universally that 'no one wants this,' you're also stating it's constantly in flux and inconsistent... so can't be equivalent to being catfolk, which was the premise raised.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Hey stupid, are you able to write anything more interesting than "halflings have a big cultural baggage, which I won't describe because" ?

Whipstitch wrote:Having common races that don't produce adventurers terribly often isn't stupid at all. It allows lower level PCs to be portrayed as unusual due to their actions or easily underestimated rather than be treated as completely commonplace or unusual only due to the rarity of their race.
I doesn't work as a Core race. Because most characters are core races. If halfling is one of the ten core races, then ~10% of the characters are halflings, it doesn't feel unusual at all. It feels even less unusual than the drow who rebelled against is kind and joined team Good.
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Post by erik »

I was of the impression that the majority of all races weren't adventurers. Don't see why it is a thing for halflings to share in that.

Nearly 50% of the fellowship was halflings and there's no setting where halflings are more disposed against adventuring.
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Post by Voss »

GâtFromKI wrote:Hey stupid, are you able to write anything more interesting than "halflings have a big cultural baggage, which I won't describe because" ?
What are you even talking about? Halfling culture isn't a big dark secret. I even mentioned it on my first post on this halflings vs catfolk discussion: bucolic, rural folk. And some of them rise to the challenge of adventure.


And again:
So besides again decreeing universally that 'no one wants this,' (despite people implicitly and explicitly telling you they do) you're also stating it's constantly in flux and inconsistent... so can't be equivalent to being catfolk, which was the premise raised
Last edited by Voss on Sat Dec 24, 2016 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Voss wrote:What are you even talking about? Halfling culture isn't a big dark secret. I even mentioned it on my first post on this halflings vs catfolk discussion: bucolic, rural folk. And some of them rise to the challenge of adventure.
OK.

You don't really know about the third edition of D&D, right? You're still trapped in the first edition?

erik wrote:I was of the impression that the majority of all races weren't adventurers. Don't see why it is a thing for halflings to share in that.
Tolkien's hobbits are defined by not being travellers or wanderers or itinerant merchants or warrior or anything, and staying their whole life in their shitty village.

Most of the elfes or dwarves or humans aren't adventurer also, but hobbits push this one step further. It work in a single-author fiction (it gives someone the reader may identify with), it doesn't work as a D&D archetype. That's probably the main reasons halfling were redefined as opportunist wanderers in D&D3 - and this change didn't raise any critic at the time.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Anecdotal, but I've literally never thought of halflings as hobbits, even though I know at some point in the past they came from them. I don't know anything about pre-3e, but for the last three editions they've consistently had +Dex (and maybe sometimes other modifications). Yeah, that totally sounds like Tolkien's idyllic peaceful folk who eat a lot, talk a lot, and are minimally active. Does this sound like a racial bonus to Dex to you?
[url=https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf wrote:Tolkien, on possibly the most active, adventurous, rogue-y hobbit ever[/url]]
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Oh, and culture? Personality?
3.5PHB p19 wrote:Halflings are clever, capable opportunists. [...] Often they are strangers and wanderers, and others react to them with suspicion or curiosity. [...] Regardless, halflings are cunning, resourceful survivors. [...] Halflings prefer trouble to boredom. [...] Halflings clans are nomadic, wandering wherever circumstance and curiosity take them. Halflings enjoy wealth and the pleasure it can bring, and they tend to spend gold as quickly as they acquire it.
Contrast that with, oh, anything Tolkien ever wrote.

Seriously, Hobbits don't exist in D&D and haven't for decades, if they ever did. We all know that Halflings are in there because of Hobbits, but it's been a long time since there was reason to get confused that they might be Hobbits. It's nothing like how Elves and Dwarves are still Elves and Dwarves.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Thanks.
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Post by Username17 »

Halflings are "small but surprisingly competent." That is the only thing that has stayed consistent through the editions. The 5th edition Halfling is pretty hobbitish, but the 3.5 Halfling is like a less comedic Kender. You choose Halfling because you want to be small and you want people to be surprised by your competency. That's it. Everything else is just filler based on how individual authors think of competency.

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Post by Whipstitch »

GâtFromKI wrote: I doesn't work as a Core race. Because most characters are core races. If halfling is one of the ten core races, then ~10% of the characters are halflings, it doesn't feel unusual at all. It feels even less unusual than the drow who rebelled against is kind and joined team Good.
The value isn't just in being seen as unusual or underestimated by the other people at the table, it's about getting to be unusual in-setting and all the opportunities and disadvantages that engenders. Because 90% of the time people build their character without any shits to give about their jaded friend who gets all peeved whenever someone plays a virtuous drow. They just have a fucking character concept they want to play and hope to get treated in a setting appropriate manner by the NPCs without the DM or other players pissing on their parade. Because you know what? D&D is 28 years older than "Simpsons Already Did It" jokes. Avoiding cliches is a big fucking ask because people have been purposely playing against type since before I was born and because once you publish a race or class as core material it's no longer going to remain unique to a specific group or player anymore. So go ahead and create whatever kind of race you want, I'm not here to stop you. But I can and will point out that trying to simultaneously play the "it's cliched" and the "it doesn't communicate information" cards at the same time doesn't really parse and that if you have to go that route perhaps you're overstating your case.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sat Dec 24, 2016 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

3e halflings are not based on hobbits so much as they are based on Frodo. It's a race entirely comprised of a very specific kind of protagonist for people who want to play that very specific kind of protagonist. It's... uhh... not the best world-building.

Pre-3e halflings are based on hobbits, complete with the "quiet rural folk who hate adventure" stuff. Mechanically, halflings made good thieves because halfling protagonists were supposed to be people like Frodo and Bilbo, who were thieves.

Kender are an example of someone realizing that mechanically halflings made good thieves and then rewriting the entire race based on nothing but that fact.

I know nothing about post-3e halflings.

Halfling protagonists and catfolk protagonists fill a similar role and as a result tend to have similar mechanical bonuses. The only thing weird about this situation is that halflings ended up that way in spite of their fluff because of a couple specific iconic characters and catfolk ended up that way because that's exactly the sort of fluff people associate with cats generally.
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Post by momothefiddler »

4e halflings are pretty similar to 3e halflings, and, as Frank pointed out and I dug up earlier today, 5 are much more Hobbit-like, though they have an odd bit of waffly, noncommittal "curious and explorer and wanderlust" thing going on too. And nobody's surprised that 5e doesn't have a coherent thought or claim. Anyway.

Claiming that Halflings are based on Frodo, specifically, seems weird to me. Why not Bilbo? Or, shit, Merry or Pippin if we have to pick a LOTR protag. I admit I haven't read the books (or seen the movies) in a while, but I'm pretty sure Frodo didn't want to go on adventures, didn't do a whole lot on adventures, and, like, his biggest Heroic Quality was that he accepted a burden that Fate shoved in his lap and he was pretty damn perseverant rather than ducking out of it (after a few false starts). Meanwhile it was Bilbo who had enough fun with it that he ended up with the Elves instead of being a proper gentleman at home.

...But that really is a tangent, because I fully admit that Halflings as a concept grew out of Hobbit protagonists, not Hobbit society. My argument is simply that they're not sufficiently close anymore to justify claiming that the "cultural feel" of Halflings in D&D is the societal cachet of Tolkienian Hobbits, or that people who play Halflings are necessarily trying to invoke the Shire.
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Post by GâtFromKI »

Whipstitch wrote:The value isn't just in being seen as unusual or underestimated by the other people at the table, it's about getting to be unusual in-setting and all the opportunities and disadvantages that engenders. Because 90% of the time people build their character without any shits to give about their jaded friend who gets all peeved whenever someone plays a virtuous drow. They just have a fucking character concept they want to play and hope to get treated in a setting appropriate manner by the NPCs without the DM or other players pissing on their parade.
I can be wrong about this, but I think the "underestimated race" concept works better as a non-core race introduced in de MM or the setting books, and then payable in the PHB II or something similar. Therefore at the moment the players can choose this race, they are already thinking "those guys aren't fitted for adventure".

Anyway, I also think this concept needs some rule support; some racial abilities representing the fact nobody cares about them (something giving them "all the opportunities and disadvantages that engenders"). Halflings don't have this kind of abilities; they are actually depicted as competent adventurers in 3e, and there's no in-setting reason why anyone should underestimate them.
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Post by Whipstitch »

momothefiddler wrote:Contrast that with, oh, anything Tolkien ever wrote.
momothefiddler wrote: Claiming that Halflings are based on Frodo, specifically, seems weird to me. Why not Bilbo? Or, shit, Merry or Pippin if we have to pick a LOTR protag. I admit I haven't read the books (or seen the movies) in a while, but I'm pretty sure Frodo didn't want to go on adventures, didn't do a whole lot on adventures, and, like, his biggest Heroic Quality was that he accepted a burden that Fate shoved in his lap and he was pretty damn perseverant rather than ducking out of it (after a few false starts).
FrankTrollman wrote: Halflings are "small but surprisingly competent."
See what Frank said? That's your blind spot. Cherry picking the bits where Tolkien informs the reader of the common in-world perception of hobbits or even how hobbits see themselves is a touch silly given that the rest of the book series proceeds to be about the li'l buggers persevering through many obstacles and repeatedly coming through in the clutch and generally outperforming their reputation. After all, the books call out the Took clan as being a bit odd and adventurous compared to other hobbits but it should also be noted that even Frodo's fat fucking gardener ends up fighting the spawn of Ungoliant to a decision victory.

So yes, DSM may be ever so slightly off by saying that they're Frodo specifically, but his greater point still makes a fair bit of sense. 3rd edition halflings really do resemble hobbits that have been stripped of pretenses after players ran them as effective adventurers over the course of a couple decades.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sat Dec 24, 2016 11:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

GâtFromKI wrote: I can be wrong about this, but I think the "underestimated race" concept works better as a non-core race introduced in de MM or the setting books, and then payable in the PHB II or something similar. Therefore at the moment the players can choose this race, they are already thinking "those guys aren't fitted for adventure".
You are in fact wrong about this, and obviously so. The underestimated character is extremely common, and appeals to new gamers, children, and so on especially. It's absolutely one of the options you want front and center in the first book because it's a power fantasy common to people who are unlikely to have read expansion material when they are making their character.

Further, the underestimated character is supposed to be underestimated by people in the world, not by other authors of your multiple author fiction. The DM isn't supposed to shit on your character concept, the DM has to be in on the joke. The DM understands that NPCs are prejudiced against this character but that the character is in fact surprisingly competent. They have to understand that, because that is the fantasy you are selling. If the DM actually thinks your character isn't cut out for adventure, then your character is just going to fail all the thumbs tasks and you're going to have a bad time.

Writing Halfling on your character sheet isn't telling the other players that you are small and not cut out for dungeon crawling. It's telling the other players that you are small but surprisingly competent. That's the total package. The other players get both pieces of information by you saying that you are playing a Halfling. Just like how when you say you are playing an Orc the other players know that your character is both big and strong. They can then adjust their contributions to the shared narrative accordingly.

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Post by DSMatticus »

momo wrote:Claiming that Halflings are based on Frodo, specifically, seems weird to me. Why not Bilbo? Or, shit, Merry or Pippin if we have to pick a LOTR protag.
Because it was snappier to put one name there instead of five, and it made the most sense to go with the name that had top billing. It's not a deliberate commentary on which hobbit has the wildest wild side, which I couldn't tell you, because I haven't read the books in forever.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Whipstitch wrote:So yes, DSM may be ever so slightly off by saying that they're Frodo specifically, but his greater point still makes a fair bit of sense.
Cool because that's literally what I said.
DSMatticus wrote:
momo wrote:Claiming that Halflings are based on Frodo, specifically, seems weird to me. Why not Bilbo? Or, shit, Merry or Pippin if we have to pick a LOTR protag.
Because it was snappier to put one name there instead of five, and it made the most sense to go with the name that had top billing. It's not a deliberate commentary on which hobbit has the wildest wild side, which I couldn't tell you, because I haven't read the books in forever.
Ah, gotcha. Fair enough.
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