Hey, don't trash my Gnomes. They're the unique ones. Halflings are just wannabe hobbit-kender with a culture that doesn't even try to set itself apart from humans. Gnomes at least live underground, in burrows (which they kicked the hobbits out of), in hollow trees, and secret magical KGB headquarters in Zilargo. Halflings (outside of Eberron and Dark Sun) have literally nothing unique, and could easily be made redundant by allowing players to choose "Medium or Small" at character creation when picking a human like they do for Dhampir, Hexblood, Reborn, and so on.
If one of the two races has got to go, let's keep gnomes and fold halflings into humans. Gnomish culture, physical appearance, and racial abilities more than stands out when compared to that of humans and halflings.
At the end of the day who cares what is or is not included in the PHB. Each setting created by the DM can be unique. I can still make 99.9% of all goblinoids evil because that works with my story. I loved the old days when a half-orc character had to RP against the general hostility of common towns folk. Adventures by definition stood out and were apart from the general society. There is no reason why we have to look at the game as a who and each individual group as belonging to the same sandbox like a mmorpg. If you don't like what they have done with some of the race homogenizing then ignore it. I liked have a smart half-orc that wasn't like all the other dumb orc and then they could surprise people.
Hey, don't trash my Gnomes. They're the unique ones. Halflings are just wannabe hobbit-kender with a culture that doesn't even try to set itself apart from humans. Gnomes at least live underground, in burrows (which they kicked the hobbits out of), in hollow trees, and secret magical KGB headquarters in Zilargo. Halflings (outside of Eberron and Dark Sun) have literally nothing unique, and could easily be made redundant by allowing players to choose "Medium or Small" at character creation when picking a human like they do for Dhampir, Hexblood, Reborn, and so on.
If one of the two races has got to go, let's keep gnomes and fold halflings into humans. Gnomish culture, physical appearance, and racial abilities more than stands out when compared to that of humans and halflings.
That’s only because Tolkien’s estate sued TSR over making Hin and their culture too closely based off of the Hobbitses and their culture and they have since been watered down to short, lucky humans. 🤷♂️
Not sure which 'shortstack' you're referring to, my point is mostly that halfling and gnome aren't terribly distinct concepts and might as well be merged.
If you recall, in the AD&D days they were combined into a single “Complete Handbook,” so someone must have agreed with you back then.
So you can only be born a tiefling, a drow, a genasi, or the like if you happen to be born at level 4?
Curious. I imagine that makes for some wild family dynamics, when occasionally an infant springs forth from the womb as a fully grown, functional, and mildly experienced adventurer. The midwives of the land must certainly be quite surprised when that happens.
They said 'delete them and give everyone a starting feat' so I think the intent is if you want to play a subrace or something, you pick that for your starting feat.
I can sort of see part of the appeal of say, making any race a tiefling but I generally prefer it how it is now. The beast race consolidation just wouldn't work IMO. They are way too different. You could make elves all one race and then make individual feats for the sub races if you wanted to. But trying to merge things as biologically different as arakokra, lizardfolk and yuan-ti into one race isn't really going to work IMO without severely watering them down. Especially if your goal is to shift sub races from the race part and into feats. Even putting my preference for plenty of races and subraces being available aside, I just struggle to see how this would work out well mechanically.
So you can only be born a tiefling, a drow, a genasi, or the like if you happen to be born at level 4?
Curious. I imagine that makes for some wild family dynamics, when occasionally an infant springs forth from the womb as a fully grown, functional, and mildly experienced adventurer. The midwives of the land must certainly be quite surprised when that happens.
I think the idea is, you give everyone a feat at character creation. You can choose to use that feat to be non-human. If you stay human, then you can use it on whatever you wish.
I understand that. I also understand that a lot of traditionalists as well as a lot of story-first players who dislike mechanical power are wildly, almost violently, opposed to level 1 freebie feats. Even if certain feats are much more valid, interesting, and useful as 'Origin' feats; Linguist is an excellent example of something that can say a lot about a character as an Origin-style feat, but makes absolutely no damn sense whatsoever to just suddenly be able to do after waking up one day. Nevertheless, I do find the notion "everybody is always a human, elf, dwarf, or orc, and if you're lucky the DM will allow you to take an Origin feat to gain very light, mostly inconsequential elements of the thing you'd like to play" to be not ideal even if I'm behind the idea of increased granularity in character creation. And if the Origin feats are juicy enough to actually be compelling and change the way your character plays, I guarantee half the playerbase would shriek their fool heads off over POWAH KREAPE(!!1!)
I understand that. I also understand that a lot of traditionalists as well as a lot of story-first players who dislike mechanical power are wildly, almost violently, opposed to level 1 freebie feats. Even if certain feats are much more valid, interesting, and useful as 'Origin' feats; Linguist is an excellent example of something that can say a lot about a character as an Origin-style feat, but makes absolutely no damn sense whatsoever to just suddenly be able to do after waking up one day. Nevertheless, I do find the notion "everybody is always a human, elf, dwarf, or orc, and if you're lucky the DM will allow you to take an Origin feat to gain very light, mostly inconsequential elements of the thing you'd like to play" to be not ideal even if I'm behind the idea of increased granularity in character creation. And if the Origin feats are juicy enough to actually be compelling and change the way your character plays, I guarantee half the playerbase would shriek their fool heads off over POWAH KREAPE(!!1!)
It's just...annoying. So very, very annoying.
It really sounds like you're getting upset about hypothetical people's hypothetical opinions about a hypothetical rule.
If we start talking about how it doesn't make sense to suddenly be a Linguist at level 4, we might have to talk about how leveling up doesn't really make sense as a whole. And that's a long, winding road to go down.
I understand that. I also understand that a lot of traditionalists as well as a lot of story-first players who dislike mechanical power are wildly, almost violently, opposed to level 1 freebie feats.
It's not power creep to replace something with something else. Incidentally, 3.5e had level-1 only feats, many of which were very strong. If you want to hide things, you can put them in a different category: "You may take a bloodline or a feat".
It really sounds like you're getting upset about hypothetical people's hypothetical opinions about a hypothetical rule.
If we start talking about how it doesn't make sense to suddenly be a Linguist at level 4, we might have to talk about how leveling up doesn't really make sense as a whole. And that's a long, winding road to go down.
Welcome to the Internet. People sometimes discuss things on it. I very strongly like a number of my characters it would no longer be possible to play under a system wherein everybody is one of four existing prebuilt species with only very light, effectively cosmetic variations on the theme.
It does not make sense to be a Linguist at level 4. Level 4 is your Adventuring Level. Your Adventuring Level, your character class? That's your Fighty stats. The entirety of D&D 5e's class system is about Fighty Stuff. It's the combat pillar. Class has almost no interaction with anything other than combat, and frankly any time Wizards tries to make class interact with anything but cxombat, the playerbase bites them. Gaining Polearm Master at level 4 makes sense - you're refining combat techniques you've been practicing over the course of your time spent genociding greenskins with your trusty Genocidin' Halberd. Gaining a facility with languages, the ability to speak three brand new ones, and a sudden deft hand at fashioning codes and ciphers at level 4 represents...what? The lifting of a case of oddly specific amnesia?
These are not skills the characters have any opportunity to hone or craft over the course of a few weeks spent genociding greenskins, they simply do not make sense to produce out of the aether. The same can be said for about half the game's existing feats, which is why people complain nobody ever takes the 'cool' feats unless they get handed those cool feats for free at first level. Nobody learns to be an Actor by slaughtering goblins in a swampy ruin. Nobody learns to have a Keen Mind by spending a couple of weeks massacring kobolds in a mine some local rich guy stole from the kobolds in the first place. Nobody learns to be a Linguist by spending a few sessions murderhoboing their way through a refugee camp where people displaced by the king's aggressive wars of conquest have turned bandit to try and feed their starving families. It just doesn't happen.
Hey, don't trash my Gnomes. They're the unique ones. Halflings are just wannabe hobbit-kender with a culture that doesn't even try to set itself apart from humans. Gnomes at least live underground, in burrows (which they kicked the hobbits out of), in hollow trees, and secret magical KGB headquarters in Zilargo. Halflings (outside of Eberron and Dark Sun) have literally nothing unique, and could easily be made redundant by allowing players to choose "Medium or Small" at character creation when picking a human like they do for Dhampir, Hexblood, Reborn, and so on.
If one of the two races has got to go, let's keep gnomes and fold halflings into humans. Gnomish culture, physical appearance, and racial abilities more than stands out when compared to that of humans and halflings.
That’s only because Tolkien’s estate sued TSR over making Hin and their culture too closely based off of the Hobbitses and their culture and they have since been watered down to short, lucky humans. 🤷♂️
Then D&D has to do something unique with them to justify keeping them. If they're just going to be "Short Humans", they don't really need to be a separate race, do they? However, if they had something unique to them, I'd absolutely be fine with keeping both them and Gnomes in the hobby. Currently, however, they're too close together in concept, IMO.
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They said 'delete them and give everyone a starting feat' so I think the intent is if you want to play a subrace or something, you pick that for your starting feat.
I can sort of see part of the appeal of say, making any race a tiefling but I generally prefer it how it is now. The beast race consolidation just wouldn't work IMO. They are way too different. You could make elves all one race and then make individual feats for the sub races if you wanted to. But trying to merge things as biologically different as arakokra, lizardfolk and yuan-ti into one race isn't really going to work IMO without severely watering them down. Especially if your goal is to shift sub races from the race part and into feats. Even putting my preference for plenty of races and subraces being available aside, I just struggle to see how this would work out well mechanically.
Yeah. Would Thri-Kreen count as "beastfolk"? Because folding them into the same race as Aarakocra, Lizardfolk, Tabaxi, and Grung would definitely not make any sense.
I'd be fine with folding both Leonin and Tabaxi into one "Catfolk" race, similar to the new versions of the Aasimar or Kobolds where you choose which distinguishing features you want to get when you create your character (roar vs climbing speed), but most animal races really wouldn't fit into the same race.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
My personal favorite redux of halfling lore has always been eliminating the lingering "sedentary hobbitses" business. it's boring and unsuited to any sort of adventure. Instead, take a look at what halflings get/can do.
Lucky: halflings have a natural knack for turning the worst moments into successes. They can absolutely fail, but when the Fates give a halfling lemons? That halfling has a way of demanding to see life's manager. Brave: Halflings have advantage against the Frightened condition. They're harder to scare than any other species in the game. Halfling Nimbleness: Halflings can move freely through the space of creatures larger than themselves.
What does all this suggest? Does it suggest that halflings are sedentary couch potatoes who want to spend their lives in Shire dens doing nothing? No. Y'know what it suggests to me?
Halflings have a genetic propensity to be these guys:
Halflings are not 'cautious' or 'amiable' at all - they're loud, brash, in-your-face, and almost psychotically reckless. They're ten feet of attitude in a three foot frame. They're every meme you see about short, aggressive Italian guys dialed up to 12. Why? Because luck favors them, nothing frightens them, and nobody can stand in their way.
Halflings live to throw themselves into increasingly ridiculous situations just to see what kind of story they can get from it, and they take especial delight in making monkeys of Tallfolk who're too stretched out and outsized to have enough courage for their frames. They're drawn to careers and lifestyles that would make Evel Knevel tell them to slow down - mercenaries, pirates, wandering caravaneers, circus folk, anybody that moves around and gets to test their luck. halflings can't figure out why so many other people are so frightened of everything all the time. After all, if you go to your final judgment you'd better have one mother of a story to tell when you get there or what was even the point? Sure, individual halflings might have throttle settings below GO TIME!, but any given halfling is gonna have twice the YOLO of any similar individual of a given species.
That is how you make halflings cool. At least, to me.
I think the lucky, fearless halfling concept is pulled from Kender in Dragonlance. Which is sort of an automatic check against it, because Kender are mega-annoying.
Kender are clueless nitwits whose fearlessness comes from a complete, Cloudcuckoolander-level divorcement from reality. They're not brave, they just have no concept of conssquences or any idea of why someone might wish them ill. Heh, there's a reason I invoked the Dai Gurren Dan. I'm not talking annoying klepto obliviousness, I'm talking Shounen Protagonist level bravado. The kind of shit where when a halfling warrior stands against the BBEG and makes his Badass Boast, he damn well expects a distant volcano to go off behind him at the end to punctuate it - and given his luck, it very well might.
I think the lucky, fearless halfling concept is pulled from Kender in Dragonlance. Which is sort of an automatic check against it, because Kender are mega-annoying.
It did. Because the designers of the game know that Halflings just being "Humans, but short" is a bad race concept, so they did whatever they could to try and justify their existence beyond "Look! You can be a Hobbit! You know Middle Earth, right? Our game lets you be a hobbit!". And Kender are perhaps the worst race they could pull inspiration from, especially since they just kept the Hobbit's culture on the Kender racial mechanics. Their culture does not fit their racial mechanics at all in the D&D 5e PHB and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.
One suggestion I've seen people make for having Halflings actually be interesting is to have them be to agriculture/farming as Dwarves are to mining and smithing. Have Lightfoot Haflings raise Giant Bees that produce honey that functions as a potion of healing. Make it so that their Giant Bees pollinate magical flowers that produce a minor magical aura for people close enough to smell them. Heck, let them ride the bees into battle if they ever have to go to war. Have Lotusden Halflings grow magical grapes that give the benefits of the goodberry spell and live in magical vineyards lead by druids and nature clerics. Make Stout Hafllings focus on typical farm livestock, but super-sized. They can raise Giant Chickens that they get meat and giant eggs from. Giant Cows that they get milk and cheese from, rainbow-colored sheep/alpacas with magical wool (maybe functioning as Wildemount's Pride Silk?), and so on.
D&D halflings (with very few exceptions) are boring. They're Kender-Hobbits with nonsensical cultures completely disassociated from their racial mechanics and no good niche that separates them from Humans (the most boring D&D race of all). The best settings for Halflings are the ones that completely dump their culture (Eberron, Dark Sun) and turn them into savage, primitive monsters (at least through the eyes of the rest of the setting's inhabitants) because it's funny and subversive.
Kender are clueless nitwits whose fearlessness comes from a complete, Cloudcuckoolander-level divorcement from reality. They're not brave, they just have no concept of conssquences or any idea of why someone might wish them ill. Heh, there's a reason I invoked the Dai Gurren Dan. I'm not talking annoying klepto obliviousness, I'm talking Shounen Protagonist level bravado. The kind of shit where when a halfling warrior stands against the BBEG and makes his Badass Boast, he damn well expects a distant volcano to go off behind him at the end to punctuate it - and given his luck, it very well might.
Which is funny, because if there's any group who'd make a drill that can pierce the heavens, it's Rock Gnomes.
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Sure. But, and here's a Spicy Opinion for the spicy opinions thread: **** gnomes.
Nearly every gnome is nothing but "LAAWWWL I'm just so random and capricious! Look at these high-LAY-rious antics! Ooops I blew up another laboratory, tee hee hee! Look, I invented magic hair dye that also works on your toenails!", and basically every other shitty terrible Mad Scientist meme that makes me want to projectile vomit from the nipples. They're the modern-day kender and I hate their default lore. I've always treated gnomes as being to halflings what elves are to humans - fey creatures, secretive and cautious, prone to wonder and curiosity but not to the degree of being complete idiots, or to the degree of exploding every building they're in for longer than three minutes. Almost more refugees and/or explorers from a realm a little beyond what most people live in.
Sure. But, and here's a Spicy Opinion for the spicy opinions thread: **** gnomes.
Nearly every gnome is nothing but "LAAWWWL I'm just so random and capricious! Look at these high-LAY-rious antics! Ooops I blew up another laboratory, tee hee hee! Look, I invented magic hair dye that also works on your toenails!", and basically every other shitty terrible Mad Scientist meme that makes me want to projectile vomit from the nipples. They're the modern-day kender and I hate their default lore. I've always treated gnomes as being to halflings what elves are to humans - fey creatures, secretive and cautious, prone to wonder and curiosity but not to the degree of being complete idiots, or to the degree of exploding every building they're in for longer than three minutes. Almost more refugees and/or explorers from a realm a little beyond what most people live in.
While I can definitely understand where you're coming from, I do think those things only apply to the rock gnomes. From my viewing, the forest gnomes are more of druids and fey tricksters and are reclusive. I do think that having a race that tends to inventing is cool, but I can understand that might not be everyone's cup of tea. Your version of them feels fine, and I totally get not wanting that kind of chaos for the sake of chaos in your games.
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Hey, don't trash my Gnomes. They're the unique ones. Halflings are just wannabe hobbit-kender with a culture that doesn't even try to set itself apart from humans. Gnomes at least live underground, in burrows (which they kicked the hobbits out of), in hollow trees, and secret magical KGB headquarters in Zilargo. Halflings (outside of Eberron and Dark Sun) have literally nothing unique, and could easily be made redundant by allowing players to choose "Medium or Small" at character creation when picking a human like they do for Dhampir, Hexblood, Reborn, and so on.
If one of the two races has got to go, let's keep gnomes and fold halflings into humans. Gnomish culture, physical appearance, and racial abilities more than stands out when compared to that of humans and halflings.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
At the end of the day who cares what is or is not included in the PHB. Each setting created by the DM can be unique. I can still make 99.9% of all goblinoids evil because that works with my story. I loved the old days when a half-orc character had to RP against the general hostility of common towns folk. Adventures by definition stood out and were apart from the general society. There is no reason why we have to look at the game as a who and each individual group as belonging to the same sandbox like a mmorpg. If you don't like what they have done with some of the race homogenizing then ignore it. I liked have a smart half-orc that wasn't like all the other dumb orc and then they could surprise people.
That’s only because Tolkien’s estate sued TSR over making Hin and their culture too closely based off of the Hobbitses and their culture and they have since been watered down to short, lucky humans. 🤷♂️
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If you recall, in the AD&D days they were combined into a single “Complete Handbook,” so someone must have agreed with you back then.
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So you can only be born a tiefling, a drow, a genasi, or the like if you happen to be born at level 4?
Curious. I imagine that makes for some wild family dynamics, when occasionally an infant springs forth from the womb as a fully grown, functional, and mildly experienced adventurer. The midwives of the land must certainly be quite surprised when that happens.
Please do not contact or message me.
They said 'delete them and give everyone a starting feat' so I think the intent is if you want to play a subrace or something, you pick that for your starting feat.
I can sort of see part of the appeal of say, making any race a tiefling but I generally prefer it how it is now. The beast race consolidation just wouldn't work IMO. They are way too different. You could make elves all one race and then make individual feats for the sub races if you wanted to. But trying to merge things as biologically different as arakokra, lizardfolk and yuan-ti into one race isn't really going to work IMO without severely watering them down. Especially if your goal is to shift sub races from the race part and into feats. Even putting my preference for plenty of races and subraces being available aside, I just struggle to see how this would work out well mechanically.
I think the idea is, you give everyone a feat at character creation. You can choose to use that feat to be non-human. If you stay human, then you can use it on whatever you wish.
I understand that. I also understand that a lot of traditionalists as well as a lot of story-first players who dislike mechanical power are wildly, almost violently, opposed to level 1 freebie feats. Even if certain feats are much more valid, interesting, and useful as 'Origin' feats; Linguist is an excellent example of something that can say a lot about a character as an Origin-style feat, but makes absolutely no damn sense whatsoever to just suddenly be able to do after waking up one day. Nevertheless, I do find the notion "everybody is always a human, elf, dwarf, or orc, and if you're lucky the DM will allow you to take an Origin feat to gain very light, mostly inconsequential elements of the thing you'd like to play" to be not ideal even if I'm behind the idea of increased granularity in character creation. And if the Origin feats are juicy enough to actually be compelling and change the way your character plays, I guarantee half the playerbase would shriek their fool heads off over POWAH KREAPE(!!1!)
It's just...annoying. So very, very annoying.
Please do not contact or message me.
It really sounds like you're getting upset about hypothetical people's hypothetical opinions about a hypothetical rule.
If we start talking about how it doesn't make sense to suddenly be a Linguist at level 4, we might have to talk about how leveling up doesn't really make sense as a whole. And that's a long, winding road to go down.
It's not power creep to replace something with something else. Incidentally, 3.5e had level-1 only feats, many of which were very strong. If you want to hide things, you can put them in a different category: "You may take a bloodline or a feat".
Welcome to the Internet. People sometimes discuss things on it. I very strongly like a number of my characters it would no longer be possible to play under a system wherein everybody is one of four existing prebuilt species with only very light, effectively cosmetic variations on the theme.
It does not make sense to be a Linguist at level 4. Level 4 is your Adventuring Level. Your Adventuring Level, your character class? That's your Fighty stats. The entirety of D&D 5e's class system is about Fighty Stuff. It's the combat pillar. Class has almost no interaction with anything other than combat, and frankly any time Wizards tries to make class interact with anything but cxombat, the playerbase bites them. Gaining Polearm Master at level 4 makes sense - you're refining combat techniques you've been practicing over the course of your time spent genociding greenskins with your trusty Genocidin' Halberd. Gaining a facility with languages, the ability to speak three brand new ones, and a sudden deft hand at fashioning codes and ciphers at level 4 represents...what? The lifting of a case of oddly specific amnesia?
These are not skills the characters have any opportunity to hone or craft over the course of a few weeks spent genociding greenskins, they simply do not make sense to produce out of the aether. The same can be said for about half the game's existing feats, which is why people complain nobody ever takes the 'cool' feats unless they get handed those cool feats for free at first level. Nobody learns to be an Actor by slaughtering goblins in a swampy ruin. Nobody learns to have a Keen Mind by spending a couple of weeks massacring kobolds in a mine some local rich guy stole from the kobolds in the first place. Nobody learns to be a Linguist by spending a few sessions murderhoboing their way through a refugee camp where people displaced by the king's aggressive wars of conquest have turned bandit to try and feed their starving families. It just doesn't happen.
Please do not contact or message me.
Then D&D has to do something unique with them to justify keeping them. If they're just going to be "Short Humans", they don't really need to be a separate race, do they? However, if they had something unique to them, I'd absolutely be fine with keeping both them and Gnomes in the hobby. Currently, however, they're too close together in concept, IMO.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Yeah. Would Thri-Kreen count as "beastfolk"? Because folding them into the same race as Aarakocra, Lizardfolk, Tabaxi, and Grung would definitely not make any sense.
I'd be fine with folding both Leonin and Tabaxi into one "Catfolk" race, similar to the new versions of the Aasimar or Kobolds where you choose which distinguishing features you want to get when you create your character (roar vs climbing speed), but most animal races really wouldn't fit into the same race.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
My personal favorite redux of halfling lore has always been eliminating the lingering "sedentary hobbitses" business. it's boring and unsuited to any sort of adventure. Instead, take a look at what halflings get/can do.
Lucky: halflings have a natural knack for turning the worst moments into successes. They can absolutely fail, but when the Fates give a halfling lemons? That halfling has a way of demanding to see life's manager.
Brave: Halflings have advantage against the Frightened condition. They're harder to scare than any other species in the game.
Halfling Nimbleness: Halflings can move freely through the space of creatures larger than themselves.
What does all this suggest? Does it suggest that halflings are sedentary couch potatoes who want to spend their lives in Shire dens doing nothing? No. Y'know what it suggests to me?
Halflings have a genetic propensity to be these guys:
Halflings are not 'cautious' or 'amiable' at all - they're loud, brash, in-your-face, and almost psychotically reckless. They're ten feet of attitude in a three foot frame. They're every meme you see about short, aggressive Italian guys dialed up to 12. Why? Because luck favors them, nothing frightens them, and nobody can stand in their way.
Halflings live to throw themselves into increasingly ridiculous situations just to see what kind of story they can get from it, and they take especial delight in making monkeys of Tallfolk who're too stretched out and outsized to have enough courage for their frames. They're drawn to careers and lifestyles that would make Evel Knevel tell them to slow down - mercenaries, pirates, wandering caravaneers, circus folk, anybody that moves around and gets to test their luck. halflings can't figure out why so many other people are so frightened of everything all the time. After all, if you go to your final judgment you'd better have one mother of a story to tell when you get there or what was even the point? Sure, individual halflings might have throttle settings below GO TIME!, but any given halfling is gonna have twice the YOLO of any similar individual of a given species.
That is how you make halflings cool. At least, to me.
Please do not contact or message me.
I think the lucky, fearless halfling concept is pulled from Kender in Dragonlance. Which is sort of an automatic check against it, because Kender are mega-annoying.
Kender are clueless nitwits whose fearlessness comes from a complete, Cloudcuckoolander-level divorcement from reality. They're not brave, they just have no concept of conssquences or any idea of why someone might wish them ill. Heh, there's a reason I invoked the Dai Gurren Dan. I'm not talking annoying klepto obliviousness, I'm talking Shounen Protagonist level bravado. The kind of shit where when a halfling warrior stands against the BBEG and makes his Badass Boast, he damn well expects a distant volcano to go off behind him at the end to punctuate it - and given his luck, it very well might.
Please do not contact or message me.
It did. Because the designers of the game know that Halflings just being "Humans, but short" is a bad race concept, so they did whatever they could to try and justify their existence beyond "Look! You can be a Hobbit! You know Middle Earth, right? Our game lets you be a hobbit!". And Kender are perhaps the worst race they could pull inspiration from, especially since they just kept the Hobbit's culture on the Kender racial mechanics. Their culture does not fit their racial mechanics at all in the D&D 5e PHB and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.
One suggestion I've seen people make for having Halflings actually be interesting is to have them be to agriculture/farming as Dwarves are to mining and smithing. Have Lightfoot Haflings raise Giant Bees that produce honey that functions as a potion of healing. Make it so that their Giant Bees pollinate magical flowers that produce a minor magical aura for people close enough to smell them. Heck, let them ride the bees into battle if they ever have to go to war. Have Lotusden Halflings grow magical grapes that give the benefits of the goodberry spell and live in magical vineyards lead by druids and nature clerics. Make Stout Hafllings focus on typical farm livestock, but super-sized. They can raise Giant Chickens that they get meat and giant eggs from. Giant Cows that they get milk and cheese from, rainbow-colored sheep/alpacas with magical wool (maybe functioning as Wildemount's Pride Silk?), and so on.
D&D halflings (with very few exceptions) are boring. They're Kender-Hobbits with nonsensical cultures completely disassociated from their racial mechanics and no good niche that separates them from Humans (the most boring D&D race of all). The best settings for Halflings are the ones that completely dump their culture (Eberron, Dark Sun) and turn them into savage, primitive monsters (at least through the eyes of the rest of the setting's inhabitants) because it's funny and subversive.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Which is funny, because if there's any group who'd make a drill that can pierce the heavens, it's Rock Gnomes.
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Sure. But, and here's a Spicy Opinion for the spicy opinions thread: **** gnomes.
Nearly every gnome is nothing but "LAAWWWL I'm just so random and capricious! Look at these high-LAY-rious antics! Ooops I blew up another laboratory, tee hee hee! Look, I invented magic hair dye that also works on your toenails!", and basically every other shitty terrible Mad Scientist meme that makes me want to projectile vomit from the nipples. They're the modern-day kender and I hate their default lore. I've always treated gnomes as being to halflings what elves are to humans - fey creatures, secretive and cautious, prone to wonder and curiosity but not to the degree of being complete idiots, or to the degree of exploding every building they're in for longer than three minutes. Almost more refugees and/or explorers from a realm a little beyond what most people live in.
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While I can definitely understand where you're coming from, I do think those things only apply to the rock gnomes. From my viewing, the forest gnomes are more of druids and fey tricksters and are reclusive. I do think that having a race that tends to inventing is cool, but I can understand that might not be everyone's cup of tea. Your version of them feels fine, and I totally get not wanting that kind of chaos for the sake of chaos in your games.
Subclass Evaluations So Far:
Sorcerer
Warlock
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