There are plenty of elves, dwarves, and orcs in fantasy. Why do halflings show up so much more rarely...

You think halflings are rare? What about gnomes?

Well Hobbits' shtick is specifically that they prefer to avoid bullshit and live a comfy life so there's that.

Probably because it's hard to justify the existance of a completely harmless race in settings that are suppose to be dripping with danger and major races that are constantly at conquering war with one another.

>tfw game series I'm following
You know, you could just say Etrian Odyssey user.

How are we gonna get more games if you hide it, nerd?

Because not everyone on Veeky Forums might like EO, stupid Ricky poster.

>stupid Ricky poster.
You're stupid, stupid.

Go back to the general, user. You're not ALLOWED to post anywhere else.

They're just short humans. No reason to use them.

...

In order to understand them, you have to understand their purpose in narrative in their source material as opposed to utility in RPGs.

In the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, which may not be definitive source material but are a staple influence on D&D and fantasy RPGs, they're a stand-in for the reader, a people who live an idealized middle-class life with mostly petty worries and a pretty good life, to whom events far off and epic are understood from a viewpoint of remoteness and detachment or read about in books.

They live an easy life and generally like the quiet life rather than the fires of industry or the rage of war, and despite their sometimes petty conflicts they can many times show great heart when they involve themselves in the outside world. Their height represents their insignificance compared to others. They stand at half the height of most of the great peoples, but surprise many with their great acts of kindness or clever thinking, showing that even though they are of short stature and worldly insignificance, they are far from being without merit. In LotR, races could be seen as stand-ins for countries and social classes rather than direct analogues to actual species.

RPGs are much less about that, since they're settings for narratives and not narratives themselves. And since a lot of stuff is just copied right from LotR, dwarves were copped from Gimli as tough fighters, Elves were archers from Legolas's examples, Halflings were thieves because they stole a shiny ring and a shiny rock, wizards were old dudes like Gandalf, and humans were all-rounders like Aragorn with his multifaceted skillset, and then they dumped a whole lot of other shit into it while making shit up on their own. As such, narrative is something left to the players and DM, but most don't really ever get that far in their fantasy games of pretend.

GET BACK TO THE GENERAL PEASANT

N________okay
but not before you ask nicely.

As much as I dislike Warcraft's lore, I really like what they did with Gnomes.

Being tinkers and engineers suits them and differentiates them from the other races.

Get back to the EO cesspool. Please. We miss you.

They copied that from Dragonlance.

Though to be fair they toned them down and made them much more sane. Dragonlance Gnomes are all crazy and worthless and irrelevant and all their inventions are jokes.

They seem to be to dwarves what goblins are to orcs, a small subset of a larger race that focuses on specialization rather than brute-force and traditional craft, and are very eccentric about it.

Stop shitposting with second best girl Only a smidge less than ponytail fencer
And I wasn't saying Ricky was stupid, but you were stupid for trying to throw the thread out of whack.
And besides, EO does have a board game too.
can't we be friends?

In Warcraft they have different origins. Both were created by the Titans, but their progenitors were different, Dwarves from Golems, Gnomes from Robots, more or less.

In Dragonlance Gnomes are the original people, the Graygem mutated some of the gnomes into Dwarves, and some of the rest into Kender. Gnomes themselves originated from a curse the god Reorx placed on his human followers for being too arrogant.

'cause people don't like humble beginnings.

Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit dealt with their culture and stuff a lot already, so everyone else moved out and focused more on the other races.

It's similar to how no one really gives a fuck about humans either, they're always just kinda THERE.

Because they're competing for their niche with fairies and gnomes, and already have a bit of overlap with the dwarves.

Since when do halflings act like fairies?

>that guy that always ALWAYS plays halfling rogue

Stop it matt.

Yeah, he should try halfling bard.

No one cares about bullshit potatoe farming midgets.

I dunno, I rather like the "garden"-variety ohohoh

Because it is often hard to tell a short or child human character apart from a halfling if the "halfling" is wearing shoes.

I've always played halflings as mexicans

they're hard workers, very sociable. but they relax enough to be seen as lazy.
also they make good food

I guess that's true if you're some kind of faggot.

Because no one ever does them well.

Tolkien gave us boring-as-shit Hobbits who care more about clean holes than adventures.

Dragonlance gave us child-like Kender who are often played as one-trick-kleptomaniac-ponies.

Dark Sun gave us BRUTAL cannibals, but they haven't caught on like the above.

To make matters worse, it seems like Halflings' best weapons are rocks because of some David versus Goliath bullshit. Oh boy, "slings." I'm sure glad we gave small creatures the weapon with the heaviest regular ammo.

Before Tolkien, nobody did them *ever*.

Are people fucking forgetting that Tolkien invented Hobbits? The reason they don't appear anywhere else is because they have no mythological/folkloric background.

Inb4, yeah, yeah, before Tolkien differentiated and codified what elves and dwarves and orcs were, folklore was an overlapping mess. Dwarfs, elves, sidhe, pixys, trows, trolls, faes, gnomes (a late medieval invention), tomte, nisse, brownies, boggles, pookas, goblins, kobolds, what-have-you, all might as well have been describing the same creature (i.e. invisible spirits that caused all the "bad things" happening to shit-ignorant European peasants).

To be fair, it's a universal trope. In the Greek countryside, to this very day, the word "kentauros" (of all things!) now describes not the half-horses of myth, but "invisible poltergeist-like spirits that cause bad things to happen to shit-ignorant peasants". Every agrarian culture seems to have their own bad fairies.

But things were at least starting to settle down in the modern period. There was already something of a distinction between beautiful young looking elves/pixies/sprites/fairies and ugly old dwarfs/goblins/gnomes/trolls. In other words, Tolkien was very creative when he invented his elves and dwarves and orcs to be what they were, but he wasn't *completely* pulling it out of his ass.

But Hobbits DID NOT EXIST IN FOLKLORE before J.R.R. Thus, they are the good professor's epic ass-pull. And nobody else has any reason to use them—or any right to them.

thanks donald

Nowhere in my post did I say that Hobbits existed before Tolkien. He created them, but he sure did a shit job of making them interesting. Admittedly, that might have been on purpose because the Hobbits were supposed to be ordinary people put into extraordinary circumstances: quite literally small people dealing with forces bigger than them.

Still, they're boring as shit.

My favorite character to play, ever, was a halfling bard. I was the cook for a crew on an independent ship, and focused on summoning feats. I was also a shitty cook.

good theory.

In my setting if the halfling is old, he simply looks like an adult with the size of a kid.

I play halflings exclusively, I like the idea of the mundane little man striving to be just as good if not better then everyone else when everyonr else is huge or in the case of gnomes, seem to be naturally intelligent.

They haven't been 'farming midgets' in D&D terms since like second edition, user. Didn't the majority of halflings in the 3e-4e era look pretty lithe and human-like in comparison to the older, 'Hobbit' style ones?

Also no giant hairy feet. So you know, bonus.

Put into this context, Dwarves might represent the nouveau-riche, new wealth borne of industrialization but prone to the folly that comes from venturing too deeply into this unfamiliar territory. And consider the Elves being representative of nobility (especially from a British POV); a proud and beautiful, noble people whom are becoming less prominent in the world, fading from significance and prominence on the world stage. When you cast them in those lights, their conflict and distaste for one another makes a lot of sense, as do aspects of their characters.

Best Tastes.

Halflings seem to me like they've been genetically engineered to be involved with the mafia, for some reason.

You mean Albanians

... brb writing Halfling Mafia into my homebrew setting.

halflings are cute

Hobbits were the best part of Tolkien's books.

That being said, halflings or generically the cute race should be shaped out more, in this regard you're regard.

Personally I'm thinking about having them being something between the brownies in folklore (as in the serving race. Maybe magically enslaved, maybe they play this for sneakiness) and furry-burrowing-possibly shapeshifting creatures.
This actually meand that you could a small-ish idilliac shire, a subterreanean magical race or racket of "unseen" oppressed people that manage to get off by organized crime means.

>but not furry in THAT sense

And yes, I played Odin's Sphere, why do you ask?

I'm sure the gnomes as engineers trope predates Warcraft

They were the tinker race in Everquest, and that was before WoW, and most likely also came from elsewhere

"...You come to me on this, the day of my eleventy-seventh birthday... and ask me for a favor?"

because they're insufferable

Its easier to present Elves, Dwarves and Orcs in a setting and make them stand out. Elves are usually tall, pompous, elegant, magical, ancient, all that stuff, Dwarves, short, but stout, resilient and sturdy, stubborn and know their way around an axe or hammer, and Orcs, big, burly, brutal. Halflings, less so. They are a race of smallfolk in a setting that would already have Dwarves, and most examples outside of Tolkien don't really set the Halflings apart in interesting enough ways. Plus for the majority of fantasy settings, the writers rarely (and mind you there are exceptions) push the boundaries with their mythos and race inhabitants, so they don't bother working Halflings in because they don't know how to write two short races interestingly.

At least thats my take on it.

I have the "Garden -Variety" of Gnome in my setting, but they're an always Chaotic-evil race of merciless, brainless, savages who live in the enlarged corpses of the Mushroom folk. They look the same as pic related.

Halflings are just even more arrogant and xenophobic Dwemer, except their Magi-tech is more Stone than metal and they used to be Goblins. They look like the usual curly haired, furry-footed, Tolkein Halflings, but they tend to have something of a Tumblr nose.