Tiny People Civilization in RPGs

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:27 pm

I do have to ask, even in fantastic settings or roleplaying games, there aren't that make civilizations composed of tiny people. I don't mean halflings, I mean things like mice and frogs and shit.

With our human-centric world, it would be really hard for people even with a high suspension of disbelief to have mice warriors fight alongside dwarf barbarians, we also have magic and stands and summons and junk. So why not have tiny people?

User6 · Post by **User6** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:31 pm

You post too much.
That's not the problem though. It's that your new threads are generally of sub-par quality and unoriginal thought.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:33 pm

HackMaster has pixie fairies, which I think stand around 1' high? It's been a LONG while since I played (new edition just out recently, too), but I seem to remember them being somewhat viable warriors (archer specialists, of course).

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:37 pm

You post too much.
That's not the problem though. It's that your new threads are generally of sub-par quality and unoriginal thought.

Do I know you from somewhere, mysterious lurker coward guy?

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:41 pm

User6 wrote:You post too much.

People in glass houses...

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:24 pm

yes, User, piss off.

Lago asks an interesting question.

I think, at least as far as D&D goes, the reason there isn't more focus on tiny people is that the mechanics just don't support their involvement in combat, short of spellcasting and sneak attacks, and societies completely comprised of Casters or Rogues suspend disbelief even further it would seem...

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:37 pm

It might be too silly for some players. Somebody invested in playing her elf necromancer or dwarf battlerager might not enjoy the intrusion of less (//_o)/badass creatures.

I personally find a lot of faeries fucking obnoxious (Earthdawn anyone?), and not everyone wants to play D&D in Narnia. That said, Narnians/Redwallachians really can be great characters to have around. A druid calling up swarms of angry little frogs armed with spears or cat-mounted mice would be clichéd but awesome.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:40 pm

The problem is that D&D's system doesn't really scale well into something smaller. Everything uses the same hp system, and the average commoner has around 4-5 hp.

This doesn't leave a heck of a lot of room to go with mice and rats.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:42 pm

RandomCasualty2 wrote:The problem is that D&D's system doesn't really scale well into something smaller. Everything uses the same hp system, and the average commoner has around 4-5 hp.

This doesn't leave a heck of a lot of room to go with mice and rats.

Ever heard of swarms, RC?

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:43 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
You post too much.
That's not the problem though. It's that your new threads are generally of sub-par quality and unoriginal thought.
Do I know you from somewhere, mysterious lurker coward guy?

http://www.flamewarriors.com/warriorshtm/ennui.htm

He's from all over the internet. He's a standard cookie cutter hypocrite troll.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:01 pm

RC2 does bring up a point, though.

You can't really roleplay an entire swarm though. You'd be roleplaying a single rodent or fairy or oversized ant in it and then you would have scaling problems.

However, would this be a problem or a challenge? I think having a tiny character at low levels would be too much work for the party to deal with, since they would have to carry all of their equipment and open all of the doors for them and so-on.

But at higher levels when the tiny character could start pulling their weight with telekinesis or Pokemon or whatever it would be less of an issue, I believe.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:18 pm

well, come to think of it, playing a swarm could be interesting... In combat, your character is "The Ground Hawks, 44th Frog Knight division of the Fairy Queen's Royal Army." You act as a well trained, highly coordinated squadron without having to break out the mass combat rules. When it gets down to interpersonal social interactions, you play "Sir Gerrald, Knight of the Round Lily Pad, Five Star General in the Fairy Queen's Royal Army" who makes decisions for his squad and stands two inches tall.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:28 pm

That's actually a very good question - we have Tiny People all over the place in fantasy from Tom Thumb in folktales to Swift's Lilliputians to Disney's Tinkerbell to comics tropes like Ant-Man's Shirnk Gas and the Bottle City of Kandaar, as well as movies like Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and the Incredible shrinking man.

Plus we have the whole genra of Kiddie anthromorphic fantasy - such as Wind in the Willows, Froggy went a Courtin', some of Dr, Suess, Watership Down, Secret of Nimh, American Tail, Stewart Little, etc etc - much of this features tiny characters and sometimes civilizations.

So it is a pretty good question why they are not more common in D&D and similar RPGs.

Offhand it may have to do with the teenages who most RPGs were historically marketed to seeing Tinkerbell and talking animals as too kiddy for them. Or maybe it just has to do with Gygax only wanting to include scary monsters and tropes out of works popular in the 70s.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 12:27 am

I like the notion of alternating between a swarm for combat and a tiny person for social schticks. It might strain suspension of disbelief since healing losses to a sentient swarm differs dramatically from healing a few cuts. Now if he commanded more traditional non-sentient swarms of vermin or somesuch, that would work alright since their replacement is trivial. Also splitting a sentient swarm for scouting or other purposes is kinda sketchy. So that is another mark against it.

p.s. Caedrus I love that flamewarrior site, thanks for reminding me of it. I reckon I am a Tireless Rebutter, but I am trying to improve and let things go when I have no new points to address... even when it pains me that my discussion partners have yet to yield to my cunning logic and irrefutable facts.

socrates999 · Post by **socrates999** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 12:35 am

Plus if you think about it, any human is really just a swarm of connected cells that are individually not capable of much, but collectively yield the emergent property of intelligence.

I like the idea of playing a swarm with a spokesperson. Plus, healing may work to completely revive members of your swarm (ie your HP) rather than healing individual cuts on one person.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 12:38 am

The tiny people we see in other fantasy works aren't swarms. They're individuals who interact with their world on a tiny basis.

Now I'm not saying that there shouldn't be intelligent swarms or anything or that people shouldn't be able to play them. I'm just saying 'swarm of fairies' is a huge cop-out without actually leaving us with the roleplaying capabilities of David the Gnome or Thumbelina.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 1:14 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The tiny people we see in other fantasy works aren't swarms. They're individuals who interact with their world on a tiny basis.

Now I'm not saying that there shouldn't be intelligent swarms or anything or that people shouldn't be able to play them. I'm just saying 'swarm of fairies' is a huge cop-out without actually leaving us with the roleplaying capabilities of David the Gnome or Thumbelina.

Ok, then lets look at a source for "tiny person adventures with standard size characters"...

"Peter Pan."

What useful stuff does tinkerbell do? she lets them fly, that's all I really can think of, though I'm going of the movies, not the book, soo... I may be missing something...

But seriously, short of sneaking, spellcasting, and well coordinated contingents of knights, tiny people need their own system...

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 1:18 am

Tiny people do need their own civilization, but not all of the tiny people actually need to have the potential to becoming capable adventurers.

The Rescue(rs/ Rangers) for instance have tiny civilizations in a world of medium-sized people. But we don't give a rat's ass about how most of the mice would get killed, we focus on characters like Basil who is an awesome detective or Gadget who builds robots out of office supplies.

So that's why I propose that tiny characters can only play along with big characters at higher levels. Otherwise tiny people have civilizations like the NIMH rats, where their biggest defense is not really being all that interesting.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 1:23 am

that's what I've been thinking this whole time and I guess just haven't expressed... Tiny people have their own civilizations and play with other tiny people.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 1:26 am

Well, so do elves and giths. At least tiny people nominally interact with medium-sized civilization, such as taking teeth or building houses out of trash or rescuing critters from laboratories.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 4:07 am

And said tiny people treat humans as near-unstoppable giants. You could almost get away with making Tiny the new Medium, and converting everything appropriately in size (cats are tigers, humans are non-magic storm giants, etc).

Rejakor · Post by **Rejakor** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 7:31 am

Eh, i'm a first level tiny frog-guy Fighter. I'm size Fine, which is fine.

All my attacks with my Fine longsword do 1 point of damage, minimum. I can even use Disarm, Trip, Bull-Rush or whatnot with a little bit of imagination.

I'm going to be working on my touch AC and putting ranks into escape artist (and picking up either that feat that removes size modifiers from a grapple or Slippery Contortionist[Skill][Tome]), to avoid being 'grappled' and 'screwed'.

With power attack or sneak attack, or hell, something like subtle cut, I am able to contribute to the party, and I am /hella/ good at sneaking.

And for the whole 'but a single sword swipe would utterly destroy a frog-guy!' Well, yeah. But i'm a heroic frog-guy - and since when was every sword-swipe a dead-on disemboweling thrust? Frog-guy ducks, gets nicked, has his arm chopped off, gets nicked again by an arrow, ducks, dodges and weaves... basically all the 'the sword stroke wounds you in the side' becomes 'the sword-stroke nicks you in the side' 'the sword-stroke knocks you head over heels'.

The main problem is with reach, the whole 'having to enter someone's square and provoke AoO's hur hur for no reason hur'. That's stupid. That's so, so stupid. I can enter someone's square and dance around his feet, sure, we actually have feats for that, it's like a disarm attempt except you must be this small to enter. But why do I have to do so to jump forward, slice his big toe, and jump back? Jump up and slice his nose across the short bit? It's assumed that without special rules /any/ character is taking up a 5ft square. So why penalize smaller people just cause? Screw that. All PC's have at least 5ft reach to begin with, the miniatures' game is predicated on that fact anyway.

[/rant]

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 8:16 am

I cannot tell... was that satire? There is no godly way you are successfully using and combat manuevers like disarm, bull rush, etc. 1 minimum damage is nothing. The most interesting thing about that kind of character in combat is their ability to hide and that opponents actually get to use the ability to take -20 to grapple you without giving up their mobility.

[edit: whoops left out a word =-) ]

Rejakor · Post by **Rejakor** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 11:35 am

There is no godly you are successfully using and combat manuevers like disarm, bull rush, etc.

Truncated?

As for the rest...

Yes, 1 minimum damage is nothing. But you get to add strength to that, assuming that you're not playing some kind of WotC frog race which like has -12 str and automatically dies just cause. And then power attack and blah and blah, and since when did weapon damage matter anyway? In a tome game, your less weapon damage matters even less.

Escape Artist checks to escape a grapple have no size modifiers.

Fine characters have a much, much higher chance of getting a decent touch AC than medium characters do.

And.. why without giving up their mobility? Funnily enough, although they shouldn't, they still count as in a grapple.

All the tools you need to make a melee (melee!) tiny character are there, much less a spellcasting/invoking character. The only houserule you need is the 'no random comedy AoOs' rule. I don't see why saying that is satire.

Just another user · Post by **Just another user** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 1:03 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:RC2 does bring up a point, though.

You can't really roleplay an entire swarm though. You'd be roleplaying a single rodent or fairy or oversized ant in it and then you would have scaling problems.

However, would this be a problem or a challenge? I think having a tiny character at low levels would be too much work for the party to deal with, since they would have to carry all of their equipment and open all of the doors for them and so-on.

But at higher levels when the tiny character could start pulling their weight with telekinesis or Pokemon or whatever it would be less of an issue, I believe.

you don't even need to be high level, try to not think to what tiny characters can't do, think to what they can do that normal size humans can't, for example, go where human PCs couldn't, enter small holes, climb inside gutters, hide almost anywhere and eavesdrop conversations, etc. Think to the opportunities of playing a mouse in urban campaign, if you think only in terms of raw combat then they are limited, but even in D&D there is not just combat. (suggested reading "the amazing Maurice and his amazing rodents" by Pratchett).

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Tiny People Civilization in RPGs

Tiny People Civilization in RPGs

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