D&D Next: Balancing Small Races

As you may have heard, Wizards of the Coast is currently developing a new version of D&D.  Their stated aim is to create a unifying concept of the game, one that will end the Edition Wars that currently rage between players of the newer Fourth Edition of the game--the current edition--and the Third Edition, which lots and lots of Players seem to prefer to the current version.

I personally play the Fourth Edition because I find it to be easier to set-up and far more balanced between PCs and Monsters, but I can see the points raised by Third Edition players, especially the financial ones.  Which is to say that D&D books are expensive, and once you've invested in an entire library of hardcover rule books, it's hard to set those aside permanently a mere handful of years (or less) after you've bought them, read them, and fully incorporated them into your gaming life.  D&D is a complicated game, Third Edition was a particularly complicated version on top of that, and spending time and money to learn to run it well was a substantial commitment.  I get that folks don't want to dump their current system just because the company they bought the system from needs to Publish-or-Perish.  And then, too, the Third Edition rules allowed for near-infinite flexibility of character design, especially as it relates to character multi-classing.  Folks like multi-classing, and the Fourth Edition's system for it is a hot mess.

So, bottom line, the Third Edition folks have a point.  We'll leave it at that.

Halfings were introduced right at the
game's very beginnings.

What I want to talk about today is a topic I found on the WotC D&D Community Forum: How do you balance the rules for Small races?


First, the issue: there are several small races in D&D--halflings, gnomes, kobolds, and goblins.  Of these, halflings are the most famous, being based in large part on J.R.R. Tolkien's hobbits.  As a Player, it's cool to be able to play the little guy, the star of the most famous fantasy books in history, but it's also a problem in that small characters can't wield weapons that are the same size as those wielded by normal-sized characters.  This was true in Tolkien's books, but in the game it results in a damage penalty that varies according to which edition of D&D a Player is playing.

For example, in Third Edition, Small characters had to use weapons that were one size smaller than normal, with the penalty coming as a loss of a die-size.  So a halfing wielding a smaller-than-normal longsword no longer dealt d8 damage with it.  It had to be sized for him, and thus dealt only d6 damage.  This was often simply abreviated to where the halfling in question now simply wielded a short sword instead of a longsword, but it was still worth noting, especially for powers that relied on a specific type of weapon.  In Third Edition, a halfling character that relied specifically on using a halfling-sized dagger was at a substantial disadvantage.

Thankfully this issue was simplified in Fourth Edition.  Small-sized creatures are now only allowed to wield weapons that are either Small or Versatile, and if they wield Versatile weapons (like a longsword) they have to wield them two-handed.  In many ways this is the same rule, but like a lot of Fourth Edition, it's much simpler to manage.

In any event, Third Edition had mechanics to balance the damage penalty that small characters took.  They got +1 to their Armor Class (AC), +1 to attack rolls, and a +4 bonus to Hide checks.  However, Fourth Edition mechanics give no specific size-based advantages, and indeed, a good case can be made that small characters are at a substantial disadvantage in the current version of the game.  One can argue that racial and class benefits make up for the loss, and that may be true, but it's at best merely a single point of view.  Bottom line, if D&D Next is looking to re-balance the game and "get back to the core of D&D," then it seems likely that they'll have to re-address this issue.

My question, dear Readers, is this: How would you balance the damage penalty for Small races?  Did you like the way that Third Edition handled it, or do you prefer the racial characteristics system of the Fourth Edition?  Or is there something else you'd like to see?

I posted my opinion here, but I'd really like to hear what some of my own Players think.  So... what'd'ya got?