I did, at that, Rag, and fair enough in a way... but let me ask you a question... What age of human child, do you imagine you might mistake a halfling for? If you say 2-4 I'll call you a liar... and if you say 5-12, I'll tell you that the halfling is actually notably too short to be easily mistaken for such; kids that age are already much taller ^.^ It's *hard* to honestly evaluate this compared to reality, though, given the lack of reality in the situation; the 'child' that you're most likely imaging this halfling being taken for is, in human reality, more likely to be over four and half feet tall; you'd glance at them, and you brain might go 'child?' but it would also immediately recalibrate for them being way too short for their normalised proportions and go 'no, halfling' right away - you simply would not make that mistake in a real situation. We won't really be able to prove this before we have some kind of .hack// full immersion world space to confirm it in though.
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You're not wrong, Evil... I'm just really tired of a lot of what I see in contemporary discussions on the topic - I'm in the category of people who regularly face being denied our legitimate adulthood by such people... people who automatically see anything short or petitely built and screech 'problematic' at the top of their internet lungs... the kind of people who would tell someone like me that I oughtn't even have a sex life, or admit to being a sexual entity at all, because it's 'encouraging paedophiles' or what have you... and from my perspective it often feels like the greater social community is in full swing of downright vilifying the victims of this behaviour, and I don't want to stand for it.
In pathfinder you had to take a specific trait in your background to let you attempt to pass yourself off as a human youth - without the trait you couldn't effectively do it, or at least, it's far more difficult. But the trait does exist, and it's pretty cool that it acknowledges that it can be a thing, isn't by default, and is something that characters may want to do for various sneaky reasons at times... I actually really appreciated that during my brief stint with pathfinder.
I think well proportioned halflings could certainly try to pass themselves off has human youths, and could even do it successfully with good checks, but I disagree that they could or would be taken for such by average people without some effort on the halfling's part to appear so in the first place. People in the realms see halflings regularly, after all, and are going to be more accustomed to the visual and physical differences. The fact that many modern people from various social media circles would screech and point the finger at them regardless of what they did or how they presented is not the fault of the halfling - it's a reflection on the one pointing, and they are not the people I feel that we should be accommodating, because that behaviour is not healthy or respectful.
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Still, I've tried hard over the course of this thread to prevent it from getting into these kinds of discussions in any derailing depth - the focus should remain on how terrible the current BG3 models are, and the ways in which they need to be fixed to look better.
