Should Hobbits get the boots bonus to kicking?

[khorboth]

Pretty much what the title says. I'm Referring to the +1 to damage for wearing boots while kicking. And I'm talking about Tolkien's Middle Earth Hobbits.

They don't ever wear shoes and get great callouses. Even when climbing the great snowy mountain of Caradhras (as seen in the movie) the Hobbits were barefoot and didn't need to wrap their hairy, calloused feet at all. When navigating the knife-sharp rocks between the Anduin river valley and the swamps of the dead, they didn't need boots.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single incident of a hobbit kicking a living thing. The only unarmed combat involving Hobbits I can think of from the books is... Wrestling with Gollum , Wrestling with Gollum, Wrestling with Gollum, and... Wrestling with Smeagol.

So, what do you think? Are callouses thick enough for all of that durability necessarily hard enough for the damage bonus? I keep waffling on the subject.

[Icelander]

They are not heavy enough to add a bonus.

If you view a given Hobbit as having callouses that are not merely enough to adequately protect his feet, but are actually thick and heavy like work-boots, there is a Perk called Striking Surface that has a prerequisite of rigid DR of x+ that you could take for such a Hobbit.

[Dalillama]

No. My uncle went about barefoot in every kind of weather for ~40 years, I saw him walk across broken glass without noticing, but they weren't boots. Part of the bonus damage is from weight, not just hardness.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by khorboth

They don't ever wear shoes and get great callouses.

This is overstated. Hobbits do wear shoes. The Prologue to The Lord of the Rings says they "seldom wear shoes." Seldom is not never. It says that the hobbits of the East Farthing wear dwarf-boots in muddy weather. When Tolkien painted the scene of Bilbo, the dwarves, and Gandalf in the Eagles' Eyrie, he gave Bilbo shoes, and Tolkien once remarked that Bilbo received boots when he got to Rivendell, and wore them until he got back from Rivendell. The original version of Aragorn was a hobbit called Trotter, who wore wooden shoes, and while Trotter was eventually eliminated, he stuck around for a long time, AFTER all of The Hobbit was already published.

However, Merry and Pippin were indeed barefoot in the Company of the Ring, as when Aragorn is tracking them across the plains of Rohan he identifies Pippin's "unshod feet." Maybe they had spare boots for use in the snow, etc., but took them off in better weather, but we really don't know that.

I would probably give hobbits DR1 feet but nothing more.

[RyanW]

While protective, I don't think they'd be rigid enough to provide a bonus.

[khorboth]

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't considered weight. Even for the size, I don't think they'll have the weight of boots. I'll just keep it with a point (maybe 2) of foot-only thick-skin DR. I'll leave open the option of the perk mentioned by Icelander. Or maybe just Accessory: Boots as an upgrade if somebody really wants it. I think everybody is right that it doesn't belong in the default package, though.

[Ashtagon]

I'd limit it further, and only grant that DR to the soles of the feet.

[tbone]

Also worth noting - though probably nothing new to people in this thread - that the image of hobbits having big feet doesn't come from Tolkien.

From the FAQ of the Tolkien Society:

No, Hobbits don’t have big feet. . . The idea that Hobbits have big feet seems to have begun with the Brothers Hildebrant, who did numerous popular illustrations in the 1960s and 1970s. They also showed Dwarves with very large feet. Tolkien did not.
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/faq/#hobbits

The LoTR DVD special-feature disks detail the great trouble and expense the filmmakers went through to equip their hobbits with big rubber feet. Funny to think it wasn't even necessary . . .

Anyway, to chime in on the OP question: Nah, I wouldn't give hobbit feet the extra damage of boots; that'd essentially be treating their feet the same as hooves. Even if you did go with the common image of hobbit feet, those big feet still won't be any bigger and heavier than human feet. And super tough soles doesn't mean the feet are hard.

(Hobbit foot hair now - that's a real thing. And what decent hobbit wants to muss his podiatric coif with a lot of needless kicking?)

[Phantasm]

IIRC, only the Proudfoots ("ProudFEET!") were noted as having large feet (the guy that exclaimed "ProudFEET!" during the Birthday Party was noted to have "the largest feet in the Shire"), but those feet were probably only slightly larger than average for their frames. I know when I was 13 I had a 13" foot, but I was also pushing 6' tall at the time. That's still within "human norm", if a bit on the large size. (Currently wearing a 13W or a 14 shoe size, depending on styling.) So if we assume that a 3' tall Hobbit has a 4" shoe normally, the Proudfoots are likely to have 5" or maybe 6" feet, not 13"ers.

[ericbsmith]

The "Boots" bonus is basically the same as the Claws (Hooves) Bonus. Are Hobbits feet as hard as a horses Hooves? If so, then give them Claws (Blunt) or Claws (Hooves). Otherwise, no, they don't get a kicking bonus.