D&D 5E Conerning Gnomes (+thread. please don't crap the thread with anti-gnome negativity)

A gnome is a creature of incredible cunning, creativity, and curiosity. They live in "bright burrows", speak to small critters, enjoy the company of other races but also treasure their own spaces, and absolutely love life. Rock gnomes are more robust in health, and generally more interested in invention and technical discovery, while Forest Gnomes are more nimble, and more interested in illusion and artistic expression, but in every Gnomish culture there are all manner of creatives, inventors, thinkers, and other enthusiasts of intellectual pursuits.

They are also one of my top three favorite races, and about in the middle of the pack according to DnDBeyond data from a couple years ago.

However, as much as I love them, I think they made a key mistake when designing the 5e Gnome.

For one, Advantage on all mental stat saves against magic is an enormous race feature. It consumes most of the space available to the race in terms of power. Meanwhile, they put the ability to speak to small animals into one subrace, which leaves many classic dnd gnomes in a weird place.

Sure, David the Gnome should be able to talk to foxes, but even looking at DnD 5e art, so should Gnomish inventors and alchemists!

Meanwhile, the Rock Gnome is just sort of...weaker...than the Forest Gnome or Deep Gnome? The Tinker's Tools proficiency can be strong, but only if your DM is willing to deal with invention in a game that doesn't have any actual rules for it. You can use magic item crafting rules as a baseline, and use DMG guidelines to determine balance by translating damage into spell levels, and then spell levels into item rarity, and use XTGE tables to figure out if a tinker item is more like a minor or major of a given rarity. However, that is a lot of work to ask of your DM.

If your DM isn't up for that, you have some toys, and your Forest Gnome cousin has a really useful cantrip and the ability to speak to small animals.

My current concept of a solution is simply to give all Gnomes critter speech, and see how it plays out. But maybe one could also add more useful tinkered inventions to the list, like repeating crossbows, or automated grappling hook devices, or nonmagical darkvision goggles, or something?

Conceptually, I think they've done a good job of presenting Gnomes in 5e, though I do find I have to draw upon 3.5 and 4e a lot for both Rock and Forest Gnomes quite a lot. My Forest Gnomes just are the 4e Gnome entirely, at this point, and Rock Gnomes are defined mostly by the 3.5 Races of Stone supplement.

I think that each Gnome subrace, much like elven subraces, have a stronger ID on their own than as a group. I don't put much stock in races needing to have a strong and distinct narrative niche, tbh, but I do think that Gnomes have that. I'll go more into in a second post in this thread, so that this one doesn't get too enormous.

I want to hear from other people who actually like Gnomes, and I'm not interested at all in why some folks don't like them tbh! Don't yuk others' yum.

Also, is anyone like me in having rarely if ever played Gnomes who are ridiculous?

I love playing Rock Gnomes because a) I like playing 5e wizards b) I like playing the eccentric, absent minded professor types. I do agree that inventor ability, while a cool idea, is close to useless. Perhaps more potent inventions available at higher levels?

My last Gnome Wizard, Dr. Irky Turgen, insisted (INSISTED!) that you always called him doctor and rocked an orange sherbert colored cardigan.

eta The answer to your last question is no. I’ve had a more “serious” no-nonsense Gnome Wizard that was an investigator, but I don’t shy away from silly.

Gnomish Cultures, and Their Places In The World

Now, first, a quick note about the idea of a race needing to be the "XYZ" race.

[sblock] IMHO, this is a nonsense concept. Orcs and Minotaurs and Goliaths and Firbolgs are all distinct, and them all being in dnd or in a specific dnd world has nothing at all to do with whether or not a new "big strong scary guy" race should be included, or a "monstrous looking and antagonistic to the pretty races" race. Just like the real world has several island dwelling fisher-gatherers, fantasy worlds can have as many or as few "small, quick, likeable" folk as a group wants. The world won't be any more or less good based on whether it has none, or several.

Minotaurs don't talk to plants and disguise themselves as elves or have a knack for druidry, Goliath don't have a cultural association with labyrinths or a bestial nature, orcs aren't part of The Mountain, etc, but even if orcs and minotaurs were more similar than they are, so what? How weird would it be if there were only one (1) race per broad archetype? How much divine intervention would be required to make that even happen? Look at the real world! Look at all the flying species in the world, and how many of them have literally no relation to one another beyond the relation of literally all lifeforms on Earth by way of the first organism. What nonsense would it be if there were only birds, because bats and flying insects are redundant? Likewise, if aarakokra are the only flying intelligent tool users in a world where a dozen or more intelligent tool users evolved and share the world, how is that more realistic or more interesting than their being 3-4 races who "share" the air space, compete for aeries and resources, etc?

I can't imagine finding the forest particularly interesting in dnd if they only "people" who come from there are elves.

That being said, Gnomes are not "silly dwarves" or "magic halflings" or "small elves" or any such thing. They're just Gnomes. [/sblock]

So, in brief, who are each of the Gnomish peoples?

All Gnomes are inquisitive, creative, and incredibly intelligent. For each subrace, this manifests in different ways.

Forest Gnomes are a bit more secluded than their Rock Gnome cousins, though not nearly so much as the Deep Gnomes. Still, they are quire friendly when they are interacting with other peoples, and make fast friends with the critters, elves, and friendly/good-spirited of the woods where they live. Their burrow-towns are more often root-burrows, similar to a series of root cellars, if a root cellar were converted into a home. They might also make home in tree hollows up in the limbs of a tree, in a forest with sufficiently large trees, but the classic image is much more David The Gnome.

Forest Gnomes also have a particular knack for illusion, and can speak with small and smaller animals, and one must consider how that impacts their culture and day-to-day lives.

They are unlike Wood Elves in several ways. For one, they are much smarter, not quite as graceful, and not as wise or intuitive. Beyond those things, though, they are not beings who live in harmony with the wood, but instead are beings who study and seek to truly understand, catalog, and categorize, the forest and all it's creatures and spirits.

They are just as inventive as Rock Gnomes, but much less technically inclined. Instead, Illusions are their domain, both in terms of creation, and in terms of defending their communities. Generally, unwelcome visitors will never find a Gnomish community, but where Rock gnomes use ingenious architecture, and Deep Gnomes hide their cities behind walls of solid stone, Forest Gnomes use simple illusions to hide what little is otherwise visible of their homes, so that to a passerby it seems simply that there is nothing but untouched forest all around them.

Similarly, when it becomes necessary to engage with an enemy, an army of Forest Gnomes and their animal and fey allies can appear out of every bush, root tangle, treeline, and pond in and around an enemy formation. By the time the invaders realize that these natural formations aren't real, it is much too late, and quiet soon returns to the wood.

Rock Gnomes and Deep Gnomes are cool too, but I will return to them another time!

I liked to play gnomes back in 3e days. They seemed to have a place in the world. Maybe it was their abilities and having them as a mage or something. 4e say the gnome become a monster and get its own lair rather than be a PC race at first. Maybe that lost everyone. I never went back. 5e has gnomes, but I do not recall anyone I played with who ran one in a game.

I do not think there would be a problem giving all of them critter speech. Not sure that would matter in who will play them.

Maybe Rock Gnomes could get a tool proficiency and the ability to create a set of tools they are proficient in.

I like gnomes and in my current 3.5 campaign we have a gnome fighter (played by my son) named Binkadink Dundernoggin. He rides into battle on his jackalope steed wielding his magic glaive and of the six PCs in our group, he is definitely the meat shield and tough guy. (And his 3-foot height isn't a problem due to his gnomish stilt-boots, which can raise him to almost human height as needed.)

He uses his ability to talk to burrowing mammals to communicate with his jackalope, and in fact learned that as a secondary language so he can speak in that fashion all day if needed.

He once used his inherent prestidigitation and ghost sound abilities over the course of many months to convince the rest of the party that they were being followed (and tormented) by invisible fairies, whose giggling laughter could often be heard just before a PC's hair turned bright pink, or neon green, or deep violet for an hour.

And, despite the 3.5 descriptions of gnomes, those in my campaign are closer to those in 1st and 2nd edition AD&D: generally with large, bulbous noses and ridiculous-sounding names.

(And now that I think about it, for a short time in a AD&D 2E campaign my other son ran a gnome thief named Joniik, AKA "Big Daddy J.")

Johnathan

Critter speak has the potential be be hugely beneficial, but the issues I have with it are it works best with spells like Conjure Animals (because they become much more effective scouts if you can talk to them at will). However, that gnome's stats don't line up well with a druid. I wish they had a bonus to Wisdom instead of Dex or Int.

In my current campaign, a rock gnome's clockwork toys will be more useful than speaking with small animals because it's an urban campaign.

I agree that what is useful is going to be campaign dependent, but what works for one campaign won't work for yours. At the same time, I don't think that all races need to be balanced as long as they have their own unique flavor.

Really, the thing with rock gnomes is that the 5e forrest gnome pretty much has the abilities of previous-edition rock gnomes, and 5e rock gnomes have inherited the tinker qualities of the Dragonlance gnomes to a minor extant (that didn't exist in the AD&D gnomes apart from that setting).

I've only seen a handful of gnomes in games that I've played or DM in (I've never played a gnome), but they've always been played seriously. I've got to say, that I fell in love with the depiction of gnomes in Paizo's Golarion setting, and have pretty much adopted that depiction (for the most part) for the settings that I run.

First, I don’t think Gnome Cunning takes up that much design space. It’s conditional advantage on one good save and two bad ones. IMO, that’s worth the same as a cantrip. It’s just that Gnome is the lightest base-race in the PHB. Most of the value is in the subraces.

Second, I think the clockwork toy is meant to have combat applicability, given that it specifies movement “on each of your turns”. This should at least distract any opponent with which it interacts, giving you or an ally advantage on attacks. Of course, the game leaves it up to the DM, but I’d say that in any game where the DM doesn’t rule that a rock gnome can reliably use its clockwork toy in combat, you’re better off playing a forest gnome.