D&D General Why Do People Hate Gnomes?

[CleverNickName]

Hot yikes on that description.

I know right?

Like I said, it left a long-lasting impression. I still don't use gnomes to this day, on either side of the screen.

 

[DEFCON 1]

try looking into mass effect asari for how elves might take to adventuring.

The Asari from Mass Effect were just blue-skinned bisexual human women with a different body shape. Same with all the other "races" in Mass Effect-- humans in different rubber masks. You could swap out any of those racial avatars for human ones but keep the personalities, actions, and communication styles exactly the same and there would be very few times when it would seem weird.

 

[Agametorememberbooks]

In the volume 2 supplement we currently have in edits, there’s an alliance of gnomes that lashed out militarily against all the other races in the region. The premise of the encounter/adventure being that someone has come forward to atone for why it all went down. So there are definitely different ways to portray gnomes.

It’s one of the reasons I loved Dark Sun. Think halflings are lovable Tolkien-happy-go-lucky…how about they were ambitious mages who broke the world!!

 

[Vaalingrade]

look I am not old enough for me to fully get this joke, I know they made those vampire games which had media spin-offs a game and a VHS show both of which I believe my mother bought.
so can you explain how they are diet xenofiction?

WW's bread and butter was the World of Darkness, a setting popuated by a shadow world of monsters where the mechanics usually had an inner monster/conflict deal that took over if you did certain things.

 

[Mind of tempest]

The Asari from Mass Effect were just blue-skinned bisexual human women with a different body shape. Same with all the other "races" in Mass Effect-- humans in different rubber masks. You could swap out any of those racial avatars for human ones but keep the personalities, actions, and communication styles exactly the same and there would be very few times when it would seem weird.

building the tallest tower begins with the placement of a single stone, no one made elves both playable and alien in one move it was a suggestion of starting point for one area of the elf experience.

In the volume 2 supplement we currently have in edits, there’s an alliance of gnomes that lashed out militarily against all the other races in the region. The premise of the encounter/adventure being that someone has come forward to atone for why it all went down. So there are definitely different ways to portray gnomes.

It’s one of the reasons I loved Dark Sun. Think halflings are lovable Tolkien-happy-go-lucky…how about they were ambitious mages who broke the world!!

honestly, I hate darksun halflings they are just an insult to both ambitus mages and people eating forest dwellers both of which I consider far better than halflings, have I ever explained how much I just hate halflings?

WW's bread and butter was the World of Darkness, a setting popuated by a shadow world of monsters where the mechanics usually had an inner monster/conflict deal that took over if you did certain things.

but that is about resiting becoming the other not being the other which is what I crave to play as, it is more personal horror than xenofiction let alone diet xenofiction.

 

[Celebrim]

The Asari from Mass Effect were just blue-skinned bisexual human women with a different body shape.

No they were alien xenomorphs with a more consensual and insidious means of replication. They just wanted you to think they were blue-skinned bisexual human women. That's part of what makes them so scary.

 

[billd91]

Gnomes don't occupy any space. They don't have a purpose or a niche or a worthwhile role. It isn't that they "aren't Tolkien" (I mean, really?) it's that they aren't anything. They have spent multiple editions trying to give gnomes an identity, from tricksters to tinkers, and none of it has taken.

That's part of the challenge with trying different identities - try too many and you dilute the impression you're making. Depending on the edition/setting you started with, what you know about gnomes may differ from what the player next to you at the table knows.
And that's a potential issue for more than just gnomes.

 

[Celebrim]

Every single race in D&D is just a "stereotyped human".

I disagree but I agree with those that say that most participants - including the GMs - are unable to inhabit alien things or even imagine them, and they usually have no desire to anyway. They generally play a race for the bonuses and, to be frank since I have no clearer way to explain myself at this time, for sexual self-identification reasons. They want to play something that they perceive as exotic and desirable and "cool" - whether elf or tiefling or goliath or whatever they think gives them their character that allure. This is usually associated with the race having a stereotypical body shape that is more like the human ideal than the human ideal, as well as being perceived as graceful, feral, wild, and dangerous.

But this isn't to say that the D&D races aren't alien if you think about it, or that they can't be really alien, it's just that there is a cost to making them alien which is the more alien you make them the less well your players will be able to play them. I do try to make my D&D races something sufficiently biologically distinct that they aren't just stereotyped humans but I don't really ever have my players ever grok the races. For this reason, I tend to use mechanics that strongly encourage a human-centric party, just because I tend to find human PC's better imagined and better role-played than non-human PCs.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I don’t hate gnomes in and of themselves, but unlike most people my experiences with gnomes in D&D tends to leave the impression that they are grouchy, egotistical, pompous, and generally just give off an heir of being better then everyone else that is so strong that it makes dwarves and elves look humble and likable by comparison.

All while constantly needing to be rescued by the adventuring group because they either got in over their heads, or because they are actually incapable of protecting themselves. And yet when you save them, they still act like they are better then you.

Now obviously this isn’t how many people play gnomes in their games but this has happened in a few groups I’ve played with and with enough frequency that it makes me wary of gnomes appearing in games.

When I decided to make my own homebrew world, I decided to take a look a some of the main races and consider how they would be represented in the world, especially since humans are not a main race on my world (they are considered outsiders as all humans on Salvera originate from other material planes). Gnomes are one of the races I thought a lot about and I’m pretty happy with my interpretation for my world, even if it’s a bit unoriginal.

Basically, I don’t hate gnomes but my experiences with them did them no favors.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Tinkerer, Illusionists and pranksters are what I leap to mentally when I first think of a gnome. They do vary a good deal from setting to setting of course. Part of the issue may be that they have varied too much from edition to edition (and other races have more of a through line: honestly though I would need to read all the entries from each edition back to back to really see if that is the case or not). If someone could past in iterations from the core books in different editions I think that would go a long way towards making this conversion more concrete (as it seems there is a vagueness in the discussion now)

I tend to prefer forest gnomes over rock gnomes, simply because I feel rock gnomes are a bit too tightly wound to the artificer class and that is not something I particularly love in my fantasy.

Which makes the gnomes the small foresty race, with a tendency towards illusions snd speaking to animals.

It tends to fill this niche better than elves, who have so many subraces they fill all niches. Even wood elves don’t really fill the shy, secretive forestfolk niche, as they get caught up in the (1) “like humans, but better” niche; and the (2) “elven rangers put any arrow in your eye before you are even aware of them” niche.