okay but can that be used in a less living comic relief way?
those feel like desperate things to me, what would the distilled version be, the prime gnome-coded being the ur gnome if none presently exists? What would it logically be like?
it is more they can feel superfluous without something else, hence why we have a million things which are big fight type and why elves keep eating up all the mystical slots.
it is more they are many disparate things without a clear guiding thread, there is a clear point where an elf would stop being an elf or something becomes elf in spirit, same with dwarves but nothing is gnome-coded.
honestly if I had existed then I would have liked to play everything about the cleric save the slight issue that it is religious and I can't role play faith in anything
the problem with gnomes is they do not do anything in a setting they feel grafted on, a people with minimal past, no clear goals of the future and are mostly played as a joke.
they need refinement and ideally to be more clearly themselves and not a halfling with a beard or a short magic dwarf
it is more a theoretical.
honestly the fact the barbarian and the ranger overlap is an issue. Then again what the ranger is or should be is an endless argument