Question for DL fans about tinker gnomes

[jonesy]

I don't recall whether the current edition mentions these, but there are also the so called mad gnomes whose inventions work too perfectly and who are thus considered unfortunate by the normal gnomes. This because something perfect can't be improved upon and so their inventions are "dead ends".

 

[der_kluge]

I HATE what Dragonlance did to Gnomes.

Destroyed them forever, it did.

 

[Dragonhelm]

If not I think I saw Dragonhelm around here...somewhere...

Where?

Well I'm not Cam Banks, but I once played him on TV. I was fired because they said my accent was too believable.

I'll try to answer this the best that I can.

It's commonly depicted that tinker gnomes' inventions never work right.

How is that even possible?

How can the gnomes do even the most basic things-wash their clothes, cook their food, get from one place to another-if they insist on building inventions to do it, and then those inventions never work right?

How have the tinker gnomes managed to survive as a society, or get anything at all done if every single project they build turns into a disaster?

How can they produce anything of value at all, for either themselves, their neighbors, or Krynn in general, if they have never managed to get a single one of their projects to work properly?

How have they managed to survive without starving to death, dying of plague caused by a lack of sanitation, or simply blowing up Mount Nevermind?

I can't understand tinker gnomes.

How can they do anything of use, both in a metagame sense and from an in-world perpective, if their inventions are all but guaranteed to royally screw up?

It isn't that their inventions never work right. It's that their inventions are overly-complex. Gnomes believe that if one pulley will do a job, imagine how much better the job could be done with twenty pulleys!

"Small, simple machines are made by small, simple minds."
-Gnome proverb

Gnomes believe that bigger is better. They will invent something, and even if it works, they'll try to perfect it ad infinitum. Gnomes embrace failure. If an invention doesn't work, then gnomes can learn from that to make improvements, or to open up a new field of research.

Not every invention explodes. Sometimes, they have added side effects. For example, a vegetable picker might also pick up small animals. A clothes washer might wash clothes, but it may also wear the gnome wearing them! The autognomes from Spelljammer are programmed to protect babies. Problem is, they protect all babies - even the dragon babies. And so on and so forth.

Point is, gnome inventions work. Gnomes just don't know when to quit fiddling with them. This, in turn, causes malfunctions. It does produce chaos in gnomish society at times, but they do have the basics with which to function. It's just when they try to advance to the next technological level that they run into problems.

Hope that makes sense.

I don't recall whether the current edition mentions these, but there are also the so called mad gnomes whose inventions work too perfectly and who are thus considered unfortunate by the normal gnomes. This because something perfect can't be improved upon and so their inventions are "dead ends".

Mad gnomes, or "thinker gnomes," are oddities in gnome society. Rather than building large inventions, they build smaller ones that tend not to have any gnomish quirks.

I HATE what Dragonlance did to Gnomes.

Destroyed them forever, it did.

I disagree, but that's a topic for another thread.

 

[TheYeti1775]

The words of danger in all of Mt Nevermind......

O OH and OOPS

 

[jonesy]

I HATE what Dragonlance did to Gnomes.

Destroyed them forever, it did.

Now hang on a minute.

Wasn't the first mention of Dragonlance tinker gnomes in Dragons of Winter Night, the novel, in 1985?

Which is the same year that Mystara got it's first mention of tinkering gnomes as well, in CM4 Earthshaker!

Doesn't that then mean that Mystara had them in the game first (or am I forgetting some source of DL gaming where they appeared)?

As for current editions, it's not the fault of Dragonlance that the base rules gnomes thought the DL gnomes were such awesome role models. After all, Dragonlance gnomes have been the same from the very beginning.

 

[Nightfall]

Dragonhelm,

Thanks! And yes you might not be Cam Banks, but you'll do in a pinch.

*agrees with Dragonhelm that tinker gnomes and their usefulness/destruction of gnomish culture isn't relevant to this thread* It might be IF Dragonhelm felt it was. But I doubt it.

 

[Razz]

I always though tinker gnomes were cursed to have blunders often, and only rarely will they create an invention that works?

Weren't they cursed?

 

[Vocenoctum]

I always though tinker gnomes were cursed to have blunders often, and only rarely will they create an invention that works?

Weren't they cursed?

There curse is that they keep working at it, even if they got something right, they'd try again to make it better.


But, my idea of tinker gnomes is simpler. They have their lifequest, and that is what their energy is focused on. They will continually try to perfect their chosen invention, though that is an unattainable goal.

BUT, other stuff they make works fine. "Unimportant" stuff is simply made and exists, it's not focused on and "enhanced". Take for example cogs. There are lots of cogs made in Mt Nevermind, and they're perfectly normal... unless it's some gnomes lifequest to make a better cog, then his cogs are messed up in the name of perfection.


The basics of life are easily obtained, and I'm sure the gnomes have a better idea of mass production than anyone else on Krynn, it's just that those items are unimportant to them.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Depends. The default DLA depiction of gnomes are minoi, the tinker gnomes that came from far away, chasing the grey gem. A small subset (0.01%) of tinker gnomes become "mad gnomes" each year, and lose that instinctive desire to make things more complicated than necessary.

The Taladas box set (Time of Dragons) revamps the mad gnomes to be gnomoi, which are the largest group of Taladian gnomes. Minoi are considered to be slightly autistic and need some extra attention to keep from getting into trouble. Minoi consider the gnomoi to be stuffy and a little boring but have their hearts in the right place.

In this incarnation, a large fleet of minoi went haring off to chase the graygem, with no or few, gnimoi. After several generations, the minoi genes became dominant but there is enough recessive gnomoi traits that about 1% of the middle aged population are "mad."

That 1% in Ansalon is enough to latch onto the good ideas and applications. If you assume the most Darwin Award ready minoi are culled out through stupidity during puberty, this makes the Mt. Nevermind somewhat risky but survivable.

 

[boerngrim]

Speaking of tinker gnomes in spelljammer. In an old spelljammer campaign I played in one of the PC's tinker gnome made all kinds of weird gizmos that improved our ship, but looked odd. We wanted to make the ship's hull stand up better to combat so the tinker gnome attached tin can lids to the hull and it inproved the ships ac. Don't ask me where the tin cans came from, but she also built a hamster powered automatic can opener to get the lids.
She made our ship go faster by bolting a hamster wheel to the helm. She painted white dots on black sheets and sewed them together to make a "cloaking" device. It worked, we just couldn't see out of the ship while the gnomish cloak was engaged....
It was weird, but fun.