THREE elven races, plus half-elves ... but they say gnomes have no niche?!

[KingCrab]

I wouldn't care if they removed all elves from 4e, except for maybe drow. Drow can make some fun villains.

 

[Arkhandus]

And yet, it could just be a single race of elves that ranges from magical-kingdom-builders to nature-loving-rural-folk, just like humans range beyond just one particular personality/talent across the entire race..... Elves could just be the general, inherantly-magical-and-good-with-spells race. But instead they need multiple kinds of elf.

Gnomes could just as easily fit different niches, since there are different kinds of gnome in different settings. Even so, the smart, clever, and mischevious gnome archetype is fairly universal (except for Dark Sun, what with its lack of gnomes, but that's cuz it's supposed to be a grimmer setting).

Whether they ply their wits as inventors, wizards, tricksters, sages, keepers-of-secrets, or manipulators, depends only on the setting. They could still be the iconic knowledge-hoarding race, with racial talents for deceptive magic, trickery, and information gathering.

Heck, if the designers wanted to, they could make elves the magic-race and gnomes the earthy nature-lover race. Or the reverse. They could play up the creepy troll-like aspects of gnomes from folklore if they wanted to. Just like elves, gnomes have a few different mythological/folklore/fantasy-fiction origins.

 

[Gloombunny]

Elves and eladrin make sense as separate races. Half-elves suck, no argument there.

I think it's odd to say that gnomes were kicked to the MM to make room for eladrin. Maybe it was to make room for tieflings, or dragonborn. Or maybe they decided that the two small races weren't distinct enough, and gnomes got kicked to make room for halflings.

I'm pretty sure that that last had at least something to do with the decision. I don't like it; gnomes may have different identities in different products, but at least they had identities. Halflings are just bite-size humans. :/

 

[FireLance]

I think the cause of the problem is twofold: one, elves carry too much baggage for one race, and two, the conceptual space for gnomes overlaps with the three "main" non-human races in D&D.

In the case of the elves, they have historically been both the "nature" race and the "magic" race. Each of these is a strong enough concept to base an entire racial option around, and the plethora of elven subraces (wild/wood/high/grey/etc.) in the past seem to me to have been attempts to provide various combinations of "nature"-ness and "magic"-ness for players to select from. I guess what WotC has done in 4e is to finally split the nature elves from the magic elves and make them two separate races. Now, I personally think that shifters (from Eberron) make a much better "nature" race, and if I had the option, I would simply make elves the "magic" race and use shifters to fill the "nature" race niche, but I think that might be an unpopular move with fans of "nature" elves. As for half-elves (the "between two worlds" racial niche), given the various options to crossbreed with, I think that most people find elves more palatable than dwarves, halflings, or orcs.

Gnomes suffer from being the second-class race in a variety of niches. They are a "nature" race (forest gnomes) and a "magic" race (strong illusionists), but elves fill those niches more strongly. They are an underground mining race, but most gamers think of dwarves first. Even in their strongest niche, that of the small, "trickster" race, they face competition from halflings. I suppose the 4e designers could have created design space for gnomes by giving them either the "nature" race or the "magic" race niche, and using elves for the other, but I think that either of those options would have been even more unpopular than leaving gnomes out.

 

[Driddle]

After reading the background and explanation for the elven races/cultures, it makes the gnome dismissal text seem horrendously justified by comparison.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Does it matter whether they have a niche? Surely popularity is all that's important. After all the tirapheg has a strong niche as the weirdest creature in D&D (and that's saying something), but that doesn't mean they should be a PC race.

 

[Doug McCrae]

the smart, clever, and mischevious gnome archetype is fairly universal

Have they ever had an int bonus? They don't in 1e or 3.5. I agree they are mischievous but so are halflings.

 

[Gort]

Secondly, the Eladrin and Elves DO fill two very seperate niches. The Eladrin are the high and mighty, magicial kingdom kind of elves and the Elves are the tree hugging, back to the nature kind of elves.

To be honest, you don't need two seperate races to do that. Same way as you can have a barbaric human culture and a technological "knightly" human culture, without needing to make two human races.

I think WotC just like elves too much.

 

[Reaper Steve]

Put a pointy red hat on your 4E halfling... *p00f!* GNOME!

Am I being silly? Yeah.
Would this totally work? Absolutely. It would be super-easy to call the 4E halfling a Gnome in your world, just change the name and as much of the fluff as you feel necessary.

 

[Insight]

Another problem we have with gnomes is that they are poorly defined as <this> in literature. In some mythologies, beings called gnomes are giants, in some, they are small. In some, they are faerie creatures, in some, they are not.

It's easy enough to decide, "You know what, we really screwed the pooch with the 3.x gnome. It was ill-defined and not very popular. We need to figure out what the offficial D&D gnome is going to be before we start allowing PCs to make them."