What's with the Gnome Hate?

[Lackhand]

Please don't tell me why I play gnomes. Not only are you wrong, you're also presumptuous.


Unless your game play consists of flash cards made up of illustrations taken from the books, this is utterly irrelevant. The culture, flavor and play of gnomes is and remains different than those of halflings, especially since halflings have been gone since the end of 2E, and we've been given kender instead. If I wanted kender, I'd be using them.

I think he meant "In WoW", where his point is a lot more relevant.

 

[Desdichado]

Please don't tell me why I play gnomes. Not only are you wrong, you're also presumptuous.

He didn't. He was speaking generically.

In any case, I'm starting to dislike gnomes even more than before, because this thread seems to have settled into gnome fans telling us gnome-apathy people that everything we've experienced about gnomes is wrong.

It's all well and good if gnomes are integral to your game and people play them all the time, but don't presume that when I say gnomes have no definite place in D&D that they can call their own, and I don't know people who play them, trust me; that's been my experience.

 

[Lackhand]

Munging the order of your post so that mine may be read.

A little bit gypsy, a little bit rogue, a little bit bard, a little bit illusionist, a little bit tinkerer, a little bit circus-performer and a dash of fey. Nothing at all like Dwarves *or* Halflings.

Wait, no. That is Halflings, almost to a T. Er, H. Observe:

In the launch of the Scarred Lands setting, Gnomes weren't a part of it, but I wanted to include them, so I envisioned them as a nomadic people called the Rus, who were very much based on cheesy stereotypes of the Romani.

Cool! But, you'll find in the late 3.x artwork, they called these "Halflings". PHB II presents some of this in the affiliations -- just look at that illustration. It's a pretty nice illustration, too

Brightly-painted wagons (that doubled as boats),

garishly-clad entertainers and tinkers and handymen, wandering the roads (and rivers) of the lands. They would sometimes tell stories about their hidden kingdom, which is concealed by such powerful magics that they couldn't even lead others to it (or describe it's location) if they tried.

That's pretty cool, though Birthright halflings had it too -- but yeah, I do see where that's more Gnome than classical Halfling. However, I don't see why it distinctifies the two races, to coin a useless word.

Other times, they would speak of the wandering 'Invisible College' (inspired by the game Divine Right), a magically concealed cart containing an extradimensional space within it, where gnomes went to learn arcane magics, particularly those of illusion, studying from permanant illusions of books, as the real books themselves are stored away in their hidden lands.

Sure. Again, though, the Vistani elements tie it more to 4e Halflings than gnomes. The magic elements are more gnomic, but that's a bit cart-before-the-horse, since halflings could and have eaten the rest of it whole -- a little different, but not very different, and it's the same little-different above.

The wandering folk would work with animals (to pull their carts), including some surprising beasties, some of whom would join them for their nightly carnival performances, such as dancing bears or trick-performing great cats (although they would be more likely to use dire badgers or wolverines than either of the aforementioned, for traditional reasons).

A great use of gnome's speak-with-animals. Also, something I can see halflings or gnomes doing with equal frequency; points for awesome setting design, but none for niche protection.

That said -- I'm stealing that for my 4e halflings. Thanks!

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

1. Birthright and Darksun actually killed them off.

Interestingly, gnomes appeared in the GM's manual for Birthright on the monsters list. Some might view that as incredibly lax editing, as typical for 2e.

In our 3e Birthright game, our DM made them (and elves) able to take Force-using classes. The gnome jedi guardian dual-wielding a pair of +5 Vorpal Sithsteel Kukris was just mean.

Brad

 

[Set]

Wait, no. That is Halflings, almost to a T. Er, H.

I'm glad the ideas will be working for your 4e halflings, but I gotta admit, I never pictured them as bards, illusionists, tinkers, fey, etc. so the Halflings in my various games have been *radically* different than yours!

Never read Birthright, so I'm not real familiar with these Vistani Halflings, but hey, if it was good enough for that setting to do with Halflings, it's good enough for me to use for Gnomes.

 

[am181d]

My current campaign is "built for 4e." The backstory involves a human warrior who, about a century ago, unified humanity to wipe out the orcs and the goblins and the lizardfolk, etc. till they ran out of traditional monster races and started turning to traditional "friendly races."

The gnomes got squashed first. Eventually the elves and dwarves got the dragons involved, and the dragons basically took over, creating the Dragonborn to run day-to-day. (The Tieflings are a recent arrival from across the sea with mysterious goals of their own.)

Modern gnomes are paranoid, tweeked out little buggers, experts at hiding, and savage when backed into a corner. You may think it looks cute when it says "Rawr! I'm a monster!" but. it. will. kill. you. in. your. sleep.

 

[Intense_Interest]

I liked my own homebrew Gnomes, in which I swapped the "speak with burrowing mammal" ability to a "speak with air-breathing water animal" ability, and turned them into Short Samoan/Pacific Islander types that would stab you with a poisoned dagger if you looked at them wrong.

But yeah, I hate the core skitzo Gnomes. Glad they got booted from the PHB so that I could just spin my own Gnomes out of whole cloth instead of having to change to fit.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think he meant "In WoW", where his point is a lot more relevant.

No, it's still presumptuous. I've been a gnome player in multiple MMOs, and saying "people only play them because they're short and cute" is inaccurate and, again, presumptuous, unless there's been a poll of hundreds of thousands of players that somehow missed me and my friends.

He can talk about why HE plays gnomes or DOESN'T play gnomes. He does not have the ability to talk about why other people do or do not. No one does, on either side of the issue.

 

[Orius]

You have to understand, Dragonlance as a literary setting worked, but failed on almost all counts on the RPG side.

Tinker Gnomes could be fun, if you used the "mad gnomes" rule variant so they weren't stupid.

Kender can work, if it's not just a sorry excuse of a player trying to be irritating.

Gully Dwarves... ow, why did they give stats for gully dwarves?

Elves never played like they read.

Only dwarves had any real sense of being what the media represented them as, and frankly it was such a focused one-trick pony, it wasn't hard to do.

Yeah, the inventor gnome can work, just don't go full-on tinker with it. Tinker gnomes were just silly with their compulsive behaviors. It's ok if other races mistrust gnome tech, as long as said tech actually works or at least doesn't fail catastrophically like tinker gnome tech does.

And really, dwarves are nearly always the same no matter what D&D setting they're in. But then the typical dwarf doesn't need work, it's successful, it's popular and people actually want to play it.

 

[Mokona]

Isn't it a poorly kept secret that the AD&D 2nd edition complete books of gnomes and halflings sold very little compared with the separate books on elves and dwarves? The memory of poor sales was what motivated Wizards of the Coast to shoehorn gnomes into Races of Stone, a book about dwarves (and to even more blatantly force halflings into a book about forests/elves). Gnomes don't really have a stone connection, they live under hills (i.e. dirt) and hang out with burrowing animals. Few real animals burrow through stone.