What's with the Gnome Hate?

[Desdichado]

Tinker gnomes are widely hated.

Regular gnomes are widely met with apathy.

I just don't have any use for them whatsoever. They play no obvious role in any campaign setting. I've yet to see a setting where they don't feel shoe-horned in just because the PHB has them, so they've gotta be there somewhere.

I've seen a lot more halfling PCs than gnome PCs.

Your arguments in the OP are all about stats too, which is part of the problem. The only time I have seen gnome PC's was from people who played them for the stats. They didn't play the PC's particularly "gnomish" partly because, who in the world knows that that means, and partly because obviously they just didn't care. Gnomes were halflings with better CON, and therefore made better wizards and sorcerers statistics wise.

 

[Steely Dan]

I've seen a lot more halfling PCs than gnome PCs.

Funnily enough, no one in my 20+ years that I have gamed with has ever wanted to play a stunted race (dwarf, gnome or halfling), that of course is just my experience, I know tons of people love their dwarves and what not.

 

[Desdichado]

Funnily enough, no one in my 20+ years that I have gamed with has ever wanted to play a stunted race (dwarf, gnome or Halfling), that of course is just my experience, I know tons of people love their dwarves and what not.

Can I join your group?

 

[Steely Dan]

Can I join your group?

Absolutely, we want a 4th player – I run a fortnightly Planescape campaign, that we have just converted fully to 4th Ed, so if you live in the greater London (UK) area, or near enough to get to London every couple of weeks, you are more than welcome to join.

 

[Wormwood]

In all my time playing D&D, I've seen a total of two* gnome PCs.

And that's double the number I've seen.

Of course, he was played purely for comedy relief ("uncle Bignose" being his name. Great player, dumb character.)

 

[Desdichado]

Absolutely, we want a 4th player – I run a fortnightly Planescape campaign, that we have just converted fully to 4th Ed, so if you live in the greater London (UK) area, or near enough to get to London every couple of weeks, you are more than welcome to join.

Huh. That's a bit of a commute for me (I live in Detroit. Detroit-ish, anyway.) I'll have to think about it.

 

[Cadfan]

I don't like gnomes because they're pointless. They're like halflings, except more lame. I might consider liking gnomes in the future, if they ever obtain a purpose or a hook or something to make me think they're anything other than magical halflings.

I'd even accept "tinker gnome" as an archetype. I don't care what the archetype IS, they just need to HAVE one.

 

[Barastrondo]

As a thought experiment, I tried mucking around with core races to make them more than just one-note stereotypes; figuring out how to make multiple halfling cultures that felt different, giving them effectively almost as much versatility as humanity. I found that sufficiently versatile halflings and dwarves made gnomes a redundancy: there was no gnome concept that couldn't be done with a halfling or dwarf concept, save the one reliant on "gnome" as a concept.

Now, the more limited your baseline assumptions for the scope of a fantasy world, the more niche protection you get. For example, when we worked on Relics & Rituals: Excalibur and its Olympus sister volume, races fit into niches rather neatly because you weren't trying to make the setting truly multicultural. If everyone's a riff off of Greek myth, then there's definitely room for a race of philosopher-magicians that aren't the same thing as the more far-roaming, adventurer-trickster, beloved-of-Hermes halflings. But if you're going for a big multicultural world with multiple races who have multiple cultures, gnomes can get a bit too samey.

Of course, that's mainly theory. Someone who had the best D&D game of their life next to someone playing a gnome well would probably see gnomes as essential, and someone who had to endure the gnome-as-vehicle-to-make-bad-geek-jokes-all-night model would feel exactly the opposite. And there's not much theory can do about that.

 

[Steely Dan]

Huh. That's a bit of a commute for me (I live in Detroit. Detroit-ish, anyway.) I'll have to think about it.

That's an odd coincidence, my step-uncle lives there…maybe one day our paths will cross.

 

[taliesin15]

(responding to Sylrae's original post)
I've been gaming since the late 70s and seen numerous players use both halflings and gnomes successfully. In a campaign that concluded a year ago, one player was running a Halfling Druid, which was highly unusual to me, but I think he did a splendid job.

For me, this is a bit like the hating Elves thread. I just have never encountered it outside of ENWorld. I have seen hating Elves and Gnomes being played poorly, or say given a dorky name or something like that, but it has nothing inherent to do with the races.

I still don't understand the "logic" behind 3.5's Gnome favored class as Bard. All the other core races are more logical for that class save Half-Orc and Dwarf. Why not Illusionist as Gary Gygax and his associates designed it? The 1st edition Gnome paradigm is the most original race template, or, put another way, the only one that doesn't blatantly rip off Lord of the Rings. Well, it does rip off Western European fairy tales and suchlike, but that's way OK for me. Drawing from age old myths means you're using something that has inherent staying power, and not something that's going to obsolete in 4-5 years when the NEXT edition of D&D comes out, superseding the one that's only been out for a few weeks.