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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4374416" data-attributes="member: 3820">The point that I'm trying to make is that to look at gnomes from a neutral enough standpoint to actually understand why people might not care for them, you have to be open to the idea of games that are not Eurocentric, players that didn't start in 1979, and the like. When you asked me what I thought of as a race associated with illusions and I didn't respond with "gnome," what I'm saying is that gnomes are not strongly associated enough with illusions in my head that I feel they're a vital component of the fantasy experience. In that same level, I also don't think that "a race associated with illusions" is a vital component of the fantasy experience; when you do see them, they tend to be villains anyway, like L. Frank Baum's Phanfasms. This is going to be true of other people.See, that's exactly it. What classes were available for PCs in 1st edition does not matter. Myth and folklore doesn't have an Illusionist class, either; it has a lot of very hazily defined magicians, and "enchanters" or "transmuters" are probably far more common than "illusionists." There are plenty of players that don't think an illusionist is a core part of the D&D experience, so saying that gnomes have a vital role because they're illusionists isn't a winning argument there. It doesn't have to ignore them completely. It just has to attach importance to them below a certain threshold. Let's say that the minimum amount of "care" to want to play a race or have a race in your campaign world is 10 units. People can be aware of gnomes, both in video games and in folklore, and still have from 1-9 units of "care." It's faintly insulting to assume that someone is ignorant or poorly educated on a topic if they don't like it as much as you do. (For the record, my favorite mythic gnomes are Paracelsian.)Not to that level of detail. The point is, though, that making the argument that the game invents a very specific description for a race does not necessarily make that race vital to a player.But if people don't see the basic need for a race associated with Illusion, particularly capital-I, then the argument that gnomes fit that particular niche is not particularly compelling. It doesn't matter that the race exists in folklore. If you want to actually understand why people don't like gnomes, you should think about what people are looking for in a race, particularly if they don't already have longstanding opinions about the good old days of AD&D 1st edition. If you want to tell people who don't like gnomes why they're wrong, well, you certainly can, but you're not going to get very far with that.</blockquote>

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