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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4375116" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think you're on the right path, but it's a little simpler. The loss of the gnomes in 4e came from their encouragement of 3e's wearing away at the archetypes that they did well in. I mentioned that halflings effectively "stole" the gnomes' schtick in looking for their own post-Tolkein shtick. But there's also the lack of class association (which 3.5 was an attempt to remedy, though it didn't do it well): Halflings = Rogues. Because gnomes didn't have an overt link to druids (which would have suited them well, but might not have been 'canon' enough) or wizards (because Elves had that) or Illusionists (because those didn't really exist in any major way), all of which would have given them good archetypes, they lost more archetypal status.Being relegated to the bard was an attempt to fix that, because the Bard was the closest thing 3e had to a "trickster." It made for a pretty awful trickster in most cases, though, not to mention its status as the weak class and a class that was, in its own way, searching for a schtick (am I a song-mage? am I a jack-of-all trades? am I a charm/illusion mage? what the hell am I?)4e was out on the illusions, out on the druids, had re-crafted the elf so that wizard made some sense, and continued the halfling poaching of the trickster archetype. So the reason that the gnomes became the red-headed stepchild was because of a consistent pattern of sidelining the trickster archetype in 3.5, except for where a halfling could pull it off, leading to a gnome-less 4e under the (rather mis-lead) proposition that they lacked a schtick.They didn't, really. They had one. It just wasn't an important one in most ways for 4e, and it was one that halflings could half-fill when it was important (halflings = rogues! rogues = tricksters!). Gnome fans, of course, never had this problem, because they maintained the gnomes as a bastion for certain archetypes (mostly the trickster archetype, but also the nature-spirit archetype, the loremaster archetype, etc.). But obviously no one on the 4e team was much of a gnome fan. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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