D&D General Why Do People Hate Gnomes?

[EzekielRaiden]

Why not merge humans and elves into a "tallfolk" group as well?

Because I see meaningful and useful distinctions within the elf (and human) groupings to keep the two distinct.

Though the terms I used above are meant to be generic (so as to avoid, y'know, copyright issues and such), the idea is that Sun/Moon/Star/Void should map (in whichever order one prefers) to eladrin/wood elf/drow/shadar-kai.

There are also several other (non-human) "tall" races in my classification. Spoilered since it's technically off-topic.

Spoiler: Ezekiel's Ancestry Concept

Listed in alphabetical order, with humans listed separately/"zeroth" solely because, y'know, we're human.

0. Humans aka "wanderfolk" (Standard/"Earthbound," Dual-Blooded, Space/"Starbound")
1. Belua aka "beastfolk" (minotaur, tabaxi, satyr, lupin--and yes, they're VERY different phenotypes, they're still one ancestry, that's intended)
2. Dragonborn aka "drakefolk" (Imperial, Badlands/Desert, Jungle/Swamp, Coastal/Littoral)
3. Dwarves aka "stoutfolk" (Gold/mountain, Copper/forest, Tin/ocean, Iron/cavern)
4. Elves aka "feyfolk" (Sun/eladrin, Moon/wood elf, Star/drow, Void/shadar-kai)
5. Forgeborn or "metalfolk" (Warforged, Envoy, Archivist, Sower)
6. Halflings or "hinnfolk" (Lightfoot/forest, Stoutheart/hills, Cragstep/caves, Ghostwise/deeps)
7. Orcs or "wildfolk" (Orc, goblin, hobgoblin, bugbear--again, embracing wider phenotypic variation intentionally)
8. Undead or "soulfolk" (vampire, ghost, revenant, skeleton)
There's also an optional 9th Planeborn or "pithfolk," which would be where you'd put a non-hybrid version of things like genasi, tieflings, aasimar, etc., beings that are more distinctly connected to non-Prime Material planes, literally made of the "pith" or "stuff" of those distant places.

More or less, my argument is that both gnomes and halflings come across as somewhat incomplete. By combining the two together, you can get a whole more viable than the sum of its parts. This is not true of humans and elves; instead, humans and elves are almost too full, potentially inviting division into smaller subsets, though I prefer what I have above.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Why not merge humans and elves into a "tallfolk" group as well?

Throw in Orcs for good measure, the three are obviously some sort of ring species.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The simple answer is that in pop-culture, gnomes are, and have been, for decades, figures of fun (primarily via garden gnomes, but also just pretty much any time a "gnome" appears), with no real examples of more "serious" or "sexy" gnomes until, ironically, D&D via Critical Role and the like. Even in D&D gnomes have often been a joke, as with Tinker gnomes, a tradition continued in many D&D-inspired RPGs like World of Warcraft, where gnomes continue to be a joke (at least kind of a funny one at times).

That's all it comes down to. Gnomes are a joke, literally.

This is differentiated from Halflings/Hobbits who has two of the most influential and impactful fantasy stories absolutely centered around them, so have a ton of "serious" examples, and who inspired at least a moderate number of other "short people" in fantasy, who are also taken more seriously than gnomes. Even in a couple of cases where something quite close to a D&D gnome (i.e. closer to that than a dwarf or a hobbit) appears, they have different names and avoid gnome "tropes" like little floppy hats or cute little white beards.

D&D's own attempts to give gnomes a more defined place have also not helped, frankly, by just making things awkward (the particular tendency to try and make at least one subspecies of gnomes into scientists or engineers just makes them a poor fit for some settings). Ironically 4E was kind of the least-worst of these attempts.

I think if 3E had added kobolds to the PHB, then 4E had kept kobolds but left gnomes out of the PHB, and 5E had failed to put them back in, nobody would even really be discussing the issue outside the groggiest of grogs (5E wouldn't have failed to though, because 5E's initial target was very much to include the groggiest of grogs).

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

In the 2024, just allow the dwarves and elves to be small or medium and you've covered 90% of the gnomes' raison d'être.

and its not like ''curious and jokester'' is a pertinent trait for a whole race, its a personality trait.

Maybe add a feat for Dwarves for ''Hoard Magic'' to conceal and lock treasures and doors (maybe Non-detection, and Arcane Lock/ Knock as rituals?) or something close to the Eberron dwarven dragonmark.

And maybe a feat to speak to forest beast (elves) or burrowing beast or mountain birds (dwarves).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I definitely do not hate them, I quite like them... or at least I like some iterations of them. But like it has been said in this and the other gnome thread, their identity is hella muddy.

I would merge them with halflings, but then again, I would merge a ton of other D&D species too. I would prefer fewer species that were not so thematically thin. (Hell, in my current setting I effectively merged halflings, gnomes... and elves!)

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

Anyway, I would assume it's because gnomes don't really have a niche of their own. They're short and kinda earthy, like halflings. They're magical and whimsical, like elves. They're miners and crafters, like dwarfs. They don't really have anything unique to them.

This.
On the DM side of the table (where I usually sit) I prefer to have gnomes be the dwarves-who-can-use-arcane-magic. They're biologically the same species as dwarves - gnome parents can have dwarven children and vice versa - but a different one for magic purposes. And dwarves who take a level in an arcane-casting class transform into gnomes. So instead of dwarf kingdoms and gnome communities, there are dwarf/gnome kingdoms and communities.

I've also combined the languages: Dwarven is Gnomish spoken with a Dwarven accent, and Gnomish is Dwarven spoken with a Gnomish accent. Whether you speak Dwarven or Gnomish depends more on which dwarf/gnome kingdom you came from, rather than on whether you're a dwarf or a gnome yourself.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

(Hell, in my current setting I effectively merged halflings, gnomes... and elves!)

This always seemed like a fairly natural thing to do, to me. Particularly gnomes and elves make sense as just elf-y fey beings who might come in a variety of sizes and appearances (perhaps including semi-animalistic ones too).

D&D often has this very Tolkien-derived thing where it's like "X is the kingdom of the Elves, Y is the kingdom of the Dwarves, Z is the lands of the Halflings" and so on, which I feel is a bit... retro... if I was designing a new setting, whilst an area might well be "majority [race]", I think an awful lot of cultures wouldn't be primarily monoracial, especially if the races had been living side-by-side for millennia, as is typically the case in D&D-esque fantasy. Only isolationist/nationalist/exclusionist societies would be.

 

[Seramus]

Sorry to interrupt, but you're just talking about a dwarf with levels of wizard, or druid, or rogue. This is not enough of a case to create an entire character race off of. If you simply cannot help yourself, if you absolutely cannot live without gnomes in your game for some reason, be honest with yourself and make them a subclass of dwarf. Because they're dwarves.

MY gnomes are tiny and wear pointy red hats!

 

[Professor Murder]

In one of my campaigns to explain Gnomes I had that just at one point they appeared and integrated into nearby elf (Forest Gnome) and Dwarf (Rock Gnome) communities, taking on their culture for the most part. It was revealed later that these gnomes were descendants of dissident Deep Gnomes, having fled to the surface, with Deep Gnomes having been the highly advanced villain nation for the tail end of the campaign.

 

[Professor Murder]

When I started playing D&D back in the 1980s, gnomes were monsters: they were listed in the Monsters section of the red box rulebook, and they were described as greedy, pointy-nosed dwarves that only cared about money. So that was my first, and lasting impression of gnomes...long before there was a such thing as a 'tinker' or an 'artificer.' Gnomes were cannon-fodder, moneygrubbing little dwarves that only wanted to rob or cheat you.

Hot yikes on that description.