D&D General Why Do People Hate Gnomes?

[Bedrockgames]

With no real pop cultural focus and identity, they're just a big ball of nothing.

Things don't have to exist in mainstream pop culture to be relevant in an RPG though. I think as long as there is a resonant concept or the race serves as a springboard for workable character concepts. Someone mentioned the Jackson LotR, and for me that movie is not a gaming touchstone (it came around much later in my gaming experience, so I tend to be more shaped by movies and books from the mid-90s to the 70s and 60s). Also I don't find Legolas or Gimli as depicted in that film as especially nuanced or interesting (they very much lean into the humor that people complain about with gnomes). And if humor is an issue, the way I see most gamers play dwarves is basically as a joke (beards! Beer! Grrrrr!). Dwarves are basically grumpy grandpas in most campaigns or cartoonishly masculine. Gnomes are more on the eccentric grandpa side of things (and more academic too: I could see a host of gnome characters inspired by famous scholars or writers from the past for instance). Something being humorous isn't automatically bad though. Part of the reason people like dwarves is they enjoy Beer! Beards! etc.

Tinkerer, Illusionists and pranksters are what I leap to mentally when I first think of a gnome. They do vary a good deal from setting to setting of course. Part of the issue may be that they have varied too much from edition to edition (and other races have more of a through line: honestly though I would need to read all the entries from each edition back to back to really see if that is the case or not). If someone could past in iterations from the core books in different editions I think that would go a long way towards making this conversion more concrete (as it seems there is a vagueness in the discussion now)

 

[Reynard]

Because even though they will vehemently deny it they are caught in the Western Tolkienic Hegemony of Elf-Human-Dwarf-Hobbit from which the only allowable variations are Furry or Monsters.

Gnomes fit an idealised liminal space of not-Tolkien, not-Monster which their minds can not comprehend.

That said even I who loves gnomes think they are easy targets for jokes…

There isn't an eyeroll emoji big enough to respond to this sentiment.

Gnomes don't occupy any space. They don't have a purpose or a niche or a worthwhile role. It isn't that they "aren't Tolkien" (I mean, really?) it's that they aren't anything. They have spent multiple editions trying to give gnomes an identity, from tricksters to tinkers, and none of it has taken.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I am reminded of an old conversation on the Candlekeep Forums. It was something like:
"Someone wishes all races to transform into Elves. What makes them an Elf?"

They all get a subrace designed to let you play any class without conflict with your racial abilities?

 

[Bedrockgames]

But ultimately, when some rando on the street thinks about elves, they'll think about point-eared archers wearing leaf-brooches and art deco embroidery on their green tunics and brown boots. And your elves will be a "So elves -but-" because you're working off that baseline and making changes.

I don't know that 'a rando in the street' should be our metric for what demihumans are or ought to be though

 

[Vaalingrade]

Things don't have to exist in mainstream pop culture to be relevant in an RPG though. I think as long as there is a resonant concept or the race serves as a springboard for workable character concepts.

Exactly what the gnome lacks.

'Diet Kinder', 'Obnoxious Mockery of Science' and 'Hates the ones that should be the other Small race instead of us' are not resonant concepts.

 

[Bedrockgames]

'Diet Kinder', 'Obnoxious Mockery of Science' and 'Hates the ones that should be the other Small race instead of us' are not resonant concepts.

I don't think this is what they are. I think they are prankster illusionist characters and tinkerers (which I wouldn't see as a mockery of science---though dragon lance executed that concept in a humorous way which I felt worked actually). I also can see them as eccentric academics. These are, in my opinion resonant and workable. At the very least they are as resonant and workable as 'arrogant and long lived forest recluses'

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't know that 'a rando in the street' should be our metric for what demihumans are or ought to be though

What other methods do you suggest for examining the fantasy zeitgeist?

Because the reason things look and behave the way they do is, in general, because that's what the creator thinks people want them to be. When something is very new (like dragonborn were at 4e's launch), the creator has a lot more freedom, as they are defining some of that zeitgeist, that shared cultural understanding.

But then it can evolve from there, sometimes a lot. 4e dragonborn, properly speaking, do not have tails, and have exactly four digits (three fingers and a thumb) on their hands; they have three front-facing toes and one rear-facing toe. They do not have hair, but instead have thick, ropy scales which grow from their heads. (Believe it or not, this actually resembles some real-world reptiles, e.g. the spider-tailed horned viper has scales on its tail-tip that have adapted to look like spider legs, and they're definitely thicker, and would look rope-like if they were longer.) The art of dragonborn characters, however, almost immediately began featuring tails, human-shaped hands (five digits), and semi-human-shaped feet (four or five toes, sometimes four forward/one backward, sometimes all five forward like a human foot.)

This has been enough of a thing that it's become an open question in D&D and related media. In Critical Role, for example, I believe dragonborn with and without tails both exist, and there's racism between them (I don't recall which direction it goes.) As a result, yes, it actually can "matter" what the guy on the street thinks a dragonborn should look like, because it will affect how they're depicted in official materials, and official materials have a major (though obviously not determinative!) influence on what people think about them.

 

[Vaalingrade]

though dragon lance executed that concept in a humorous way which I felt worked actually).

We're just not going to see eye-to-eye here as DL's portrayal is what murdered gnomes for all time for me. There is no redemption from that in my eyes.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What other methods do you suggest for examining the fantasy zeitgeist?

I don't think the fantasy zeitgeist is a good way to decide what races ought to be in a game. I think races that fit what the game is about and what you want people to be able to do with it (and what concepts you think will resonate and be useable) are far better than making races that fit peoples preconceived ideas from pop culture about gnomes, elves, etc. When I first played D&D one of the most striking things about races and monsters was they didn't align with what I had grown up reading about these creatures (I grew up reading about 1 minotaur for example and elves were very different in the folklore I had read). So I found how these things all got brought into the game from other sources quite interesting, and it was interesting how they became their own thing in a way (at a certain point these things can become overly self referential and lose meaning, which might be why I've lost interest in later versions of D&D) but I want interesting races that work well in different settings. I don't see how having a race that matches what a random persons idea of something in the street is, is especially helpful for that (I think that is how you get a lot of boring gaming material).

 

[Bedrockgames]

We're just not going to see eye-to-eye here as DL's portrayal is what murdered gnomes for all time for me. There is no redemption from that in my eyes.

Fair enough. But that does seem to open the possibility for you of a pre-dragonlance style gnome working?