D&D General Why Do People Hate Gnomes?

[Vaalingrade]

1) Dragonlance and the anti-science bent D&D went down for a while using gnomes as a catspaw to have wacky scientists who fail at everything vs magic that's clean reliable and better than science. I find both medieval stasis and 'science is exploding yourself' offensive as the end result of fifty thousand years of science.

2) The encouragement of gnomes to be joke characters and just joke characters, enforced by things like the illusionist archetype.

3) Generally the less appealing-looking small race until 5e when things took a turn. Gnomes look like cobbler/cookie/Xmas elves at best, but don't actually use any of that in their lore ever.

4) Speaking of lore: Lack of cohesive raison detre beyond being the joke one way or another. They're fey, now they're trickster small elves, now they're diet dwarves. In the folklore, they're earth spirits, but D&D cares not. Kobolds are also Earth spirits and gnomes seem to also exist to torment them. Oh, and in pathfinder, they are just straight up starfish aliens. Pick a lane!

5) We have halfings at home.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because gnomes are:

1. Short. It sucks, but short races are just going to not draw nearly as much attention. It's the same reason why the vast majority of characters in MMORPGs will either be max height or min height for their race; max height if you're trying to be awesome, min height if you're trying to be cute. Which leads us to...
2. VERY frequently played for laughs, without any seriousness to them. It's related to the problem with kender, though a better example would be Pathfinder goblins. Gnomes and goblins both tend to be rather poorly-written comic relief characters, often in a way that is supposed to be kooky but often just is damaging to the party.
3. Not actually supported by too much fiction that doesn't do the former. World of Warcraft is one of the main places you see gnomes (and goblins) and...they're almost always weird comic relief characters. It doesn't help that most other sources are about garden gnomes.

So...yeah. Between their aesthetics, the almost-always comic relief issue, and few to no major fiction properties to draw on to inspire something else, gnomes just aren't generally handled well, neither by writers nor by players.

Again, this DOES NOT mean that 100% of all gnomes are badly-handled. I knew someone in WoW who played a gnome that was both actually legitimately funny and not just a comedy relief character, but actually really good at blending serious and silly. It can happen. But like certain sexual lifestyle choices, a lot of people who try it aren't really ready for it and won't do it well.

 

[see]

Gnomes started out with a very weak identity ("kinda like dwarves, but can be illusionists"), and as a consequence picked up a couple annoying-at-the-table identities (wild prankster, derived from the illusionist bit; mad steampunk comic-relief engineers, imported from Krynn) shortly thereafter. And they're persistently a core race rather than Dragonlance-only, so the annoying identities keep showing up in vanilla D&D material.

 

[Hussar]

I think it's more the fact that gnomes just have never been that popular. I know, I know, I'm going to get hammered by all the folks who say that they have seen a bajillion gnomes being played. But, really, it's because gnomes just don't "do it" for a lot of players. I know I have one player who consistently plays short characters and almost never plays gnomes. Kobolds, currently an owlkin and maybe a halfling or two, but, I've never seen a gnome played.

Heck, as far as I can remember, I'm the only person who has actually played a gnome in any game I've sat in or DM'd. With a couple of exceptions I suppose for my faulty memory. But, honestly, it's not so much that people hate gnomes it's just that gnomes never really gained any traction.

I think the biggest criticism I ever saw of gnomes was back in the early days of 3e when I was running a Scarred Lands campaign. We were months into the campaign, several levels, and one of the PC's got killed. So, the player asked about playing a gnome. And it wasn't until then that any of us realized that the setting didn't actually have gnomes (they added them in a later supplement). They were just so far under the radar that no one even noticed that they were gone.

 

[Argyle King]

For me personally, it's only D&D Gnomes with which I have a problem. A big part of that is because I don't understand what their identity is supposed to be.

They love to tinker, so that seems to imply some sort of bend toward the city and technology (as a way to be different than rural Hobbits/Halflings,) but most of their innate abilities involve talking to animals (and being even more reclusive than Halflings).

I'm aware there are subspecies, but still...

What are D&D Gnomes supposed to be?
What is their niche?

I grew up watching David the Gnome and reading Dragonlance. So, I'm open to a very broad range of what "gnome" may mean. D&D Gnomes appear to try to cover both ideas but somehow never really seen to capture either.

For what it's worth, elves had this issue too. One of the things I liked about 4th Edition was taking the different concepts of "elf" and giving them both their own space.

 

[Faolyn]

I have a friend who vehemently hated gnomes at one point. He ran a game and said that any gnome brought into his world immediately burst into flame. We renamed fireball to be the summon gnome spell, and meteorswarm became mass summon gnome.

He's playing a gnome (who was raised by dwarfs) in a current game.

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.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For what it's worth, elves had this issue too. One of the things I liked about 4th Edition was taking the different concepts of "elf" and giving them both their own space.

Ironically, I'm of the reverse opinion when it comes to gnomes. I think they should be merged with halflings to create "hinnfolk" or whatever one wishes to call them.

Svirfneblin and "ghostwise" halflings thus merge into a singular subtype, as do forest gnomes and lightfoot halflings, giving you four options: ghostwise (deep-dwellers with psi leanings), cragstep ("rock" gnomes, enigmatic tinkerers/chemists), stoutheart (plains-dwelling herders), and lightfoot (tree-dwelling, animal-taming hunters). That gives each subtype a clear focus and thematic concept. It also ties the resulting race to a conceptual reason for their differences, with lightfoot and stoutheart being more animal-oriented, while the underground-dwelling ghostwise and cragstep ones lean toward industry and the creepy-crawlies that live at the lower boundaries of the world.

 

[Minigiant]

Lack of identity.

And whatever identity they are given either already exist (magic halflings, small dwarves, tiny elves) or is disruptive (pranks, faulty magipunk, small critters).

So no one ever plays or runs them. And when the few do, 50% gnomes are run as annoying or comic relief.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I would just add that the PHB gnome race is mechanically not very interesting.

 

[Hussar]

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but, I rather hope that the revised PHB drops gnomes in favor of another small race like kobolds. Just to give something else a chance to gain some traction. Don't make it impossible to be a gnome PC, of course. Keep the shorter race write up somewhere, but, I don't think it needs to be in the PHB. If gnomes haven't gained traction after fifty years in the PHB, maybe it's time to give something else a chance.

ducks and hides since the last time I floated this idea, I got massively dog piled on.