D&D General Why Do People Hate Gnomes?

[Mind of tempest]

Gnomes have just been added to Baldur's Gate 3 (early access). It's worth taking a look at the visuals. They have made their gnomes much more alien-looking than their halflings.

you got an image??

 

[Paul Farquhar]

you got an image??

I'm not sure I'm allowed to share.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I'm not sure I'm allowed to share.

honestly, I looked and found them fairly mundane but maybe I have different standards.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

honestly, I looked and found them fairly mundane but maybe I have different standards.

They have some more alien faces and some more humanlike faces, but the difference really shows up when you flip between gnome and halfling. Larian's halflings look like small humans with the cute dialled up to 11. Some of the gnome faces could pass for grey aliens.

 

[MNblockhead]

the subject is light, text is dense and built for a different time which is to say it is a good story but a chore to read it took me weeks to read.

I want to argue with you, but I felt the same way when I tried to read Alice in Wonderland to my kids. I still love the story and have memorized many of the poetry, but I just found it dry to read when I went to read it out loud to my kids. :-/

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Hasbro only has to produce some cartoon for all the family about gnomes, and the little children will want to play with PC gnomes in their first games. Maybe a funny story set in Witchlight. Impossible? Let's remember that animated saga about a greenskin ogre named "Shrek", or Dreamwork' (Damm) Trolls.

And they are perfect in a D&D horror story because the audence don't guess them the stereotype or final girl or survivor who kick-ass monsters.

They haven't to be alwasy rogues or illusionists, but also the riders of some monster mount(/pet) or tinkerer/alchimist/mad scientifics.

 

[Parmandur]

They have some more alien faces and some more humanlike faces, but the difference really shows up when you flip between gnome and halfling. Larian's halflings look like small humans with the cute dialled up to 11. Some of the gnome faces could pass for grey aliens.

Well, that matches what's in the Core books.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

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.

One can easily justify going in either direction with world building. Isolationist/nationalist/exclusionist societies were very common historically (and still are, one could argue), and that's without the large, real, and undeniable biological differences seen in D&D Land, or the even larger ones of Tolkien's Middle Earth. And you don't have to impute that much isolationism or exclusionism to people who would rather be ruled by their "own kind" - who aren't unfriendly toward the people of the next-door kingdom, but who still would prefer "home rule" or "self rule" over being ruled by that next-door kingdom of a different people.

On the other hand, the "X is the kingdom of the Elves, Y is the kingdom of the Dwarves, Z is the land of the Halflings" setup does feel unattractively stiff and stereotyped, especially if taken to extremes. (Note that not even Tolkien had a single Kingdom of the Elves or Kingdom of the Dwarves, but rather multiple kingdoms of elves and of dwarves.) I personally prefer a cosmopolitan setup where language, religion, culture, and being a loyal subject to the human prince Whoever or the dwarf-queen Whatshername overrides the importance of being an elf or a halfling. What bugs me more than "X is the kingdom of the Elves..." is "A is the Deity of the Elves, B and C are the Deities of the Dwarves, and D is the Deity of the Halflings"

 

[Belen]

Serious question, as I've seen a ton of people online that play D&D make jokes about Gnomes or say how much they hate them. More than Kender, actually.

So . . . what is it about Gnomes that makes people hate them so much? Or such easy targets for jokes online?

My wife once played a gnome paladin of the goddess of love named Rosalyn Wocket who's father owned Wocket's Rockets. Enough said.

 

[Parmandur]

My wife once played a gnome paladin of the goddess of love named Rosalyn Wocket who's father owned Wocket's Rockets. Enough said.

My wife enjoys Gnomes, and played a Gnome Warlock who sold her soul to Satin...the fabric, Satin.