Halflings vs. Gnomes

Since I'm sure we all agree that two short comedy relief races are redundant which do you prefer?

>short comedy relief races
I thought those were dwarves.

In name alone, gnomes.

In every other way I prefer halflings.

Goblin.

I'll agree with dwarves being a source of comedy, but I don't think I'd call it relief.

Kender.

Halfings because gnomes are usually way more annoying. Although Arcanum which made gnomes into capitalist not-jews did it really well and managed to make them terrifying instead of comedic.

>not-Jews are terrifying
Oy, gevalt! How antisemitic.

Halflings. Gnomes tend to feel like a cross of dwarves and halflings.

Hobbits.

Gnome players should be shot.

PF shitter pls go

>Hobbits
>muh food
>muh rural folksiness

At least Gnomes sometimes have nuance.

I feel like newer D&D has kinda caused this, but I feel like both have a right to exist, if done right.

>Gnomes are:
Adventurous, full of wonder, small and chipper, have magic abilities, value humor and family

>Halflings are:
Adventurous, full of wonder, small and chipper, have rogue abilities, value humor and family

With that setup, it is impossible to not kinda hate them.

>Gnomes ought to be:
Valuers of family and structure, cantankerous, wildly ambitious, engineers and wizards, bankers and the kind of people to keep ledgers of debts and favours owed. Stuck together and suspicious of larger humanoids.
But this sounds like a caricature of jews, so that'll never happen

>Halflings ought to be:
Unassuming, fly-under-the-radar rogues, with a tendency for laziness, but also surprisingly capable and self-assured when they are pressed. People who value family and friends, but don't say it to their face. The kind to enjoy a good adventure, but pretend they don't. The kind of people who are made of far tougher stuff than you'd think from looking at them.

>But this sounds like a caricature of jews, so that'll never happen
No that sounds like fucking dwarves, user. Wizardry aside you just described surface dwarves of 90% of settings to a T.

>Since I'm sure we all agree
Your first mistake
>that two short comedy relief races
Your second mistake
>are redundant
Your third mistake
>which do you prefer?
Both since they are both different and occupy different thematic niches within the fantasy RPG mythos.

Halflings are hobbits and/or Romani, short thieves and simple farmers. They travel in caravans going around nicking whatever isn't nailed down to sell to the next community or farm in little secluded communities hidden away fromt the trouble of the world.

Gnomes are the embodiment of the fey trickster from folklore. They are often given to crafts that allow them to apply their unbounded imaginations or experience new ideas. Many times they have strange names and strange looks.

Neither is necessarily the comedy relief race, as that can fall to any race, but should be more accurately applied to specific individuals.

PF has probably the best versions of gnomes and halflings. Pic is a gnome professor of magic at a university.

I do see gnomes and dwarves as sharing a number of traits - gnomes essentially being the less xenophobic and more squishy cousins of dwarves.

But wildly ambitious engineers and wizards who do banking is not at all how I do dwarfs in my games.

I would also give dwarves much more rigid social structures than gnomes. I imagine gnomes as essentially having social structures similar to most large, culturally insular minorities, like Orthodox russians or Jews in the US or Europe ( or, rather, like those minorities lived in the 50s )

Dwarves, I would play off as far more rigid. Like, formalized laws governing all sorts of shit, caste-systems, etc.

In fiction, I prefer Halflings.

Especially since they are more sexually promiscuous than gnomes

However, for making a D&D character, I prefer gnomes over halfings.

I really like making jew characters.

And nothing says jew like a gnome artificer with unbound scroll prc.

gemcrafting, ledger keeping, the bread and butter of house Sivis, founders of the Ninth College.

Also, Dragon 291 (starting on pg 25) Details a lot of good flavour for gnomes.

You might not have dwarves like that, but surely you'd agree that dwarves are almost universally represented as masterful engineers who build ridiculously grand cities.
And the large majority of settings also has them as the shark merchants and bankers of the world.

But your picture shows an example where the dwarves are merchants and industrialists and gnomes are the engineers.

No, in the Witcher setting dwarves are both merchants and engineers, whereas gnomes are pointless dwarf clones. They barely appear in the setting at all and they're basically described as "dwarf, +2DEX/-2STR".

Never read the books have you? In Baptism by Fire Zoltan goes on a tangent about dwarf industrialism and the gnome that is coming along with him goes on a tangent how gnomish blacksmithing and engineering are the best in the world as well as working as a blood hound for the party. Hell, even in the games the best swords are of gnomish make which they blatantly point out. I can give you the page number if you need proof.

>PF has probably the best versions
PF has shit everything.

FUCK GNOMES FUCK GNOMES FUCK GNOMES FUCK GNOMES FUCK GNOMES FUCK GNOMES

Halflings.
Gnomes should be magical creatures strongly associated with earth magic, like salamanders, sylphs, and undines are for their respective elements.

I like gnomes as fey spirits that act thematically as the commoners to elven sidhe lords, but I also don't think either should be player races. The fey should be fundamentally alien in a way that disallows their being anything but npcs.

Gnome, my first character 10 years ago was a Gnome in DnD 3.5 and I just started another Gnome in my first 5e session. Mostly played Dwarves, and Half Orcs in between, but I always have a tendency for Gnomes. I think there is a bunch of differences, at least in DnD. Gnomes have a tendency towards Lawful Good, whereas Halflings are more towards Choas and there own sense of right and wrong. I also feel like Halflings are more malicious than Gnomes.

Also I never got the whole "dwarves are comedy" maybe if there no Gnomes, I've always played Dwarves as hard drinking stoics with little patience for bullshit.

Any ideas for my first Gnome in years, and my GMs first Gnome in party? Does anyone else play Gnomes?

This guy gets it.

Why? (Pic Related)

Gnomes that are called dwarves.

All of this.

Gnomes should only be of the Forest/Fey variety. None of that Tinker Gnome shit. Makes them much for strange then.

Halflings are a meek sort that keep hidden and are taken advantage of. Halflings in multiracial cities are often doing unskilled labour as cooks and maids and the like. They're to do their job and be unseen. Halflings are also the Oliver Twist types.

In my homebrew setting halflings are just "city" gnomes, where gnomes if they live in an urban environment too long (years) they lose their connection to the fey world and become halflings statblock wise.

The change can be reversed if they move to a more rural area and live their for a couple years. So there's only one small folk race but with two versions depending on how close to nature they are.

If someone wants to join your group and their first character is a gnome, just kick them out to save yourself time. They're gonna be "lol so randumb chatoic neutral teehee" faggots AT BEST

agreed

>Its ANOTHER SHOAH:((.jpg

Gnomes for funny mages, halfling for funny rogues, dwarves for funny warriors.
Shortstacks unite!

>non-black shadows
Some people.

I like gnomes. They're small, weak, and not really suited for fighting which gives me an excuse to put (relatively) tiny mechs in my setting

>hips and thighs

dam

THICC
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How it should be:
Gnomes: small, wise fey of the earth
Halflings: short farmers and pastoralists

How it be:
Gnomes: steampunk inventors with florescent hair
Halflings: Hobbits*
*but if it's a nontraditional setting they're riding dinosaurs or are jungle savages or something

In our setting we just merged them together: The Lawful Neutral Greater God of Knowledge, Civilization and Comprehension created them to be a race of grand inventors, scholars, sages, visionaries, researchers, agents of truth and evolution as well as masters of illusion to protect such projects, ideas and treasures from those willingly to destroy or corrupt them. These are His precious children, but unfortunately, they make up only 30% of all Gnomes, here called Bronze Gnomes.

The rest are a bunch of ungrateful, lazy, simple-minded naive redneck stoners who chose to live on the surface lands and worship the Neutral Good God of the Sun, Prosperity and Compassion. These are the Field Gnomes.

Gnomes, but I like a very specific type of gnome. The lives in the wood, wears pointy hats, and prospects jewels type gnomes.

Actually I like my gnomes to be basically the dwarves from Disney's Snow White now that I think about it, seeing as Dwarves have been so utterly consumed by the Tolkein interpretation.

All dwarfs are Gimli.

Halflings = Half-breed human/gnomes.

I always kind of got the impression that gnomes were magic dwarves.

As in Dwarves are the mostly non-magical physical types while gnomes were the nature loving magic types.

Sort of like the human/elves comparison only shorter.

Which just proves gnomes are just dwarves.

Where did this Gnomes are mechanics that build robots and shit come from anyway?

How does one adapt earth elementals into miniature scientists?

I don't know what I prefer. I always took the stance that gnomes are to elves what halflings are to humans.

I like gnomes, because I played Warcraft and WoW long before DnD, so my idea of them is very different. In the settings I've made or in the games where I've played them, I treat them like dwarves, basically, just smaller, slightly smarter, not as militarized or rigid. As builders and scientists, which feels fine to me.

I hate Halflings because I read The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings long before I played any fantasy games, and even as a kid I kind of hated all the hobbits. They are a bunch of incompetent asshats who constantly fuck up and fail, but are somehow still praised, loved, and treated as sublime heroes, because Tolkien obviously had a boner for them. Halflings in pretty much all incarnations just feed off this concept. "I'm an asshole, and I cause problems and fail at things, but you can't be mad at me or hold me responsible for my actions, because I'm little and look like a kid." It's extremely weeaboo and annoying. If there is anyone who has ever played a halfling and that wasn't how they did it, I fucking missed it. But even if you did want to play a halfling who was more normal, or a badass or something, why not just play an actual dwarf? Like a human midget?

I also hate the fact that halflings are an entire race based off hobbits, who are described as almost universally behaving in ways entirely counter to how hobbits behaved. It's like the creators only sort of read the books, and didn't realize that Bilbo and Pip were sort of the weirdo and retard hobbits, and no one else really was like that. But that's an unrelated peeve I have stemming from my own OCD.

Their art is good. Probably better than any actual edition of DnD. You'd think WotC could afford some good art, but I guess not.

World of Niggers

>Their art is good

> Filthy degenerate. Human women are the best.

Kobolds.

Halflings were the dumbest thing to make playable characters. They're little walking allegorical plot devices, NOT action heroes. They were the precious thing to protect, which in the end, proved tougher and stronger in soul than anyone, and necessary for the salvation of all.

Not another race on par with the others for game balance.

I ban halflings and gnomes in my games. I'd probably fuck one given the chance, though.

>I'm sure we all agree
Why would you EVER think that?

The only stunties with value are Dwarves.

The rest are just midgets that sit on hills getting high all day and eating nonstop.

Autism is no joke.

Halflings

you da man

Came here to suggest something like this.

I was going to suggest the halfling as the rural/pastoral short folk with gypse, poverty, etc. themes, and the gnomes are more urbanized modern city dwelling little people. Explains a lot of their cultural crossover, but also their distinctions.