What the fuck do you do with these fuckers to make them actually worthwhile in the game? What the fuck are Gnomes and how do you make them something unique and an intresting part of the setting instead of more gay dwarves or shorter elves? Or EL OH EL STEAMPUNK'S SO COOL YOU GUYS
I've been trying to redo them as something worthy of anything, instead of just a shitty comedic relief race, but it's hard. Are gnomes truly the worst standard D&D race?
Yes.
Still better than Tieflings and Dragonborn.
I go with Gnomes as good natured murderous fey. Their societies are relatively peaceful and mostly self contained with the only major trade being in fine crafts. Which isn't to say they're withdrawn or hostile, Gnomes are the friendliest folk around, until the moment they're threatened in any way. Then they go silent, drop whatever they were doing and their faces turn completely expressionless. And then they start killing.
Kobolds are the masters of defensive traps and ambush, Gnomes are the masters of offensive traps and ambush. And on top of that they have a natural talent for illusion. Not fun and games illusion, the sound of your friend screaming for help in the dark to lure you away from the fire's light illusion.
There's no passion or emotion in how they kill. If you impale yourself on a punji stick they won't finish you off, you're not going anywhere and you'll bleed out soon enough. They'll just turn and leave you there, or worse wait for someone to come try to help you.
And then when it's all said and done and the bodies of the latest over confident bandit clan are burned or buried it's back to cheerful laughter and smiling as if nothing had ever happened.
So basically tricksy murder midgets.
Honestly, I wonder if you couldn't juts push the whole "dwellers in the forest, children of fey" aspect onto gnomes. I mean, elves are stretched so far and already have to be so many things, would you actually lose anything by making them lose that stuff? Unless you just really love wood elves, I guess.
Elves as the high and noble people in their silver cities or whatever (High elves, however you want to do them) and gnomes as the woods-dwelling fey fuckers. Maybe, if you really want wood elves to still be a thing, just say gnomes are the stunted offshoot of elves. Or maybe elves are the gnomes that got much too proud and literally puffed up.
I stick to the second edition representation of them. Mini-dwarves who pull pranks and use illusions to scare off rather than kill their enemies.
There is a world of difference when you use Forest Gnomes as the common type and Rock Gnomes as the less common type.
I much prefer Gnomes to Halflings. I like the small natural magic to them, and they have proper physical proportions as small folk to them.
I hate edgy fey. It's a cheap inversion.
Gnomes by Paraclesus are elementals of earth. Gnomes if folklore are small and magical. Gnomes of gardens wear hats.
They have the small earth or fey magics, being able to speak with small beasts and conjure minor illusions.
Feywild-exclusive tinker and smiting race driven by whimsy. Make powerful and dangerous magical items for top kekels. Non-player only.
Gnomes are just goblins with human faces.
My setting replaces DnD gnomes with the elemental version. Small people made of soil, color and composition depend on where they were "born". Each has a spike of colored crystal from the top of their skull. Gnomes are good at earthy magics, most often using it to augment their pitiful strength to ogre levels. Dwarves are a gnome and human hybrid.
What's wrong with their heads?
Gnomes and halflings in 5e are fucked up to all hell.
lol they look like those kids with microcephaly that kept getting posted awhile ago
>BRAINLESS SISSY RETARDS
>edgy fey is a cheap inversion
Might wanna read up on some actual fey in old fairy tales, user.
Its what happens when the artist says
'Rather than keep the head to body ratio the same and just scale them down to 3ft tall, let's scale the body down to 2ft tall and keep the head the same size it would be for an adult human a bit under a foot'
Really fucks up the proportions.
D&D itself doesn't really know what to do with gnomes. I mean, they've always had that "like dwarves, but" problem (in this case, the "but" being "but more annoying"). Later they've been trying to make them more like fey creatures, but elves already sit in that slot pretty squarely.
I guess the problem is that they occupy a conceptual space that's already filled by fantasy races that draw from the same mythological origins, and don't really have place of their own. Sometimes they're tinkerers, which is probably the first and most trite place anyone goes when they try to make their fantasy race somehow different.
They need a conceptual space separate from elves and dwarves. Something neither really does. If you still wanna go the "little fairytale folk" route, there's other little fairytale folk you can go for. Like house elves or such. Maybe they're small and live besides (under, wherever) other races.
Then again, being a literal pest isn't all that flattering, as far as race shticks go.
Space gnomes are cool
Gnomes take the role of "normal small race" in my world as Halflings are a bit busy being abominations of nature. They're part of a larger pattern of "Smallfolk" in the world, thought of to be some sort of convergent evolution type of dealio along with Goblins and Kobolds. In general, racial identity is a lot less important than national or international identity anyway. They're just people.
>What the fuck do you do with these fuckers to make them actually worthwhile in the game?
play 4e
Why? What makes the 4e gnome different/unique/better than any of the other D&D gnomes?
Gnomes and Goblins in my games play the same as the World of Warcraft ones: they have a knack for artificing, alchemy and are completely fucking crazy.
Everyone is either Jan Jansen or Morte, and it is horrifying.
Better lore
Better mechanics
Much better art
I like this. Delicious friendly outside, spicy murdermiddle.
They seem like short, tricky elves.
I think 5e Halflings look great. Human-proportion halflings don't make visual sense when depicted alone, for one thing. I like the homely, warm features and big heads and mutton chops because it makes them look like an actually separate race and evokes their humble culture. Small humans are just small humans.
And as for gnomes, I like to think of them as fitting into the Tiny size category rather than just Small. I like pointy hats and living in secret but comfortable tree root homes, too. I admit they don't really belong in the adventuring world like this, though.
They can be your angle, or yoru debil
I just rolled gnomes and goblins into one race.
They should be the as to elves as halflings are to humans.
And as goblins to hobgoblins.
Just like how Halflings are short, mellow humans.
They're like halflings or dwarves, except not gay.
What about a human that is just short and mellow? I don't think one race's description should fit inside the range of another race. Why not just have a human ethnicity that is short and mellow?
Well, Tolkien did make it clear that hobbits were suppose to be a particular race of humans.
As far as D&D is concerned, humans are defined as basically glory seeking conquerors that (typically) mean well but are very self-centered, while halflings are basically "what if humans just retired to the countryside and stopped all that conquering nonsense?"
The name Halfling to me evokes something not whole. They're compared to men, they're half-men. Not even men. I see that sort of being be a mistreated underclass, like Victorian child-labour, but it's just small short people. By 5e's standards they have relations with Hill Dwarves and have mixed blood between them. I see them treated much better there than among Humans.
Gnomes in turn evoke a sort of knowledge, be it natural or mechanical. Gnomes speak to beasts and work illusion magic, or tinker and twist metal into strange contraptions. Forest Gnomes to me seem like a natural thing, the original thing. Creatures of the earth and nature, but not like elves. Rock Gnomes seem unnatural. Like a Rock caused them to be mechanically minded. Earth turned to industry.
I'm starting to seriously consider just deleting wood elves from Faerun in my campaign. Replace all of them with gnomes. Just going to make gnomes the fey people of the woods.
It sure as hell won't suck more than ten thousand different elf subraces.
The thing about Wood Elves is that their magic is rather mundane. They don't cast spells, but nature does not hinder them and it hides them. So the woods of Wood Elves are ultimately mundane, even if they are not.
The woods of Forest Gnomes are not mundane. There is illusions being spun and small movement out of the corner of your eye, and every small animal seems to watch you as you go. There is something very much alive in those kinds of Forests, and it is watching.
But I thought 4e was still universally condemned as shit-twinkie tier material on Veeky Forums? How can you say that?
I see gnomes as alchemists, clockpunk tinkers, astronomers, seers, gold-and-silversmiths, jewelers, and miners.
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I haven't a clue of what to do with Halflings. Halflings as Hobbits are too comfortable to be of any use in my world. I'm thinking of a sort of imperialist Munchkinland sort of place, an empire or city of the small, with a multitude of byzantine guilds, and strange rituals of courtesies and hospitality.
I want to argue with that because I hate gnomes so much, but I cannot.
Dragons and Demons are not playable races, and fuck whoever thinks they should be.
good thing they're not dragons and demons
They're too close to the conceptual space of both.
In my setting gnomes are to elves what dwarves are to humans. Elves live the woods, gnomes live under hills. Essentially, they're earth fey. No steampunk/tinker gnome stuff.