Do you like Gnomes? Do you feature them much in your games, or do they get bogged down among other shorty races...

My gnomes are the original variety, being small Earth Elementals. As a nod to the pointy hat idea they have a colorful spike of crystal in place of hair.

Gnomes and humans that start families end up making Dwarves. Halfling is a slur typically directed at gnomes, skinny dwarves or short elves.

>Do you like Gnomes?

Kind of, I'm with most of what the other anons in that I find them to be a redundant 'short race' that's too similar to Dwarves or Halflings, and even then I find fantasy's attempts at making them tinkerers or "wacky XD" race to be annoying and unbearable.

I DO, HOWEVER, really like using Gnomes as a counter-culture of "surface dwarves": big fucking beards, happy little faces, tumblr noses, those delightful red pointy hats, who have a culture of white-robed wreath-hat wearing druids and a deep respect for nature, while at the same time building the most cozy of hobbit-hole-style or german/dutch-themed villages in the hills and mountain valleys.
I'm also pretty okay with Gnomes and Dwarves having a kind of familial rilvary between one another: arguing about who does x, y, and z the best, while other races are completely oblivious or otherwise don't get the 'subtle' differences between Gnomish and Dwarven craft.

Honestly I feel like Gnomes are too pigeonholed, or redundant or I guess both. Basically the problem everyone has with them is that they're not unique enough to justify being their own race, but I feel similarly about Halflings, which are not so similar to Dwarves but still have a cultural shallowness to them. I feel like if you stuck Gnomes and Halflings together into one race they'd add up enough to be a single fleshed out race.

I generally roll them together with dwarves and halflings into a single race. They're all a bit shallow on their own, but mash them together and you get a pretty okay race.

You could just make gnomes, dwarves and halflings be different cultures from the same race. Maybe time has given them slight physical differences, but nothing major. Gnomes in the forests, dwarves in the mountains, halflings in the hills.

fuck papa smurf

yea that about describes all my feelings toward gnomes

That's retarded. They should clearly be different things. Either pick one or make them both be others.

>In my setting snakes and gold are the same thing so either word works fine.
>In my setting two things that are completely different are the same thing so call the it either of the two different names made for different things.

That is purely setting based. Are you using lawn gnomes?

In most setting I see halflings are just men half as tall, maby with a mild silly demeanor. While gnomes are a shorter fae race, tending to have more cute features.

Kill your idea with fire. It's terrible. At least call your "gnomes" Elementals or some name based on Elementals.

Gnomes have to have a more fae base to them.

But that's a dwarf.

So you're saying that halflings and gnomes are only half a people?

He is slav probably. We have completely fucked up terminology where garden gnomes and Tolkien dwarves use the same word, thanks to lazy translators.

Gnomes are the best race, and as such, are always the best race in my settings. Any setting with gnomes will inevitably feature gnomes in a critical role in some capacity.

In one of my first D&D settings the gnomes stole all the magic in the world in a prehistoric time, making their little island continent into a crazy masterwork of magic and exterminating all the other races on the island (giants, mostly). After a while they figured there was probably valuable minerals and slaves out in the rest of the world, and considering the rest of the setting was low-magic, they pretty much 8-hour war'd the entirety of the huge continent that all the other PC races lived on, with my party fighting a guerrilla war and eventually all dying and making gnome adventurers.

That's retarded gnomes need to be child like, charming and silly. Not full blown nuclear autistic.
Kill yourself. And stop forcing magical realms.

>charming and silly
>not charming and slutty
You are doing gnomes wrong.

The gnomes in my setting have a sort of symbiosis with dwarves and they're always found together. They consider it mutually beneficial. It roughly breaks down that the dwarves do blue collar work, while the gnomes do white collar work. The dwarves still rule since they're much better about consolidating power through family lines. It's made for some interesting cultural dynamics the party has had to navigate through.

Players like it, but almost always play humans anyway.

That's actually nice.

I like Gnomes. In my setting they fall under the super-type of Halfling which includes gnomes, goblins, (sometimes) kobolds, tinderkin (hobbits), etc. I more or less fuse
D&D 4e's and Pathfinder's interpretations of gnomes (slaves in the fey realm and beings that will wither without consistent entertainment, respectively) for my setting.

I fucking hated gnomes and saw no point in shoving them in our setting. Rock gnomes in 5e even come with the tinkerer-engineer-clockwork theme built in, which I feel is the worst of the issues.

So right now, we have:
Forest gnomes are basically autismo tricksters, coming from the woods at night to steal your socks, water your plants, drink your wine and leave unnoticed. They live in really small communities, and don't have much of a centralized civilization.

Rock gnomes, on the other hand, all lived in a big Babel tower-like city. They were philosophers mostly, seeking the meaning of soul through magic, so they were all over putting spirits of the living into inanimate objects and building better political models while using animated corpses as cheap labor. When the nazi high elves first came from the Feywild to the Material plane, they saw these gnomes as arcane competition and magic-nuked them out of existence simply by knocking down the tower. That was the way I found to make the players stop trying to build those annoying WoW gnomes.

Fuck those gnomes.

Weren't gnomes originally earth elementals?

PF gnomes are actually my favorite variety of them. They combine all the various aspects of gnome thematics found in many sources and build a fairly interesting race out of it. The Bleaching is one of the best ideas to come out of this. The fact that they look like little anime versions of David the Gnome and lawn gnomes is pretty fun.

I mean, look at this fucker with his shit eating grin, he probably knows a bunch of sick ass illusion spells and he isnt afraid to use them. He also probably talks to gophers, those little shits, gets them to pull pranks and stuff.

The real problems Gnomes get is they are never factored into any setting on a noticeable scale. You can find Shire ripoffs all over D&D but what do Gnomes get? Tiny gag settlements like the retard gnomes of Dragonlance and Top Ballista. Outside of Zilargo in Eberron they were always an underdeveloped joke

A lot of that is because they existed in the old days as a meta race. They literally existed to be the poster child for Illusionists and a weird Elf/Dwarf mechanical hybrid that was still somehow its own race

in my world gnomes are discriminated against and are legally green skins (some asshole emperor did it so he could take a lot of gnomish land and money) so you have a lot of gnomes moving into orcish/goblin camps and are split into two subcultures the ones who are trying to act as the brains behind the orcs and provide the infrastructure for the orcish war machines and the ones who have embraced orcish culture who spend their days pillaging plundering while riding around on various war beasts owlbears, giant sloths, pygmy war rhinos etc.

Sounds like the relationship between Orcs and Goblins.

I like this

Correct

has probably just never played anything but DnD/PF and lacks an appreciation for the source material.

I play nothing but 3.PF and fucking loath gnomes, but even I'm aware if that. That nigga is just ignorant.

I'm building them in as one of the two native races in my setting. They were agriculturalists who lived on the coast and inland whilst halflings populated the nearby archipelago raising and exporting the magical sugarcane only they could process.
However later on, a dwarven prince conquered the bay and surrounding areas, turning into a luxury region for foreign nobles and merchants to spend their money in. This forced the local gnomish population into the nearby vast swamp where they became an expy of swamp dwellers from the Louisiana Bayou.
Their remaining villages are nearby the players' thieves' guild lair and they and the guild treat each other well. Until the prince's son starts whisking them off as slave labor under the pc's noses, that is.

They're true Fae creatures. The lines aren't well defined between what exactly is a Gnome and what is a Dwarf, sometimes, so it's mostly down to age, intellect and magical affinity. Very old Dwarves sometimes start to brush up against the boundaries of Gnomish nature. Dwarves live to be around 120 where most humans are lucky to hit 70, so it can take quite a while, and Dwarves being as contentious as they are it doesn't happen often.

Halflings actually brush against Gnomish nature more often, actually being more laid back and in tune with their environment than the Dwarves.

What Gnomish nature is, in the simplest possible terms, is dangerous. Gnomes are like True Elves, where even just speaking to one carelessly can end with you either accidentally selling your first born, falling in love with estranged family members, or ending up Never Seen Or Heard From Again.

Most Warlocks prefer to deal with the infernal over Gnomes or Elves or Goblins, because with Devils at least you know their every act or word is intended with the long-term goal of fucking you over. It can be exhausting to separate the words and deeds of a Fae between the Benign, the Malicious, and the This-Should-Be-Funny.

They're a type of troll

>>ITT a bunch of bandwagoning faggots who don't know fuck all about fantasy races and aren't old enough for WoW to not be their only frame of reference

you fucking idiots are retarded.
is the only right answer in this thread.
gnomes are fey and so dwarves should only JUST be tolerating them, and if and only if rock gnomes.
unless you and your players are completely useless, ditch the kender stereotype and use what little creativity you have to facilitate:
>high INT
>rogue/wizard type
>geologist
>druidic
how hard can it be? there are no racelets, only brainlets, don't dismiss three awesome races just because your table is devoid of any originality. you can play as a fucking lizard or crow or cat person for chrissakes, being small is orders of magnitude less cringe than that

>geologist
*gemologist FUCK MY AUTISM WAS RUINED

I completely disregard their existence.

In ancient times there were Humans, Halflings, Dwarves and Gnomes. Gnomes, with their vastly superior intellect, were easily able to conquer the world and establish a grand Gnomish kingdom with their magic and tinker-tech. Gnomes would go on to enslave the Dwarves who they forced to mine minerals and give to the Gnomes. Humans were also enslaved but not as widely, for most Humans were barbarians who existed on the fringes of civilization and not easy to control. Halflings, being so similar to Gnomes and naturally stealthy to boot, were able to escape slavery within their own hidden Halfling communities.

While the Dwarves made good slaves, the Gnomes' proclivity for tinkering lead them to wanting something better, faster, more efficient. Using many combinations of now lost magics and technology they made a new race in their own image, but taller, stronger, with even pointier ears, and beautiful beyond measure. These were the Elves, and they were designed to be perfect in every way. Perfect soldiers, perfect servants, perfect for whatever the Gnomes needed. Unfortunately it wasn't long before the Elves began to wonder why they were serving those stubby little Gnomes when they were the perfect ones.

The Elves were not so great in number, but with the help of their Dwarven brothers in chains (though both races would be loathe to admit to working together now) and many Human barbarians they were able to war against the Gnomes who were ultimately frail despite their much more powerful technology.

Eventually the Gnomes in their desperation attempted to create soldiers that would save them and thus the Orcs were created from the same template as the Elves. While Elves were perfect in the sense that they could be used in any situations, the Orcs were created solely for war. The process of creating the Orcs was never perfected, and in times of peace would never be used in such a state. But the war frenzied the Gnomes into deploying inventions before they were ready, and many smaller, malformed but more cunning mutants were created called Goblins.

Eventually the Elves, the Dwarves, and the Humans were victorious over the Gnomes, but it was not long before the winning races fell to bickering. The Elves had no intention of reordering Gnomish society beyond putting themselves at the top, but the Dwarves would not let themselves become servants to another race again. After a series of destructive and decentralized wars, it ended with The Elves pushed into the forests and some still standing Gnomish cities, The Dwarves in their mountains, cut off from the other races and mining for themselves, leaving the humans free to roam as they pleased, taking what was left of the Gnome kingdom to use for themselves, making humanity the defacto, upjumped rulers of the Gnomelands. The Gnomes, meanwhile, were scattered. While their cunning remains true, they have never again organized like they did in the old days. Many Gnomes pine for those days of yore, the Golden age of Gnomes, when things were good, and hope that someday those times will come around again.

Not really?

Better than halflings though.

GNOME is a pretty nice desktop environment.

they are right there in Midget Ancapistan with the halflings and dwarves, the last taking all the spotlight with their fortresses

My gnomes are blatant dwemer rip offs.

In my setting, they used to be an isolated magitech civilization but at one point they tried making a machine with something they didn't really understand to power their civilization enough to match the gods. Obviously, the gods wouldn't let that happen. They rallied the elves and humans in a crusade against them and wrecked their shit before they could complete the machine.

Unlike the dwemer, they didn't disappear, but their numbers dwindled and they never really recovered. Now, they are mostly found traveling in groups underground between the dwarven kingdoms selling their services, trinkets and whatnot. Some do wander in the other realms, but those are rare sights.

>1366x768