It seems that out of all the classic PHB races Gnomes are the least well-liked. Why is that? How can we help?

They're tricksters like goblins but aren't as monstrous so we get upset at them for not conforming to more regular human norms and in-setting it's usually frowned upon of treating them like pest monsters as oppose to goblins.
Halflings also occupy pretty much the exact same niche but are more "heroic" since they favour humbleness and good country living.

...

What is the replacement race?

half-fae catboys

It seems like gnome stats really limit their usefulness. If you have a cool idea for a gnome character, you have to get the DM to work with you.
I've always thought a tinker gnome motorcycle chainsaw paladin would be fun.

Should I make my Duergar Brute a dual wielder, or should I just stick with weapon-n-board?

Goblins are often used in serious context, though, like Blackfuse. Gnomes are NEVER used as anything other than comic relief.

Wow stole the idea from Dragonlance. That's where Tinker Gnomes showed up.

Gnomes are only good as onaholes. It’s fine if you want to play a prostitute adventurer, I guess.

Only enough room for one small-sized PC race.

It's because they have too much thematic overlap with halflings (as this thread has pointed out) but also with dwarves.

Name a single defining trait of gnomes that isn't also easily imaginable as a defining trait of either halflings or dwarves. You can't.

One way to make gnomes interesting would be to have them take after Paracelsian gnomes, which were earth elementals that lived underground, guarded vaults of treasure, and could walk through earth as if it were air -- but at this point, they're more suited to being a monster race than a PC race.

tinkerers are pretty much it desu

The real problem is the Halflings. Few people want to play Bilbo, and on top of that the book is legally prevented from telling you that the race is meant to be Bilbo.

Keep gnomes, scrap halflings, and if WotC ever feels like coughing up the cash for a legit Middle Earth book they can add Hobbits(R)(C)(TM) back in as that setting's Gnome replacement.

They have one foot in the turf of both dwarves and halflings, and nothing to themselves. The cancerous 'EPIC SIMPLY EPIC xD' tinker gnomes from World of Warcraft have made things even worse.

They’re too damn silly for my taste.

t. WoW player

Gnomes in my world are effectively Jews. They are industrious with a strong group identity and have been displaced from their homeland by giants and orcs. (Muslims)

I played WoW for exactly 1 week back in 2014, played a dwarf paladin. Got bored and dropped it. MMOs just don’t hold my attention.

kill yourself

Lack of a well defined mythology; gnomes in D&D are literally just "Dwarves: Mythology Edition" (as opposed to actual dwarves, who are "Dwarves; Tolkien Edition"), and flavor-wise come off as a mixture of dwarven and elven traits that's watered down.

It doesn't help that they're traditionally the "comic relief" race, which saddles them with traits intended to be entertaining and/or cutesy and just makes them look annoying - see Krynnish Tinker Gnomes, who are forced irrevocably into the Arrogant Bungling Inventor archetype both by flavor and by game mechanics.

Plus, they overlap too much with the halflings in many peoples' eyes. I would personally say that gnomes have more inherent flavor than halflings, who were literally hobbits sans serial numbers in AD&D, but both races fit the "small cute race" trope and thus step on each other's feet.

It doesn't help that gnomish appearances tend to be, traditionally at least, kind of mediocre. I know Veeky Forums hates the "gnomes are shortstacks" memetic bleedover from /aco/, but at least it's a more appealing aesthetic than "little old men/women with huge noses".

Give them a stronger visual aesthetic - not some dwarf lite with elf traits - and give them a bit more dignity in their fluff, maybe excise the halfling, and gnomes get a lot more respect.

>but at least it's a more appealing aesthetic than "little old men/women with huge noses"
I'll have you know I enjoy the weird old people aesthetic

They are very useful in my setting. They have gone extinct by setting of a gigantic ancient magical trap, and their ruins are strewn throught the realm. Basically, they are what the Dwemer are in Morrowind.

Yeah but an entire race?

Dwarves at least style their beards.

>How can we help?
It is written
>Only Link can defeat Ganon

How does warcraft do them?

More pics like that certainly wouldn't hurt

Competent tinkers with a comic streak that does not keep them from being capable of doing badass shit, and with a tendency to go batshit crazy in awesome ways. Also, brightly colored, magical, and with the now-iconic "shortstack" bodytype.

I always treat halflings like miniature humans with rampant drives and appatites. Tight rural communities with lots of farming, fornication and fermentation.

Where as I always treat gnomes as antisocial hobodruids, headbutting squirrels to steal nuts and pinching eggs from bird nests but bedrugengly helping put out that rampaging forestfire or making a curative for an incontinant badger, after all it keeps pissing in his snail patch. They also smell like vinegar,l and gnomish sounds like mumbled Irish swear words.

Personally I always play up one to two traits about them: Their intelligence, and their affinity for magic, which I personally put as above the Elves, occasionally making Gnomes the ones to have taught magic to the Elves in the first place.

For the intelligence angle, I have them be at the forefront of invention. Waterwheel? Gnomes invented that. Crossbow? Gnomes did that too. Much of what is known of wizardry came from the minds of Gnomes as well, marking Gnomes as the primary movers of both the scientific fields, and the magical fields.

To get back to the magical emphasis side, for one campaign I had Gnomes be literal incarnations of sentient energy, short version, world is populated with mortal races by gods, they evolve, grow, then once they get to a certain point, are consumed by the deities and the whole thing starts over, creating multiple long cycles. Each time though, sorcerers would occasionally crop up, and pull from the wellspring of energy that existed on a different plane that overlapped with the Prime, like the Ethereal does in a standard setting. Each time they pulled, they left a piece of themselves in it, and eventually all of this mortal energy sparked sentience in the plane, and now aware of being drawn from, it actively began pulling back, and what it left behind in the Prime came to be Gnomes.

For a more mundane way of differentiating them, I actually have them be taller, at least in their youth. They reach a full height of about 5'5'', or 1.7 meters, and look somewhat similar to Half-Elves, but with a propensity for curly hair and freckles. Around 350 though, they begin to shrink, and eventually become the stereotypical human Yoda-looking figure.

I like Gnomes, they're the underdog race, so I try to come up with ways to differentiate them and make others like them too.

I like gnomes but not this kind

OK, what do you like about regular gnomes? Not an accusation, as I like them too, just curiosity.

Get rid of this tinker gnome bullshit wow and dragon lance made.

Go back to gnomes being fae creatures of the land and earth. They help animals, they aid travelers, will work for milk or mead, and are the servants of elven lords in said wilds. Making a race that’s only feature is wacky science is retarded. 5e dropped the balle by giving us no lore or interesting societies of gnomes, and are only now possibly fixing it with mordenkainen. Possibly.

Hmm...

Haha nuclear holocaust in Gnomeregan so funny.

Gnuclear

That's one highly fuckable gnome.

I like the magical little people angle. Yours sounded fine up until the sentient energy origin; your cosmology does not interest me at all.
I'm also not fond of the inventor angle; tinker gnomes are a mistake and detract from their magical aspect; better to leave practical invention to dwarves or humans or even hobs.
I also enjoyed 4e's feywild refugees angle, taking their magical qualities and using it to make them elusive illusionists trying their best to escape notice.

Its more that prople forget that they are almsot all survivors of a nuclear holocaust and make everybody a happy little piece of shit. Blizzard also forgot about it a bit. They are the guys who have chainsaw swords after all. Also if I remenber in old lore the entire idea is that they are also perfectionists, normally working on a product for yeas and perfecting it, never completelly happy about the results, in contrast to goblins unstable contraptions that either work really well from the get go or explode.

I think its the face, she doesnt look like a happy little girl, but a serious mature woman that jsut happens to be small. Also makeup.

Shortstack fetishists are a mistake.

I like the gnomes from 2nd/3rd Ed. Warhammer.

A sub-race of dwarves, slowly dying out. Surving by illusions to hide from enemies and within dwarven communities.
Morose, stubborn, less tough and more skilled at magics than dwarves.

Sort of like a slightly more plentiful version of Tolkien's Petty-Dwarves.

the best way to have a race liked is to post loads of porn of it, trust me

The sentient magic angle was the most out there, but mutually exclusive.
Never played nor read Dragonlance, but from what I understand, tinker gnomes are obnoxious because their shit is "oh so wacky tee hee oops it broked oh well ecks dee!"
Which is the opposite of what I was proposing, which was allowing for their mechanical boost of +2 Int to show in the world they occupy. To me, Gnomes are engineers, Dwarves are construction workers.

I don't know if I believe this. Perhaps provide several dozen examples so we can test this theory.

Paracelsus's gnomes were elementals, whose job was to guard the inherent intelligence in nature until it was time for humans to discover it, as God ordained.

Gnomes with a bonus to intelligence, and having written many treatises of knowledge, engineering, and natural catalogs, are clearly focused on knowledge.

So they have this place, where they are both seekers and protectors of knowledge from the outside world, until it is ready. How do they do this? well they're also focused about misdirection, illusion, and anachronistic technology. They cloak their settlements in illusions, and seal them in mechanical vaults. Automatons guard their complexes, while an illusionary forest cloaks it. I imagine there are many false gnomish settlements that are little than a skeleton crew maintaining the illusions.

The truth of the matter, they're like the Alien Greys, the MIB, and the SCP all in one. They're strange and small, they seek out knowledge, take and suppress any hint of it's existence if it's too dangerous for the world, and seal it away in great vaults. They perform experiments on these discovered to learn more about them, to learn the extent of their danger. Only those discoveries deemed safe and suitable will be shared outside of the Gnomes, and often for a great price.

Of course, non gnomes, and many actual gnomes, don't know the truth of any of this. They're just silly little tinkerers and reclusive dwellers in the forest.

If you don't hear from me in a month, send a hardcopy of Genesys

Dwarves, halflings and gnomes should really be condensed into one race.

But what can they be called?

Shorties.

I tend to include them so players still have Gnomes as an option, but leave their explanation as 'Gnomes are to Halflings as Elves are to Humans'. Gnomes, like Elves, are longer-lived, naturally skilled with arcane magic, and have closer ties to the Feywild than their more down-to-earth counterparts. Halflings and Humans are more grounded, live comfier lives and have a stronger emphasis on faith and community. I still let players play up the tinkerer angle, but Gnomish tinkering is more magitech in nature, using runes and magic crystals and the like, while Dwarves are the more mechanically proficient engineers.

A fairly mundane take on them, but hey, whatever works.

Honest question; what's lost by replacing Dwarves and Wood Elves with Rock & Forest Gnomes and having Half-Gnome as a valid racial choice?

The Manlets.

Every single person in this thread is incorrect. The correct answer is gnome players.

That's adorable!
What's the title of the book?

STAGNDING

OGN THE EDGE

I dunno, trolls don't get a lot of porn, but I've yet to see anyone hate on WoW trolls.

According to Google, Woodland folks meet the: Gnomes

Basically because there's no Legolas of gnomes and people need a fictional character to relate to to make sense of what a race or class is.

Hobbits have Frodo
Dwarfs have Gimli.
Elves have Legolas/Arwen/Galadriel
Orcs have Lurtz
Barbarians have Conan
Wizards have Gandalf.
Even Dragons have Smaug ( though people still think Dragonborn are lame for good reason, they just get played more than gnomes because DRAGONS)

What the fuck do gnomes have in decent fantasy literature or films? Willow?

Kind of a watered down mixture of the other races in D&D and D&D-likes, with no particularly distinct identity. I like the trickster thing they have going on but its not a particularly compelling trait if that's the most unique thing about their culture, which it is.

Thank you this is adorable.

...

The problem is that roleplaying games generally try to distance themselves from the niche of gnomes being tiny old guys, which does sort of separate itself from the halfling niche of being tiny young guys.

It does do them very well. I don't like all the steampunk/sci-fi elements in Warcraft but in a setting like that where things can get whimsical and weird, they work perfectly.

Nah. Maybe for specific settings. But for many settings that's a bad idea. I understand why you'd say that though, a lot of the races and monsters in contemporary actually come a smaller number of creatures in the mythology its inspired by.

> 'Gnomes are to Halflings as Elves are to Humans'.
I like the idea that physiologically, halflings are actually just mini-elves and gnomes mini-dwarves, while culturally halflings are rustic pseudo-human, and gnomes' resembles a mix of dwarfish and elvish but in a way that they aren't quite either

Tall pretty people and the stout warrior aspect of dwarves. But it still sounds pretty compelling to me.

Oh yeah, I was kind of trying to be silly. That movie looks stupid to me and I don't think it should be used for reference for anything.

Though, I wouldn't mind a homebrew were gnomes are tiny old guys. Correct me if I am wrong but actual German myth gnomes are tiny. Wouldn't make a great player race in many cases, but a fun culture to encounter while adventuring.

>They're strange and small, they seek out knowledge, take and suppress any hint of it's existence if it's too dangerous for the world, and seal it away in great vaults.
Reminds me of Eberron gnomes but even cooler.

I like the idea of gnomes being literally an off-shoot of dwarf being cast-off for delving into magic and dooming dwarven or something.

Technically it's part of a series called "The Woodland Folks", with further stories detailing the animals & gnomes encountering giants, fairies, elves and other things. I had the "Woodland Folks meet the Elves" fic myself as a kid, and I've never seen the others in years.

Don't suppose any anons can track 'em down online?

I use all races (call me a pleb I know) because I just kinda realized you are always going to have that guy that wants to be something not in your setting. For gnomes, I gave them a unique history. They developed a steampunk style society that evolved further and led to the creation of abominations. After some time, they pissed off a god or two with their cocky blasphemy and got their entire kingdom wiped. Most knowledge was lost into the swamps that formed after (This comes with the side effect of forming a badass wilderness for characters to explore). Most gnome nations define themselves by that ancient empire.
Gnomes are crafty and inventive because that is the only leg up they have in a more competitive world.

They have pretty much no value in a setting if you already have halflings, and vice versa.
Halflings fucking suck too. Dwarves and goblins can already fill every niche, theme, concept, or stereotype usually associated with the manlet races all by themselves.
I also don't think I've ever seen anyone play a gnome as anything but a chaotic stupid disruptive retard.

Wich is weird, considering how much erp people try to start with my female troll.

They should go back to their 4e look.

because it's female character, also a potential giantess fetish. If I remember correctly I think female trolls were the tallest female models in horde side.

what's the deal with their eyes anyway?

They're fey creatures of unknown relationship to the eladrin, who have the same thing. It's to make them more otherworldly and visually distinguishable from halflings.

Gnomes are more magical halflings in DND. And not even that much in this edition.

Can't redeem them.

Every other day, this thread. Every. Other. Day. Whatever you're suggesting isn't sticking.

My biggest complaint with the "how do we fix gnomes/halflings" threads is that, these days, nobody uses them as an excuse to post cute female gnomes or halflings.

I'll admit I never gave gnomes a second thought until my gf started playing one in 5e. Now I can't get enough of them.

Why would they do that? Old gnome grandpas make the best Turnip Stew and Flasher Master Bruiser Mates. They also make the best Earth Mages.LoM HD remake when?

>squareroot(4)e
ftfy

Halflings should have been dropped a long time ago. They're stolen Hobbits without any Hobbit traits because they're stolen. An embarrassment.

The fact that Jan manages to somehow be an incorrigible memelord and also a well rounded character with some depth and interesting shit to him still astounds me.

Every time I go through this game I try to do a run without him, but inevitably, I see that colorful fuck in the Gov't District and it's like seeing one of my oldest, best friends again and he winds up kicking someone to the curb.

>Why is that?
Because they weren't in Lord Of The Rings

I really wish these threads would have stopped by now. All you're doing by creating these things is baiting out all the retards that think gnomes and halflings are or have ever been in any way similar, culturally or physically.

Ironically, I've been in three campaigns set in Middle Earth and every single one of them was an all-elf party.

How so?

They suffer the same problem that any short race in an RPG suffers from, they're mostly played by wacky ebin memelords or magical realm horndogs with a shortstack fetish. It's exacerbated that the former is usually the actual canon portrayal in a lot of settings nowadays. You could make them more appealing by winding them back to the more classical folklore portrayal, but honestly I just think they should be an NPC race out in the woods talking to raccoons or doing whatever a bunch of weird embodied elemental spirits gets up to.

Oh, 4e's version of them was decent, but otherwise... yeah. Even Pathfinder doesn't have anything more for them than just "they're hobbits that people like to enslave because they're small, weak and pathetic".

The gnomes in my games are the incarnated forms of eldritch horrors from the Astral Plane, trapped in pathetic, diminutive forms by the spirit of the Earth itself. Their otherworldly nature manifests in their wacky personalities, most especially their bizarre love of haberdashery. However, if a gnome experiences enough mental trauma, their "shell" cracks and their true nature begins to manifest, usually in the form of misanthropic "pranks" that mixes Jigsaw with Rube Goldberg. Crack it enough and the gnome's physical body rots into nothingness, leaving behind a black hole ringed with teeth and tendrils.