What's Up with Gnome Hate?

[BreaktheStatue]

I've yet to run across it personally, but it seems like there's a pretty sizable contingent of DMs/players who hate gnome characters, some to the point of blanket banning them from games.

As someone who happens to like gnomes, for both mechanical and RP reasons, just curious as to the reason. Are there any other fantasy races you also dislike?

[Florian]

Are there any other fantasy races you also dislike?

Kender, for similar reasons.

[Millstone85]

Kender, for similar reasons.

Kender are disliked because you are supposed to forgive their kleptomania, right? How are gnomes anything like that?

I actually prefer gnomes to halflings. I feel that forest gnomes have got the halfling themes covered, and then rock and deep gnomes offer interesting alternatives.

[Kaptin Keen]

Gnomes - in their standard version - are boring. Of course I think all the races, as described by PHB, are boring, but gnomes particularly so. Gnomes in Eberron, just as an example, are awesome.

So for me, it's a flavor thing. Oh, and everything that's had the misfortune to be tainted by Dragonlance is just way beyond awful.

[Neknoh]

A lot of DM's hear Gnomes and think of Warcraft, purple beards and cooky voices, rather than small naturefolk.

[Kaptin Keen]

A lot of DM's hear Gnomes and think of Warcraft, purple beards and cook voices, rather than small naturefolk.

Ha! I'm a lot older than WoW, and the thought would simply never have occurred to me - my image of gnomes precedes WoW by two decades. But yes, I'm sure that's part of it too.

I still maintain that the gnome fluff is the worst of all the player races, and the standard is very low to begin with.

[Anonymouswizard]

As someone who happens to like gnomes, for both mechanical and RP reasons, just curious as to the reason. Are there any other fantasy races you also dislike?

I think the standard list is:
-Gnomes: people dislike either the tendency towards comic relief or the technological leanings they've had at least since Dragonlance. Proposed solution: play up the arcane magic aspect (and play up the elves' druidic magic).
-Kender: disliked because while a skilled roleplayer can make them work, their racial tendency towards kleptomania and 'innocence' make them attractive to disruptive players. Proposed solution: replace with 3.X halflings.
-Halflings: disliked because 'they rarely have a reason to go adventuring'. Proposed solution: give them mercentile leanings.
-Elves: disliked due to 'I an superior' fluff and being one of the most played races. Proposed solution: burn down the forests.
-Humans: disliked due to being boring. Proposed solution: but effort into world building.
-Half-orcs: disliked due to unfortunate backstory implications. Proposed solution.

[the_david]

I don't think I've met any people who dislike gnomes. My pet peeve is special snowflake races outside of special snowflake settings.

My idea for the Gnome Liberation Front adventure got a lot of good responses in my group. Maybe you could try something like that. (Everybody plays a gnome and the goal is to liberate your petrified friends from the gardens of rich people.)

[Mechalich]

Out of the 5 'core' D&D races 1 is humans and 3 pull their fluff heavily from Tolkien, to the point that Halflings were initially called Hobbits until legal issues were raised. Gnomes are the odd race out, and because they are the odd race out there has been no real consistency to their fluff over time. In 3e Gnomes have Bard as their favored class, largely because no one could come up with any better ideas. At the same time, Gnomes are old enough in the legacy of D&D that there is fluff accretion and it's not really acceptable to simply totally redefine their existence for a new edition they way newer and less realized races like Catfolk or Tengu might be.

Beyond that basic, 'nobody really knows what to do with us but at the same time no one can do anything truly interesting with us' paradox, gnomes have several other problems that cause people to dislike them. First, they're small, and odd-sized races tend to find reduced love in gaming simply because they make certain interactions awkward in a human-sized built environment and because they may naturally lend themselves to absurdity (Belkar is a prime example here, the idea of a 'sexy, shoeless, god of war' who can't reach high enough to stab most of the party in anything actually vital is simply comical). Second, they suffer from niche competition with Dwarves and Halflings in the 'small human' space, which is particularly bad when combined with their ill-defined fluff. This isn't unique, Hobgoblins have this problem too in that they share the 'goblinoid' space with Orcs, Goblins, and even Bugbears.


As for other races, well Kender has been mentioned and they are indeed truly horrifying alongside several other Dragonlance origin races like Tinker Gnomes and Gully Dwarves (the latter being so problematic isn't against forum rules to even talk about why).

Beyond that I generally find that 'construct' races such as Warforged, Androids, and Wyrwoods have been done poorly, with insufficient interrogation of what it would mean to actually be such a being whose sapient existence bypasses the majority of the Hierarchy of Needs from inception.

[Khedrac]

Amongst the ex Living Greyhawk players I know, Gnomes have a reputation for always being evil.

It's not true, there are neutral and good NPC gnomes in the LG adventure set, but enough are evil (and usually pretending not to be) that their general reaction on sight of a gnome is to assume that they are actually evil and should probably be destroyed.

[BreaktheStatue]

Yeah, I get reluctance to the whole Kender/Gnome klepto thing, or just seeking to avoid annoying RP characteristics...but why not just say "You can be a gnome, but don't use it as an excuse to be obnoxious or he's dead."

[Yora]

People hear gnomes and think of tinkering kenders. I think that's all there is to it.

And kender are an abomination.

Poor gnomes.

[Talyn]

I hate gnomes as a player race - I am happy to have them in my campaign world as NPCs. Feywild tricksters (like they did for them in 4e) works nicely.

The reason why is because there is no narrative or thematic space for gnomes that couldn't be done with either halflings or dwarves just as easily, and it makes my world-building less cluttered if I don't have to accommodate yet another intelligent, crafty, civilized species.

[Jophiel]

As someone who happens to like gnomes, for both mechanical and RP reasons, just curious as to the reason. Are there any other fantasy races you also dislike?

As noted, gnomes never started with much of a culture. In 1e, they were basically forest dwarves, sharing the same skills like detecting new stonework or sloping tunnels but less effectively. But they also didn't really have the same "dwarf" feel to them which made them both an odd man out and redundant at the same time. The most you could say about them was something something practical jokes and illusionists. Then you had Krynn which started the steampunk tinkerer thing which doesn't do much for me but, if that's what you like, then at least they have a place in society. But even now with 5e, I don't have a real feeling for what a gnomish settlement or village would be like. And, again, they feel redundant with halflings and dwarves as small races and elves having fey connections. I allow them in my game but they're basically tolerated hangers-on in Elvish society with no real home or civilization of their own.

I have no interest in Tieflings or Dragonborn -- both feel like the sort of edgelord nonsense people would come up with decades ago with "My guy is a half-dragon, half-demon vampire werewolf paladin with dual-wielded vorpal Holy Avengers!". And I really dislike the amount of draconic and dragonblood critters these days. It makes dragons feel cheap and baseline to me, much like how humans are used to mix up and make centaurs and medusa and Yuan-Ti and merfolk and a billion other things. That's fine because humans in fantasy worlds are generic; I don't want my dragons to be generic. At least in my own world, I can control it and no Dragonborn, go back to old kobolds, change Dragonblood sorcerers to "Elemental", etc. Save the dragons for the real thing.

[King of Nowhere]

At the same time, Gnomes are old enough in the legacy of D&D that there is fluff accretion and it's not really acceptable to simply totally redefine their existence

that's an interesting point to be raised here, because me and my table have never used any of the official fluff very much. Sure, there are some expectations, but if a DM totally changed the fluff of some race, nobody would complain. In fact, I did, and while it took my players a little adjusting to internalize that, for example, you can't tell the alignment of a dragon by its color, they got into it well.

Generally, I don't like too much adherence to official fluff. It has too much of a "been there, done it" feel. I'd rather use the mechanical building blocks to create something original.

in a human-sized built environment and because they may naturally lend themselves to absurdity (Belkar is a prime example here, the idea of a 'sexy, shoeless, god of war' who can't reach high enough to stab most of the party in anything actually vital is simply comical).

that makes no sense.
how is that any different than your average medium-sized fighter skewering large ogres? heck, you routinely fight stuff up to three size categories bigger than you, four sometimes, and nobody says "hold on, this sword is too short to reach the dragon's vitals, there's no way I can deal alll that damage to it", or "it picked me up with its mouth and chewed me, how can i possibly be still alive (and with only mild damage taken)?".
No, those are part "high level characters are superhuman", and part acceptable breaks from reality.
But suddenly, throw a gnome in and it's not acceptable anymore!
"oh, woe on me, I am one meter tall and so I have no hopes against this 10-meters dragon. If only I was one meter and a half, that would totally change everything!"

EDIT:

The reason why is because there is no narrative or thematic space for gnomes that couldn't be done with either halflings or dwarves just as easily, and it makes my world-building less cluttered if I don't have to accommodate yet another intelligent, crafty, civilized species.

How is that different from any of the dozens upon dozens of published races? Don't they clutter the worldbuilding too?
(My answer is yes, and therefore most of them don't exist in my campaign. Now, if in session 0 a player wanted to play one such race, I could insert is, all right, but as a rule of thumb, non-core races do not exist unless stated otherwise")

[Anonymouswizard]

People hear gnomes and think of tinkering kenders. I think that's all there is to it.

And kender are an abomination.

Poor gnomes.

It's a bad hobbit. Unfair to the gnomes as well.

FWIW I think that they could pull something interesting out of the tendencies towards illusions and mechanics. In fact in many ways Gnomes are more dwarf-like then Dwarves, remember that in Germanic myths it was the dwarves who were great magicians and crafters who made many things, including Thor's hammer.

[AvatarVecna]

You're right that gnomes are more in touch with general mythology tricksters...but D&D isn't primarily inspired by those, but rather by Lord Of The Rings. That leaves us with humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, and hobbits halflings. Add gnomes into the mix and they just kinda come together as a mish-mash that's distinct enough to be worth separating but a lot of people find annoying. You could play a skinny dwarf, or a short elf, or just...a halfling and you'd be hitting a lot of the same beats, but where Halflings fall into the "small guy who has to outwit the big dumb guys" by virtue of their size and their pluck, gnomes are inherently tricky, and as a species lean towards the traits of the fae that people really don't like. It's kinda like having the option to play a pixie of the Seelie Court, but also you've got racial options explicitly and implicitly rewarding you for really RPing that exact kind of behavior that made the fae carefully-navigated obstacles at best and outright capricious antagonists with a non-mortal concept of morality at worst. When a friend first described gnomes to me as "they're like classic fae from Arthurian legend, except they're really friendly and people love 'em", my response was "so, nothing like classic fae", and oh joy it turns out we were both wrong - me for thinking they were different, and him for thinking that was charming.

Of course, there's also that some players (myself included) hear the word gnome, and their first thought can be less "classic fae, but friendly*" and more "you're playing a lawn ornament?"

[Neknoh]

Personally, I skew my gnomes into magical tinkerers, even as mages or warriors.

Not full on dwarves with runes and pure mechanical effects, and not full on elves in magical ivory towers, rather something in between.

Gnomes like making things which they then imbue with magic, a bird toy made by a gnome will not fly through clockwork and cogs, but rather through enchantment.

A gnome tool will be less refined than a dwarven one, but will be enchanted in some small way to be equally good.

Gnomes are played like the elves/dwarves of norse mythology rather than gygaxian dwarves.

It also differs them from halflings as well.

[The Jack]

This wasn't exactly I was thinking of, but it fits

[Jay R]

The main reason I prefer humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits* is that I'm interested in them totally apart from D&D. I've played an elf that was raised away from any other elves, and knew nothing of elven culture. But I treated him like a Wendy Pini elf; that's still playing a role I loved before I come to the table.

The truth is that I don't have any favorite gnome characters from literature. Nobody like Bilbo, Sam, Frodo, Legolas, Elrond, Cutter, Skywise, Puck, Trumpkin, Gimli, Thorin, Andvari, Doli, Doc, Dopey, Casanunda, etc. From Paracelsus to the present, no author has presented me a gnome type that looks like it would be fun to play. Certainly not the earthmen of Narnia, the pests of Harry Potter, or the nomes of Oz.

So all I have to go on is D&D fluff, and I never went to D&D for a D&D-only creation.

Similarly, I would never play a hobgoblin unless he could be green, small and quick, and go out walking with his black thorn stick.

After 44 years of D&D, I am currently playing a gnome for the first time. I'm using as much of the fluff as possible, but I'm using it to bring in ideas from other literary non-humans. Two of his names are Doli and Gwystyl (from Prydain's Fair Folk) and the name he uses around elves is one I invented from Sindarin. While I'll never tell anybody at the table, his character is built primarily around Robin Goodfellow's playfulness and Skywise's curiosity.

[And I've built in a tribute to Alan Rickman that won't come out for a long time.]

* Yes, yes, I know. The PHB says "halfling". When I started playing, they were called hobbits, and we played them because we loved hobbits. Then the Tolkien estate sued and said that TSR couldn't make any money off of their intellectual property. But I'm not making any money from it, and in my games, they are still hobbits.

[gkathellar]

There's a lengthy collection off specific reasons, but I think the central issues are that people feel they're out-of-place, ill-defined, and sort of annoying in most of their implementations.

There's an argument to be made that they exist in fantasy games entirely as a particularly weird and unasked-for D&D-ism (although the other side of that coin is that tricksy magical little people occur in mythology all over the world, and gnomes have at least a vague relationship to that archetype).

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'll admit I was a gnome-hater for a long time.

All the characters I saw using the race were obnoxious (playing up either the "mad scientist" or the "trickster/kender" archetypes or just plain cartoonish). They didn't fit into my world at all and were only there for legacy reasons in version 1. So when I did a time-skip, I genocided them. They existed in history, but were extinct.

I've backed off that position now--now they're just rare (in the main play area). Gnomes are the result of goblin tribes being exposed to large amounts of "fey" spirits, the kami of nature. This mutates them into gnomes, where the type of gnome depends on the exact nature of the fey influence. They do breed true and occur at the tribe level unlike aasimar, tieflings, or genasi, all of whom are of similar origins (stemming from humans) except celestial, fiendish, or elemental influenced--all of these rarely breed true and only occur in individuals rather than groups.

[Jophiel]

(although the other side of that coin is that tricksy magical little people occur in mythology all over the world, and gnomes have at least a vague relationship to that archetype).

The problem is that, without more than "magical trickster", they make fine one-off NPCs but lackluster PCs. And you can't swing a dead displacer beast in a Monster Manual without hitting a dozen other magical fey tricksters which takes us back to the "redundant" issue. It's unfortunate that one somewhat unique trait they were given (steampunk tinkerers) is also one of the more obnoxious things about them.

In the Paksennarion novels, gnomes are super-lawful and orderly. Their stonework abilities rival the dwarfs' but their aesthetics are Soviet-utilitarian blandness versus the richly decorated and gem-encrusted dwarven architecture. The gnomes are also superior scholars and military tacticians as well as being traders renown for their fairness. "Measure for measure" is their creed and favors or gifts are very rarely given -- a gnome given aid will expect to pay you back for it and a gnome rescuing you will expect payment. I liked that take on them since it gave them a society both fairly unique yet understandable. It also helped that dwarven/elvish society is barely touched on so it didn't feel as though they were stepping on anyone's established toes.

[Xuc Xac]

And I really dislike the amount of draconic and dragonblood critters these days. It makes dragons feel cheap and baseline to me, much like how humans are used to mix up and make centaurs and medusa and Yuan-Ti and merfolk and a billion other things.

For a game called "Dungeons & Dragons", the dragons should be a lot more common at least as far as PCs are concerned. Maybe there aren't a lot of dragons in the world, but adventurers should be running into them regularly.

Gygax sold us a bill of goods!

[Jophiel]

Dragons got second billing for a reason!

Now, "Raisin Bran" -- there's a legitimate complaint.

[Deophaun]

There is no such thing as gnome hate. There is, however, a psychosis where people don't murder the things on site.

[Talyn]

How is that different from any of the dozens upon dozens of published races? Don't they clutter the worldbuilding too?
(My answer is yes, and therefore most of them don't exist in my campaign. Now, if in session 0 a player wanted to play one such race, I could insert is, all right, but as a rule of thumb, non-core races do not exist unless stated otherwise")

It really isn't. Like you, I don't use races that aren't in the core rulebooks in my campaign world, for that exact reason.

[Xuc Xac]

It really isn't. Like you, I don't use races that aren't in the core rulebooks in my campaign world, for that exact reason.

I don't think being in the core rulebook is a valid reason for including them. I pick the races that I think are appropriate for the setting and those are the only ones that exist.

[Jophiel]

It really isn't. Like you, I don't use races that aren't in the core rulebooks in my campaign world, for that exact reason.

Unfortunately for 5e DMs who hate gnomes, they're not only in the core rulebook, they're even in the "Common races" section instead of the "Uncommon, go ask your DM" section

[Millstone85]

Unfortunately for 5e DMs who hate gnomes, they're not only in the core rulebook, they're even in the "Common races" section instead of the "Uncommon, go ask your DM" section

Gnomes are in the 5e PHB, but they are listed in Uncommon Races.