Why are D&D style manlet/totally not hobbit "gnomes" so much more common/popular in fantasy games than the actually teeny tiny lil feller gnomes of fairy tales etc?

>>96157317 (OP)
>why is (thing from the most popular fantasy game) so common in fantasy games?
gee whillikers anon what could the correlation be

>>96157317 (OP)
I wanted to say that it's because teeny tiny fellers never achieved anything of merit but then again neither did manlets so I'm stumped.

>>96157327
If you weren't a retarded dipshit, you'd be able to understand that the question clearly is about why the upsized gnomes took precedent over the more fairy tale accurate tiny gnomes.

>>96157355
the answer is the same either way einstein

>>96157448
You are free to fuck off from the thread if you don't actually want to discuss the topic.

>>96157317 (OP)
Because Gary's initial playerbase were all diehard Tolkien fans even after he made major lore for the gnomes that drew from Laputa of Gulliver's Travels.

>>96157338
What do you mean by not achieving anything? Classic gnomes are big part of old fairytales, household guardian spirits and what not.

Tiny PCs open up a number of complications that game designers and module writers don't care to deal with, because time and word count wait for no man.

>>96157577
If you want the big climax of your campaign to be the players pissing into milk to make go sour then by all means, have your players play manlets.

>>96157517
If that were the case Gnomes would be raven haired elves.

>>96157317 (OP)
Because the nerds in 1971 were referencing THE BOOKS THEY WERE READING AT THE TIME when making up the bullshit that will be Chainmail then D&D.

Go blame their Childhood choice of books.

Go blame the people in 1990s not making a more complete set of monster for a TTRPG game that should have overshadowed Dungeons & Dragons so it would have prevented this Hobbit saturation over actual European Gnome folk tales.

It's easier to blame that make something

>>96157317 (OP)
Why are you nogames?

>>96157317 (OP)
because they don't work very well within a ruleset or for what a rpg is supposed to do.

>>96157317 (OP)
The former can believably be heroic adventurers. The latter are cutesy sidekicks at best, pure window dressing at most. Same reason why other Tiny-sized races like sprites and pixies never took off.

>>96157609
>>96160094
>>96160121
Are there any games that focus on playing as a tiny creature like a pixie or a gnome?

>>96158368
>Go blame their Childhood choice of books.
Gary was 33 in 1971.

>>96157317 (OP)

Weren't gnomes something put off just because they wanted a smaller race with magical aptitude?

>>96164228
In dnd and it's offshoot settings gnomes are basically just magic halflings

>>96164306

Not even that, I half-remember Gygax and Anderson wanting to have a small race with a magical angle and coming up with gnomes.

Which is... not the best idea as far as themes go, but gnomes were kinda fucked up as a choice anyway. Poortvielt book came out in the same year of dnd, amusingly enough, and that is probably the only thing that actually characterize gnome as SOMETHING relatively defined. I hardly think before then gnome as a word was something that you could put a characteristic on and say "this is what they are in folklore". Maybe magical house dwellers?

And then the book came out (and after that various animated versions and shit) and gnomes were 15 cm tall nature-attuned mary sues with a knack for mechanical thinking (but ecological, not like you evil humans!). Which... is not exactly what you can dig materials for a race in DND.

>>96157317 (OP)
>why is a race that exists in games more popular in games than a race that does not exist in games?

Gee, I dunno. Fucking moron.

>>96164444
See>>96157355

>>96164421
Gnomes in OD&D were originally just a monster you could encounter - smaller dwarves that hoarded treasure. They only became a player race in AD&D because Gygax wanted more racial options

>“I added gnomes to D&D to broaden the choices for non-human PCs, as I did in AD&D. This was done because a number of players, myself included, were tired of having so many dwarves, elves, and halflings in the group of adventurers. In my campaign a party of 12 would have three front rank halflings, a second rank of dwarves, elves in the third rank, and the fourth rank the humans…” (Gygax 2002 178)

They remained "smaller, illusion-focused dwarves" until Dragonlance gave them an entirely unrelated identity as tinkerers and artificers, which became the new standard and spread to things like Warcraft. After that, they wallowed in this nebulous, disassociative space until 4e decided they should be connected to the feywild because 4e wanted more fey-aligned races that weren't Elves. And so you have two unrelated gnometypes (tinker gnomes vs fey gnomes) which got solidified in 5e as Forest and Rock Gnomes, but which have little enough to do with each other and basically nothing to do with classical Poortvielt, Paracelsian and European folklore gnomes.

>>96164572

Interesting.

>>96157317 (OP)
Take a wild guess

>>96164792
I don’t think gen-xers and boomers have played a tomtenisse in their games either anon-kun.

>>96157317 (OP)
Be honest /tg/, left or right?

>>96165623
Left was an early fap

>>96165623
Both at the same time while the elf watches from the cuck chair.

>>96157317 (OP)
because actual gnomes would be too op.

>oh, the local lord annoyed the gnome player?
>gee too bad, now he is Fae cursed to die of having his hair and teeth growing into his head the wrong way

>oh look, the party member forget an esoteric rule of hospitality?
>now the gnome has summoned an army of redcaps.

>>96165623

Classic gnomes in modern day fantasy Y/N?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhQwFjyz4Wc

Gnomes are cool solely because they come from alchemy or whatever and I like garden gnomes

>>96160135
Do "furry adventurer" games like Pugmire and Humblewood count? I've never played them but the minis are neat, might have some interesting mechanics for being the size of a mouse.

>>96157317 (OP)
The gnomes in >muh setting are a cross between the classic whimsical red hatted forest dweller and The International Jewish Conspiracy:
>strange connection to woods and other wild liminial spaces
>also live exclusively in cities or hidden ethnic enclaves
>wear peasant clothing and a culturally-mandated (red) hat
>use their clannish nature exclusive connections with each other to dominate the money-lenders' trade
>might be older that any other race in the setting; commonly discuss forbidden knowledge amongst themselves
>old ahead of their time, universally ugly, but noone has ever seen a gnome die of natural causes
>talk to each other in a mysterious secret language that outsiders are forbidden to learn
>have a conspiracy between their religious elites to create a new Promised Land and bring about the End of Days
This is far from the only conspiracy in the setting, but it is one of the most effective, thanks to how widespread yet cohesive the Gnomes are as a race
>hate, disrupt, and avoid mechanically complex devices
>seek to disrupt and degrade their host nation - especially the upper classes - in order to effectively manipulate them
etc
I don't have any gnome pictures atm so have this Lich instead