Context: I was diagnosed as autistic as a child and feel that's important to mention.
For a number of years I and a friend have been working on a fantasy tabletop role playing system on and off in our free time. Think Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Shadow of the Demon Lord, etc ... In the past couple months we have made a very large amount of headway and are getting into the actual play testing stages. We are currently at the point of adding a lot of meaningful content to play test including Player Ancestries (humans elves dwarves goblins etc...). The way ancestries currently work is each ancestry has three things that it gives your character and one thing you can choose to take from a list of ancestry specific abilities.
Now we arrive at the gnome in the room. I don't particularly like gnomes. I don't dislike them either, I just have never really cared about them. The only gnomes in fiction I think are remotely interesting are Paizo's where the entire race is cursed to stay motivated and happy or they become crippling depressed, ostracized by society for risk of getting infected with sad, and die. However, I don't want to rip off someone else's universe so I want to find my own way to take these guys. To that end I'm wondering if using them as an allegory for autism may make them more interesting and also be drawing from something that I can write from experience.
My worry is that I do want to eventually release this game into the world one day and I can see easily where "gnomes are coded with autistic traits" could easily become "game author compares autistic people to gnomes".
There is also the option of just not including gnomes at all, this is the easiest solution by far but comes at the cost of disappointing a few members of my primary game group who really likes gnomes.
Thoughts, opinions, comments, and criticism are all welcome.
Also any other gnome related thoughts are incredibly welcome.
I tend to think world building should explain why certain races in an RPG behave the way they do. If your world building includes reasons why gnomes behave in a way where there is overlap with autistic traits then I don't see the harm.
What traits are you referring to? Are they more isolated and keep to themselves? Explain what happened to their race to encourage that behavior. Also, just because a race is isolated, doesn't mean they want that- sometimes they are forced into isolation and it's not a natural thing for them. Are they tinkerers? How did they get started in that and where do they get materials? How do they contribute to the world as a whole? If there's an option to exclude them outright, then it feels like there might be a hole in the lore of your world.