[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Fat, Overweight, Skinny and Very Fat

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Races (including engineered genotypes, android designs, etc.) can’t be Skinny by the rules, because Skinny is relative to racial norm

This restriction has actually been softened in later stuff - notably, for example, the ghoul racial template in Horror has Skinny.

[khorboth]

I had a fighter-type in a DF game who started as a former gladiator turned bar bouncer.

He had ST14 with HP20 and overweight. As the game went through the first few months of heavy travel and he started exercising, (he was also hidebound) I bought up the rest of ST and bought off overweight to reflect him getting back into fighting trim. It worked well.

The combination of overweight and gigantism made armor for him a great challenge for a while.

[Toptomcat]

I sometimes use Skinny for athletes in weight-classed combat sports like boxing and kickboxing, where having a really long reach relative to your weight class can produce fighters that look like scarecrows. This can be kind of counterintuitive, since it's not a classic disad for people with high ST, but people like Hearns and Dieselnoi definitely qualify.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by smurf

limitation
Inconvient body position -10%

Fantasy or Sci Fi races may have 'tails or tails that can hold things etc'. But this is an inconvient place to have an extra arm. Trousers, pants, skirts, dresses and plus the problems with chairs (as opposed to stools), including car seats, bus seats or fair ground rides.

Uh, so how do I apply that to centaurs with their big butts?

[Bengt]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

It depends on the skills you use. Fat might be a desirable advantage for a sumo wrestler, not so much for a cat burglar or shadower.

That's the point, disadvantage pricing generally assumes that you don't pick them if they hamper your concept too much, hence a given bonus has a larger absolute value than the same penalty. Except for these, which seems to assume that they'll only ever be taken by professional shadowers who never gets in a fight or tries to swim. Any other negatives to being fat are either house rules (e.g. squeezing through tight spaces) or separate disadvantages (e.g. Social Stigma) that are not cowered by the price for these. It's really mystifying.

[smurf]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

That was certainly the idea with the latter. Races (including engineered genotypes, android designs, etc.) can’t be Skinny by the rules, because Skinny is relative to racial norm — but Skinny has some specific effects on things like knockback. So one needs a racial feature that produces those same effects.

Arguably that’s a glitch in the rules. To fix in the 5th ed that’ll never happen.

I read it that certain disadvantages should be applied to the campaign norm.

If you were playing fantasy an Elf could be skinny to all other races, a Dwarf would have Dwarfism to all other races. To stretch to say that in the Dwarf land no one has the Dwarf disadvantage until they pop out into Elf land or vice versa with Elves is a bit skewed.

Skinny's effects on Knockback can be replicated by the racial disadvantage called Skinny and is the same -10pts. Let's not reinvent the wheel.

[smurf]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

Uh, so how do I apply that to centaurs with their big butts?

You could argue that Centaurs have a 'Gigantism' Disadvantage coupled with inconvient body shape.

A Centaur has extra Legs and each of those legs would have inconvient body limitation applie to them.

Unless you have 'small' Centaurs a Centaur is just as big as a horse. Extra Weight or Density should be considered.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Additionally, following the game mechanics progression of Skinny, Overweight, Fat, and Very Fat, there could be three additional disadvantages:

Underweight (-1 point)
You are at the extreme low end of normal mass for your height. You must take the lowest possible mass for an Average build on the Build table. Your effective ST is reduced by -10% to resist knockback, to resist being picked up or moved or to “throw your weight around.” This also gives you -1 to Swimming rolls to stay afloat and to HT rolls to resist the effects of extreme cold. On the positive side, if you are a mammalian creature, you get a +1 bonus to resist Aging rolls if you have spent most of your life underweight.

If you miss a meal after spending FP on physical activities, roll vs. HT to avoid taking double the normal FP loss, at -1 per 3 missed meals. When you lose more than half of your FP score due to starvation, roll vs. HT, at -1 per missed meal. On a failed roll, you become Skinny.

Very Skinny (-10 points)
You are skeletally thin. You automatically have the minimum possible mass for your height under the Skinny line on the Build table, or half the normal weight for your height, whichever is less. This doubles knockback and reduces your effective ST by -30% to resist being picked up or moved or to “throw your weight around.” You get -3 to Disguise - or to Shadowing, if you are trying to follow someone in a crowd, -3 to Swimming rolls to stay afloat and -2 to HT rolls to resist the effects of extreme heat or cold.

Extremely Fat (-10 points)
You are at the extreme end of Very Fat. Your minimum mass is equal to the highest mass for your height on the Very Fat line of the Build table. At most, it is double that. You get -4 to Disguise - or to Shadowing, if you are trying to follow someone in a crowd. However, your extra fat gives you +6 to Swimming rolls, and a +40% bonus to ST to resist knockback

Would you be proposing the fixed -2/+1/+2/+3 to ST from the existing traits be changed to percentages like these?

I don't even know why it's ST, isn't HP used to represent mass, and used when you're not actively resisting? Sumos probably buy up HP past ST and rely on that to resist knockback, so a bonus to HP to resist knockback would be more useful for them.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

This restriction has actually been softened in later stuff - notably, for example, the ghoul racial template in Horror has Skinny.

It’s long had a tendency to slip into racial templates. That doesn’t make it right by the rules as written, it just means that some writers tend to forget the rules as written.

Arguably, some racial templates ought to be reclassified as “variant human” templates. They’re not actually different species, or rather, they’re not perceived as such; they’re perceived as humans with odd features. So a ghoul or a zero-G spacer can have things like Skinny. But setting the borderline between the categories might take a bit of thought.

[Bruno]

"Race" vs "race varient" or "sub-race" or "original-race-with-a-curse" or "a common set of physical features that generally result from growing up under certain extreme physical conditions" or "traits a given culture adds on to all children via genetic engineering" is going to be endlessly arguable, as it's going to be as much campaign dependent as anything.

I suppose arguably the templates with Skinny are simple metatraits, not racial templates (which are a subcategory of metatrait).

We don't have a firm definition of "species" IRL but we do get to arbitrarily draw lines in RPGs and know we're always right - and we also get to say "well, Skinny gets much of its point cost from being a minority who can't get clothes and stuff that fit easily, so this small group of elves scattered in a vast sea of humanity still have all the Skinny problems and should get the same points". Technically the disadvantage you give them wouldn't be Skinny - it would just cost exactly the same and have the same game mechanical effects, but it would be an exotic physical trait, and have some very specific conditions before you can take it.