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

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by Bruno

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.

Hence why I renamed my use of "Fat" for racial templates.

[Michael Cule]

Speaking as someone who has one of these disads in real life, I really dislike the fourth edition changes.

I could understand the 'being fat uses up your encumbrance' model and the current one just doesn't commit to anything mechanical that makes sense to someone who lives with excessive body fat.

True, I could never manage to make the options available in third edition modelme. Not without giving me ludicrous levels of ST that I don't have. Perhaps fourth edition's 'Lifting Strength' would work better. Being weighed down builds up the legs but not the upper body strength.

There's a lot more variety in the degree and the effects of obesity than GURPS wants to model. Sometimes I think there's more than modern medicine wants to admit.

As I get older though, I am more willing to admit that the limits on HT for very fat people may have something in them.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

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.

In the case of the Ghoul template, at least, it was specifically brought up during the Horror playtest, and Kromm explicitly signed off on it. So I think it's more a matter of the RAW being in need of a bit of errata.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

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.

I can certainly see this working for some templates, but I don't think it applies for the ghoul - it's noted as having Appearance (Monstrous), and the customization notes suggest reducing that to (Ugly) would be necessary for one to pass as human.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Plane

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

Sorry for using the percentages to ST rather than the generic -1, it's a HR which I've found is more reasonable when dealing with very strong or weak characters.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I could understand the 'being fat uses up your encumbrance' model and the current one just doesn't commit to anything mechanical that makes sense to someone who lives with excessive body fat.

There's also the confounding factor that many effects that we associate with obesity alone are actually a combination of obesity and lack of physical fitness.

There are people who, for whatever reason, are in amazing shape but are still medically overweight/obese.

In GURPS terms, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assign levels of Lifting ST (Only to support body mass, -80%) to a relatively active, but obese, person, to counter most of the drawbacks of being overweight/fat.

This would allow you to model someone who is obese but can still walk or run relatively quickly, even though they probably suck at performing tasks like climbing or doing pull-ups.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I can certainly see this working for some templates, but I don't think it applies for the ghoul - it's noted as having Appearance (Monstrous), and the customization notes suggest reducing that to (Ugly) would be necessary for one to pass as human.

A ghoul that's made from a human is in a similar situation as a werewolf that's made from a human, or a vampire that's made from a human. It would be pretty valid to say that an elf werewolf uses the same template as a human werewolf, merely adding it to their Elf template to get "Elf Werewolf". Same with vampire, and if appropriate to the campaign, same with ghouls.

Ghouls are a little funky as they can be an independent kind of entity and people can turn into one purely by ghoulish behavior, and they're still the same kind of ghoul (at least, some versions of the Arabic ghoul - I believe Lovecraftian ghouls are a separate species). Standard Fantasy Ghouls are just another kind of undead, and better treated as a metatrait than a race.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Ghouls are a little funky as they can be an independent kind of entity and people can turn into one purely by ghoulish behavior, and they're still the same kind of ghoul (at least, some versions of the Arabic ghoul - I believe Lovecraftian ghouls are a separate species).

Pickman, at least, seems to have become a ghoul by behavior altering his physiology. So... bit of both?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Sorry for using the percentages to ST rather than the generic -1, it's a HR which I've found is more reasonable when dealing with very strong or weak characters.

I think following the pattern of a penalty to ST (or HP) whether % or fixed number would work best for your proposed Very Skinny. Doubling knockback won't do anything if you don't get knocked back to begin with, and penalties allow knockback to happen with less damage.

Your idea of a % sounds good though. -3 or +3 to ST means a lot more for a ST 3 being than a ST 30 being, that's either 100% or 10%.

I'd like to see "easier to knock around" or "harder to knock around" isolated as their own traits.