[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Growth and Shrinking

[johndallman]

Growth [10/level] is an exotic physical advantage, allowing you to increase your Size Modifier. You need to buy additional strength to support yourself, but this can have Limitations, so it isn’t bundled with the advantage.

Shrinking [5/level] is likewise an exotic physical advantage, allowing you to reduce your Size Modifier. Your strength does not change, but by default the damage you do is reduced. Both of these advantages first appeared in GURPS Supers for 3e, and have no realistic explanation; they’re for supers, super-science, magic and gods.

Each level of either ability lets you change your SM by 1, taking 1 second. You return to normal size at the same rate. By default, you only change yourself, not clothing, armour or equipment. Shrinking has the Can Carry Objects and Affects Others special enhancements, which are allowed for Growth, per Powers.

To support yourself while larger than SM 0, you need ST 5, multiplied by your height in yards. If you don’t want that ST all the time, you can buy additional ST with the Size (-10% × maximum SM, limit ‑80%) limitation, which makes it appear and disappear automatically as you grow or shrink, pro-rata with your size. There’s a special modifier for not being able to stop at intermediate sizes, which trades that off for the ability to complete your change in a single second. See p. B402 for the effects on your limb lengths, and p. B58 for bursting out of rooms or containers that are too small for your full size. There’s no rule under Growth for calculating your new weight, but the rule under Shrinking works for that too.

Shrinking normally reduces your Move, reach, damage, HP and DR pro-rata with your height. You can buy all of those off, except for reach, but this increases the cost by a total of 190%. You can also take Affects Others to bring other people with you, as well as Can Carry Objects. Finally, Shrinking has rules for calculating your new height and weight.

These advantages are, naturally, confined to characters and creatures that can have exotic powers. They’re used by DF elementals, creatures in Horror, and other strangenesses. Powers suggests buying Enhanced Move to go with Growth, and has combat rules for really tiny people, while The Weird adapts the Growth rules for creatures made of denser stuff.

Never having played supers with GURPS, I’ve never used these abilities. How have they played in your games?

[Not another shrubbery]

I don't think I've ever seen Shrinking taken by a PC in a game I've been in... sneaks and skulks usually preferred Insub or Invis. All I've done is tinker with it for builds that were never used :/ Growth was used once in a while by my players, and one of my favorite NPCs (for my old 2E Supers game) was Stilts, a pretty typical brick with Growth. Dunno if I could even find those old stat sheets now, but it would be fun to convert him to GURPS 4E.

[Crystalline_Entity]

I messed around trying to design a Sorcery spell based on Shrinking, to allow a sorcerer character to work around encumbrance limits for Warp and Jumper by taking advantage of the reduced mass/weight given by using Affliction (Advantage: Shrinking) on inanimate objects.

If I remember correctly it was surprisingly inexpensive, Shrinking 7 [35] is enough to make 3000 lbs weigh just 1 lb. Dispelling the spell might have consequences ranging from annoying to serious, but the build would allow a character to walk around with a few tons in his backpack.

[awesomenessofme1]

I figure threads like this will never have an issue with necro'ing.

Powers says that if you have Growth, you can buy Enhanced Move (Ground), and if it appears gradually, you can take the Size limitation, like increased ST. Would it make sense to allow the same for other logical traits, like DR?

[naloth]

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

Powers says that if you have Growth, you can buy Enhanced Move (Ground), and if it appears gradually, you can take the Size limitation, like increased ST. Would it make sense to allow the same for other logical traits, like DR?

I have and it doesn't break anything. It fits the source material as growing supers often get "denser" or "tougher" as they get bigger to offset how easy of a target they are.

SM really shouldn't be a "free" feature, and the way the growth/shrinking is handled presents a real problem for Supers (which conversely is where you'd probably see it the most) unless you also use KYOS. SM limitations doesn't offset the SuperST cost at all (unless MM rules are in play) and the required ST for Growth can be absurdly high.

Shrinking is very useful (with or without mods), but often not give the chance it deserves.

[awesomenessofme1]

Originally Posted by naloth

I have and it doesn't break anything. It fits the source material as growing supers often get "denser" or "tougher" as they get bigger to offset how easy of a target they are.

SM really shouldn't be a "free" feature, and the way the growth/shrinking is handled presents a real problem for Supers (which conversely is where you'd probably see it the most) unless you also use KYOS. SM limitations doesn't offset the SuperST cost at all (unless MM rules are in play) and the required ST for Growth can be absurdly high.

Shrinking is very useful (with or without mods), but often not give the chance it deserves.

The "easier to hit" part is something that I hadn't thought of. I felt a little iffy about it, because unlike ST/HP, I wasn't sure the utility actually changed, but that cinched it.

[kirbwarrior]

These two traits seem like they should merely be mirrors of each other but act so completely weirdly different that sometimes I have issue trying to figure out how to actually buy them. Like, if I have my character be SM+6 and take Shrinking 6 with Full Abilities, I can have ST30. But if I'm SM+0 and take Growth 6, now I have to have minimum ST100? If I can change from SM -6 to SM +6, should I start at one end or the other? Or somewhere in the middle if my default size is actually SM -2 because someone could take my powers away?

As for actual use, Shrinking comes up a lot on both PCs and NPCs, largely because it's cheap. Growth comes up far less because ST (even with my houserules) is plainly expensive. And the prices are fine, they make sense, but when any sort of budget comes into the picture, how many of those points are going into a single ability really matters. Especially with Growth because most of the time my players would just sink points into ST and not care about being bigger.

I might just remove the ST require for Growth. Especially when blatant supernatural effects are the cause like creating a physical hologram of yourself around yourself. I'm not even sure if players would take it more, but I feel like there's plenty of ways that Growth wouldn't require or even want more ST with the bigger size.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

These two traits seem like they should merely be mirrors of each other but act so completely weirdly different that sometimes I have issue trying to figure out how to actually buy them.

Growth and Shrinking both seem to originate in the abilities of comic book heroes. Heroes who grow characteristically seem to become stronger in proportion to their increased size; see for example Ant-Man's feats of strength in his enlarged form in Captain America: Civil War. But heroes who shrink seem to retain their full-sized strength, as with the Silver Age Atom or as with Ant-Man in the MCU movies about him. I expect that comics writers want to have the large hero be one way to do a brick, but don't want the small hero to be ineffective in a fight.

[Anthony]

Both of them are originally from Supers, and probably shouldn't exist at all, as they're just special cases of Alternate Form with weirdly different pricing.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Both of them are originally from Supers, and probably shouldn't exist at all, as they're just special cases of Alternate Form with weirdly different pricing.

Alternate Form is also one of those things which got reworked from 3e to 4e since originally you pooled advantages as the base cost and then applied the disadvantages as a temporary disadvantage.

This meant that even if your point total remained static, huge changes could still cost a lot. Whereas now if there's a net balance 0 you can change a slight bit or a huge bit and it's all the same.