Daring to ask the what does SM do question.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I would really like for some really tall strong and short people to give their input.

Oh, are we talking about reality now? In reality, the effect of size is essentially free ST (if you take two people who don't work out, which is a fair definition of 0 points spent on ST, and one is bigger than the other, the bigger one will be stronger), and the incidental effects (mostly reach vs difficulty fitting in small spaces) sort of balance out.

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I would really like for some really tall strong and short people to give their input. Which problems are avoidable and which aren't, for example.

Drawbacks: Cannot move properly in many showers because the things for holding soap exactly at hip height for me.

Benefits: Extremely easy to get a job. "I'm not sure if quali... can you get that top shelf? Welcome aboard."

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Anthony

In my experience, +SM provides a bunch of fairly irrelevant benefits with substantial drawbacks, and -SM provides a bunch of substantial benefits with almost totally irrelevant drawbacks

The operative word here is "experience."

My experience with low-SM characters is that they mostly get nothing good or bad out of their SM . . . they just are, and their SM rarely matters. My experience with high-SM characters is that the bonuses to be hit and seen aren't nearly as serious as they sound (I'd price them at -5 and -2 points, respectively), while the ST discounts, increased Reach, and (especially!) grappling benefits are actively abused, and the ability to overrun objects and people, soak up poison, and generally carry on like an elephant is pushed well past perk level. In one campaign, things reached the point where even my normally non-grumbly players were a little grumbly about how the high-SM warrior was far too effective for his points – and said fighter was not built by a system guru or an optimizer.

Also in my experience, the equipment and life-support changes are basically quirk-level at most. High-SM characters purchase so much cheap ST with the intent to become combat monsters that even with overweight gear, they aren't slowed, while consumption is one of the first things that gaming groups get annoyed with and stop tracking. Low-SM characters actually get screwed more by gear scaling (their weapons and armor aren't worth having), and tend to avoid gear and thus its effects – and once more, tracking consumption ends up being too much bother to care about. All of this stuff ends up set aside except when invoked as a plot device, and then it's almost inevitably inconvenient in a binary way (your SM is or is not 0), not in any way that scales meaningfully.

Were I pricing SM, then – and I've yet to be convinced that I should – I would throw in a cost to offset the easy abuse of the benefits of high SM by those who would willingly select it (i.e., "tanks"), and I would downplay that actual in-play disadvantage value of adding SM to rolls to be seen (I'd follow the lead of Noisy and call it -2 points/level) and hit (+1 to hit rarely helps the vast majority of foes who are mooks accomplish much of anything useful). Whereas low SM mostly seems to do very little either way (the chicken and cat characters did like being hard to see, but suffered a lot from being worthless once grabbed).

I could see experience pushing things in other directions in, say, space adventures where cabin and passageway size, and life support, aren't ignorable quirk-level issues, while being monstrously effective at melee and especially grappling isn't terribly important. My experiences lean more toward fantasy, where being a huge ogre – with piles of ST and HP, striking from far away in melee, trampling and pinning anybody who falls down, and brushing off poison – is a rather overwhelming advantage, while being a tiny animal is mostly done for the kawaii factor. I'm not saying that my experience is more valid than anyone else's, but I will point out that fantasy is the genre that sells the most product.

[dataweaver]

Yeah; grumbly players is a much better indicator of how something should be priced than theoretical upside-vs-downside analysis.

I would also bear in mind the fact that players will tend to find ways to play up the strengths of any traits they have while finding ways to downplay or circumvent the drawbacks, unless you've got something in play to encourage them to to play up the weaknesses as well (which could range from the Challenges option mentioned in You Might Have a Point There to just the sheer fun that the weakness brings to the table on its own).

[ErhnamDJ]

My experience in DF--which is the only place where I've seen this come up--has been that players avoid taking the larger sizes because it's just not worth it to double the weight of your armor.

As far as size goes, SM -1 provides an extremely attractive benefit in that it greatly reduces the weight of your armor. So much so that the halfling barbarian looks like one of the few ways to make the barbarian almost competitive with the other templates. Except it still spends forty points on Outdoorsman. If you house rule Outdoorsman down to 5/level (perhaps by removing one of the skills) or remove it from the template entirely, then the halfling barbarian looks very attractive.

[Kromm]

The issues of playing up strengths and playing down weaknesses guide my hand a lot as a developer. I ask, "Right, here are the detached, mechanistic costs for the downsides and upsides . . . but how far can the downsides be suppressed and the upsides be pushed?" Then I price the trait assuming player selection with intent, and ensure that when downsides are maximally suppressed and upsides are maximally abused, the trait still doesn't seem "too good." If that breaks the more moderate cases, I don't let that worry me – people don't have to take the trait if they believe it's "broken" and aren't contemplating how to build their character around it, and I see that as being for that best, as it discourages people from tossing in a trait without thinking about its ramifications.

To be honest, one thing that FATE-style Aspects do better than GURPS traits is allow variability of importance. They have no cost, and they're as central or as peripheral as the player and GM wish. Such thinking strongly influences my feelings about SM . . . a mean GM or devious player can make any SM different from 0 a huge drag or a massive benefit, but the effects come less from the rules than from the gamers' legalistic case prep.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

My experience in DF--which is the only place where I've seen this come up--has been that players avoid taking the larger sizes because it's just not worth it to double the weight of your armor.

I can see this, but when in one of my own campaigns I inflicted double armor weight on the SM +1 barbarian, the player just shrugged and said, "Well, I'm taking ST 30 anyway, so even with double armor weight, I'm less than half as encumbered as the ST 13, SM 0 guy with the same DR, and I'm saving 20 points on ST." The SM 0 guy did have 150 points in stuff other than ST, and it was in fact almost entirely combat-related (DX, notably), yet he wasn't as effective in a fight despite being played by a more experienced gamer. I do sometimes think that people downplay the lethality of the high-SM/high-ST combo and overstate the downside of armor weight ("I plan to stand here and block and parry, not dodge" isn't nearly as bad as it sounds unless all battles are on infinite featureless plains where everyone is free to run around and use missiles).

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I could see experience pushing things in other directions in, say, space adventures where cabin and passageway size, and life support, aren't ignorable quirk-level issues, while being monstrously effective at melee and especially grappling isn't terribly important. My experiences lean more toward fantasy, where being a huge ogre – with piles of ST and HP, striking from far away in melee, trampling and pinning anybody who falls down, and brushing off poison – is a rather overwhelming advantage, while being a tiny animal is mostly done for the kawaii factor. I'm not saying that my experience is more valid than anyone else's, but I will point out that fantasy is the genre that sells the most product.

That's probably the issue. I'm currently playing in Transhuman Space. My shell is a normal SM+0 human. The GM definitely isn't going out of his way to emphasize SM. And yet already I've felt that being human-sized is something of a luxury in many cases:

• A 2×2×2 cabin is way more spacious for someone of SM-1 or smaller.
• The Little Dragons can get into spaces where I can't (and so I had to teleoperate a smaller cybershell instead).
• If you attach a thruster to your spacesuit, you get significantly more delta-V out of it if you're small/light.
• Getting same amount of DR is cheaper. You also need less Reactive Armour Paste to cover the whole surface (somewhat relevant in combat).
• In a world with 30 minimissiles, a -1 of being hit is nothing to sneeze at.
• Smaller hands are not a big issue - either make custom grips on the nearest robofactory, learn the Huge Weapons perk. Or just use clamp-on weapon pods that don't depend on hand size. Or servo weapon mounts on a suit.
• The issue of consumables didn't come up directly so far, but did wave its hand from behind the curtain.

Being SM+1 probably would've been intolerable.

Maybe a 0-pt Feature should remain neutral across the majority of generic conditions. I understand that perfect neutrality is impossible, but currently things are seeming too biased.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I can see this, but when in one of my own campaigns I inflicted double armor weight on the SM +1 barbarian, the player just shrugged and said, "Well, I'm taking ST 30 anyway, so even with double armor weight, I'm less than half as encumbered as the ST 13, SM 0 guy with the same DR, and I'm saving 20 points on ST." The SM 0 guy did have 150 points in stuff other than ST, and it was in fact almost entirely combat-related (DX, notably), yet he wasn't as effective in a fight despite being played by a more experienced gamer. I do sometimes think that people downplay the lethality of the high-SM/high-ST combo and overstate the downside of armor weight ("I plan to stand here and block and parry, not dodge" isn't nearly as bad as it sounds unless all battles are on infinite featureless plains where everyone is free to run around and use missiles).

You seem to be comparing ST10 SM+0 people against ST30 SM+1 people. Of course they're different. But ST has a price of its own. (SM+1 saves [20] off ST30; but it gives no points back to someone of ST10).

[PK]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

You seem to be comparing ST10 SM+0 people against ST30 SM+1 people. Of course they're different. But ST has a price of its own. (SM+1 saves [20] off ST30; but it gives no points back to someone of ST10).

True, but as I said in that other thread, there tends to be a correlation between SM and ST. In any game with even the slightest nod to realism, SM +2 characters will tend to be stronger than SM 0 ones, who'll be stronger than SM -2 ones. And the Size modifier supports this (and further intertwines SM with ST), by acting as the means by which high-SM characters get back extra points.