Tournament Arc, Part 3/8
Poor Pugilist. It seems she’s run afoul of the same medium-sized-centrism that keeps the halflings of Handbook-World from booking griffin taxis. It’s unfair, I tells ya! But even if an anthropocentric society provides interesting RP opportunities for small-sized races, I think it’s important to keep the flavor and the mechanics separate.
What does that mean? Just look at that lance! Look at that embarrassingly embarrassingly oversized horse! Pug is a professional ass-kicker, and shouldn’t have to make do with ill-fitting second-hand castoffs. Same deal if we’re talking about the four-armed kasatha over in Starfinder or Sir. Noodle the snake in your awakened animals game. In order to function at baseline competency, you need baseline gear.
The design choices in D&D 5e offer a natural advantage here. The system’s core design assumes adventurers with mundane weapons and armor, meaning that you won’t be punished for your unconventional body type. Compare that to Pathfinder 1e. There the optional automatic bonus progression rules offer an excellent demonstration of the bonuses you’re expected to pick up (usually through gear) in normal Pathfinder play. Be wary though, because the second you begin passing out upgrades to the crew—regardless of system—the intent buried in the game design goes out the window. Players don’t care about whether or not they’re meeting the expectations of some hypothetical platonic ideal campaign. They care whether they’re keeping up with their buddies. And if Hugh Mann the fighter gets all the best magical kit while Hal Fling the cavalier can’t find so much as a riding dog, you’ve got problems.
Let me be clear: this is rarely a major problem in most campaigns. Properly-sized gear is a prime candidate for handwaving, and many GMs will take a wish list from their player in order to sprinkle “the right gear” into treasure piles. But if you like to randomly generate your own loot, then the size charts are definitely something to take into account. After all, there’s nothing worse than finding the fabled Sword of Extra Damage only to realize it was designed for a friggin’ giant.
Question of the day then! Have you ever found arms or armor that you couldn’t use due to size / race restrictions? Did you give it up? Did you go through extreme measures to make it fit? Sound off with your own solutions to the resizing problem down in the comments!
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afik in PF1e all magical gear (except weapons and armor) adjust to the size of the character wearing it. One could easily dump that exception as well.
It’s not going to solve Pug‘s problem here.
Weapons and armor are kind of important.
The One Ring somehow grew larger when the wearer is about to die.
Most if not all magic items resize to fit you in 5e, so I never had that problem. The other systems I played don’t seem to have tiny or huge critters capable of magical crafting.
I suppose there are rules to be found for teeny-tiny shotguns, if I wanted to play a pixie in Shadowrun. There are rules for absolutely everything in Shadowrun, laid out in the most confusing manner possible. All this realism, gun-/tech-porn and grenade fragmentation diagrams (where an example use takes up 2 pages) make it a nightmare to DM.
So yeah, good that 5e just stated that resize rule.
Definitely an ease-of-play advantage.
I’m told that Shadowrun 4E is actually pretty good aboot functionality and accessibility.
I usually use the magical gear resizes rule, and finding nonmagical gear won’t be an issue for long starting out. However the last long-running game I did play we all took various crafting feats and just sold everything and made our own stuff to the spec we wanted at half price 🙂
Solid solution there. Good on tour GM for allowing enough down time to make crafting viable.
I basically made my own downtime because of crafting XD technically it was a one on one and my party was npcs so i got to make most of the decisions. was like, ok after this haul, it takes me x weeks to make our stuff then we go off again. i didnt have to worry about anyone else getting impatient
Anytime we found armor or weapons in loot, size was never mentioned so it was never a problem. If someone wanted to take the item, it was the proper size for that character. But the size was then fixed from then on so a sword taken by a medium character wouldn’t then become small after being given to a small character. The one ancient artifact weapon we found actually did change size from character to character. Unfortunately, it was given to one of the goblins and his player had to quit a month later so the artifact was never seen again.
Damn thieving goblins….
Our game has magical gear resizing to fit the wearer. We also custom-craft items for unique cases as well, e.g. a ‘bandolier of abundant ammunition’for my current character, a Kobold Gunslinger. Or to reflavor the appearance of an item into something else (corset becomes jacket, and such).
Notable is that this puts into light a thing often overlooked with magic items – their description, default size, appearance, and visually obvious magic properties A lot of randomly-rolled magic swords, for example, are supposed to have a magic glow to them, or markings that hint how they work. But most PCs and DMs focus on just the mechanics and powers of the item.
Yup. It’s hard to make a magic item feel magical when it’s only d distinguishing characteristic is math.
I think the obvious solution is to not tell your players what it is right away. The Identify spell exists for a reason, after all. I just describe what the thing looks like and that it has an obviously magical aura, and let my players figure out what that means through experiment. Maybe after they’ve had it for a while it’ll just become another Stone of Ethereal Sight, but right now it’s that weird sculpted rock with a giant diamond in it, that makes everything look like when Frodo puts on the ring in Fellowship, only the Nazgul are giant spiders. It’s way more fun for me as a DM to narrate that stuff than it is to hand them a description, and I enjoy stringing along the mystery of what it does, and it keeps it open about whether there might be more properties of it to discover.
I’m running into issues with this in high level Pathfdiner 1e play. When you kill an NPC, they explode into 5-6 magic items apiece. At that point, asking your PCs to roll their spellcraft checks with a +40 modifier is a bit beside the point.
Different levels of play get weird after a while, and the challenges of low level seem to disappear in favor of new, more complicated weirdness (e.g. how to take down antimagic fields or break into a demiplane).
For basic humanoid figures, we’ve always assumed that armor and other worn gear just resizes magically. But if someone’s playing a race with more awkward anatomy — wings, horns, tails, etc — then we might have some acknowledgement that the item may not be usable until some adjustments can be made.
In part, of course, it’s up to the GM to provide items that work for the players. For example, my tiefling logically can’t wear normal headware — the horns get in the way — but if the item is instead some piece of jewellery that can be worn in the hair, it’s all good… not an implausible thing to find in a dungeon, even if it’s targeted at a particular player.
On the other hand, finding armor is a bit more problematic when you need something that fits around wings… not something that’s so readily found in dungeon loot crates, so basically, I need us to get in a fight with a medium-sized winged humanoid that wears enchanted light armor.
Just had a fun play by post encounter where my party’s magus asked for celestial armor. I thought it was a nice moment when I had the NPC merchant ask if wing holes would be a problem. Second hand items aren’t custom-made!
Yeah, it just makes for fun RP. Strictly of course, the rules don’t say anything about needing clothing customised for non-standard anatomy… but it makes for an interesting detail — particularly in a more urban, more social campaign — that certain party members need a good tailor and armor-smith.
Actually, this has come up in non-D&D games as well… for example, there are certain supers characters who just can’t buy off the shelf. When you’re a humanoid cyborg weighing in at about half a tonne, good luck finding stuff like footwear, furniture, vehicles… this character ended up knowing a lot of ‘maker’ types, because she certainly couldn’t get stuff rated for her weight anywhere else. Or for a comic book example, picture Ben Grimm in a suit… I bet he doesn’t shop at the local menswear store…
This is the stuff that gets skipped over in-game. It makes wonderful fodder for PBP though.
There are upsides to being small sized though. What my party has come to refer to as halfling trap immunity, in a world designed for medium sized creatures decapitation traps tend to harmlessly whiz over your head.
Not to mention being light enough to not set off pressure plates!
This raises a question though. What do traps set to counter halflings but not humans look like?
Or even better, what about traps set to counter giants? It could be amazing to have the Ewok’s log smasher trap crack over their heads, then break and swing down at them for some incidental damage.
Personally I like to go with solutions along the lines of of “A skilled craftsman of the appropriate kind back in town can resize this thing to fit you for a symbolic cost (assume they have a feat or perhaps an npc archetype that makes them good at stuff like that in exchange for being bad at adventuring)”. The symbolic cost is mostly there to satisfy my own sense of verisimilitude, and also generally covers a bit of aesthetic rejiggering at the same time if the player wants it.
Some-stuff might change a bit in the exchange through (the ogre sized longsword becomes a greatsword with a new grip for instance and the same for human to halfling) at least it changes for a smaller symbolic costs than it would be to have it remain the same kind of thing.
Armor in general doesn’t change and just have to be sold and a new one in the right size brought from the local correct-sized merchants.
I do try to make the world seem like one where sentient beings of multiple sizes are common and which therefore has accommodations for them.
A tourney where people aren’t expected to bring their own mounts and gear for instance would have ponies available for the small folk.
Love that cosmopolitan feel. It’s part of why I love Discworld so much. And also why I wrote this thing: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/122122/B17-Death–Taxes
Is her nickname pronounced like the dog breed or the first syllable of the full name?
Like the dog breed.
All magical gear in 4/5E resizes to fit the wearer unless it specifies otherwise, so it has never been a problem there.
I did encounter the problem with a DM who rolled on random loot tables and got a Legendary Greatsword (I think it was a Moon Blade, or a Sword of Answering, or something. I can’t recall, and can’t be bothered to look it up) that required attunement by a Chaotic Good character.
The party in this scenario was my Lawful Good Paladin who used a one-handed battleaxe because swords are for chumps and elves. (But I repeat myself) a Lawful Neutral War Cleric, (Who favored a hammer/shield like any respectable Dwarf) a True Neutral Lizardfolk Gunslinger Fighter, and a Chaotic Neutral Thief Rogue. Nobody was eligible for the weapon, and even if we were it was the wrong type of weapon for any of us to use.
I should point out that lances don’t have the Heavy property so a small character can use them fine, and that the only rule for riding is that the steed needs to be bigger than you. Drunken Master Monk should be fine except for her lack of martial weapon proficiencies.
Not really related, but if you’re 5e-ifying everyone’s names, what’s Street Samurai’s name? Whatabout Gunslinger?
Because I find it more relatable than the Mathfinder versions.
Street Samurai is Street Samurai because they’re a Shadowrun character who is at odds with the setting. Gunslinger is either Artillerist Artificer, or Gunslinger Fighter depending on your tolerance for Mercer’s mediocre Homebrew.
When the dungeon you’re going through at mid levels is infested with goblins, and some of them have enough levels to be trucking around some decent gear, but the entire party is medium sized.
That’s when the world begins to crack a bit around the edges:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/prep-time
The way I figure it, the main advantages to being small-sized is that all meals and all beds are “biggie size”, we never have an issue getting through doors, and most small races are happy to band together against the medium+ sized folks, even if they’d otherwise be opposed to one another.
You ever hear of the kithkin back in Eventide? Little dudes banning together can be plenty scary:
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Kithkin
In a recent level 20 campaign of mine, one player wanted to start with the Dwarven Thrower despite being an Aarakocra. Since it was just a one-shot, I ruled that in this world the weapon was for throwing AT dwarves instead of by them.
lol. re-flavoring at its finest
What I like doing is having pretty versatile weapons, sort of like Dark Souls. Sure, the Black Knights treat the weapon as a longsword, but they’re also ten feet tall. So when the Chosen Undead picks it up, they use it with the same fighting stance they do a greatsword. Now, Dark Souls also does a bunch of magical weapons resizing, but I like the Black Knight Sword way of handling it best. I know that there are supposed to be penalties for using a weapon not sized for you, but I think they can be ignored in the right circumstances.
As to situations where I haven’t been able to use gear, I’ll admit that I’ve more often been on the GM side of that. My favourite Sci-Fi system to run is Alternity, and of the playable alien races, only one of them can fit into human standard clothing. This makes it a little harder for characters of the other races to find gear, but I try my best to give everyone new toys.
Like I said up top, this seems to be the go-to strategy for most real-world games.
No armor or weapon is useless as long as you can use your head. Like using not the armor itself but parts of it to make other armors and so. But even human-size equipment can be problematic. Once one character of mine used a shed skin ritual/skill/something to heal himself from almost death. Thing is he end up not only healthy but younger, like in teenage younger. Which made many of his item not quite fitting for his new younger and almost a head down body. Needing to buy new armors fitting of a teenager is quite funny specially when the rest of the table keep rolepalying the vendors doing jokes about shonen heroes and weapons and armors 🙂
By the way, speaking of size. Why today comic is so big? Is part of the joke or Laurel forgot to use the usual size? o_O
The original script called for Pugilist to be wearing a modified helmet as her suit of armor. Didn’t quite work in-context, but the image made me giggle.
Laurel says she got the size wrong. She’s planning to fix it.
5:50 Fixed 😀
But how ugly of you to blame Laurel 😛
Ohhh yes, the quality! THE DEFINITION!
Smaller heroes get bigger pictures 🙂
Just look at those scales! So in-focus!
I’m surprised she’s red-chromatic scaled, if she’s on the side of the forces of good. Good Kobolds tend to be end up being metallic color-coded. Or is she not good-aligned?
Is pink chromatic? Maybe it’s rose gold….
Close enough!
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/race-traits/carnation-scales-kobold/
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/race-traits/purple-scales-kobold/
It’s certainly come up a few times. More so if you also take into account games where a sword dropped in a party that didn’t need another (or any) magical longswords.
Most of the time the GM has been reasonable and accepted a request to resize/change type of an item. But there have been a rare few cases where the GM just stuck with “you get what you get” and nobody wound up with any magic items because nothing was of use to anybody in the party.
No axe guys in the party, huh?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/weapon-focus
I like the magic anvil in the Giant Slayer AP quite a bit. Anticipating that the PCs wouldn’t be able to make use of giant-sized equipment, they built reforging into the game.
Yeah things like that should be included in all pre-made campaigns. How often do people have to go through modules designed with three to four specific awesome weapons nobody can use while the game tells you that “any combination of characters is fine”? Designers, just be honest. Either say what character builds your campaign is designed for or acknowledge that your “legendary axe” and “awesome wizard staff of only useful to wizards” don’t work as items for 95% of characters people could play and put in workarounds or just outright tell the GMs to customize them for the party.
Every group that I’ve been in has always had it so that every magic item automatically resizes to the user unless theres a plot reason for it not too, so its never been much of an issue for me.
Do you feel like you lose out on any verisimilitude with this technique?
Occasionally i feel a bit of coolness and excitement may be lost from this, but it is way more then made up for with the lack of frustration And higher freedom of cool stuff to try out.