this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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I just wish I could make fat characters.
Kinda hard to stay fat when you're on the move all the time, both marching around and fighting for your life. It'd take a conscious effort to overeat (and/or a relatively sedentary work situation) to stay fat.
If you're really fat, it takes quite a while to get the weight off. In BG3 specifically, you're not (necessarily) an adventurer before the game, but get picked up randomly in a city. I see no issue with a fat level 1 wizard, and even for martials you can just say they trained for a couple of years and then stopped training once they got a job in the city. They probably should get some kind of penalty, but on the other hand you should also get a penalty for being small (i.e. gnome or halfling) and BG3 just threw that out completely. If a gnome can wield a two-handed sword made for adult humans without penalties, a fat dude can have the same stamina as a thin dude.
Small characters in older edition used different equipment; a small sized weapon used smaller dice, rules for number of hands between sizes were pretty much what you'd expect, which lead to crazy shit like feats that let you use a larger size category weapon, a small size suit of armor wouldn't fit a medium character, carrying capacity multipliers, +/- to hit, and all kinds of shit.
Pathfinder still has them.
It requires extra design consideration (how do we balance loot across character sizes, which many players would never deal with and all would feel at least a bit of fomo about; your small size tank can't use the best heavy armor, your medium rogue can't wear the best light armor) and doesn't add much. Plus, fat sits differently on different bodies, jiggles when running, adds complexity to animations like holding yourself against wall or getting stabbed, and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican?
I can see why they dropped it, but you may enjoy a more rules heavy system.
Oh, I do agree that it's tedious, especially when it's tabletop instead of a video game.
My point is pretty much that I want consistency - if you (the game) don't care about adventurers who are very short, it doesn't make sense to care about adventurers who are very fat. Though I think it's pretty clear that the main issue for the BG3 devs was that animating fat characters is a lot of extra work that most players won't appreciate.
Have you ever tried losing a lot of weight? Takes a pretty long time, even if you basically don't eat anything. The main character in BG3 basically springs into existence at the beginning of the game (with a very good excuse for why someone who never did any adventuring is suddenly on the road), and the game takes places over a couple of weeks or a few months, depending on how often you rest.
But also all but one of them are kind of wizards.
And there is an amount of selection.
And they do get stabbed and set on fire a lot.
And they are all kind of infested with parasites.
And a more rules-heavy system might be for you.
Older editions had stuff like "small characters are harder to hit, so they get +1 AC. But then it's weird they have a hard time hitting each other, so they get a +1 to-hit, too".
Trying to simulate reality gets wacky real fast, and quickly becomes more work than it's worth.