One of the things that used to bother me about a certain gaming magazine was the endless mockery of a fictional player, a large man who always wanted to play a tiny, delicate fairie in-game. The humor seemed mean-spirited to me, especially given the amount of leeway given to the obviously cheating min-maxer, the combat jerk, and the guy-who-didn’t-care-about-anything-but-having-the-biggest-sword. Personally, your humble MS-QOTD has a tendency to want my characters to be oversized (as Critical Hit listeners who remember my lamentations that Torq couldn’t be 7 feet tall will attest.) The tall or small divide is one that isn’t always examined vis a vis preferred playstyle, which leads us to today’s official-handbook-of-the-query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) likes my wrestling personas to be 7′ 2″ or thereabouts, asking: When it comes to your RPG counterparts, do you prefer to be Tall or Small?
2 Comments
I’ve played a lot of different PCs, but I’ve never really given much consideration to size. I’d say that in general I go for ‘average.’ A good number of my D&D PCs have been human, for instance.
It breaks my immersion a bit when players all play the most unique race that they can find, being that singular representation of outre fantasy race even within the fantasy world, and then rapidly they become just accepted as normal so that the narrative can progress beyond their being ogled at in every new town or city. So I often will end up playing a baseline or baseline-adjacent race just to keep things a little bit grounded.
Good question, I haven’t really thought this.
Usually if its average human, like in let’s say sci fi setting, like Star Wars, I’ll usually pick something close to average, or close to my height which is around 5’9″ to 6’2″. If I’m doing a non human, I’ll pick around average of their size, unless I’m really going for some exact thing I have in mind. Let’s say I’m doing an Orc gladiator, that’s going to be a chunky boy, while Rebel Alliance X-Wing pilot would be few inches shorter, because that’s how pilots usually are.