Forums » RP Discussion » How much does your character weigh?

... actually I have a confession to make. I have never played an actual game of D&D.
The only reason I had a D&D copper dragon chara was because a friend of mine was a huge Dragonlance fan at the time and gave her to me through IC means. D> But I did get the Draconomicon books so I could at least try to freeform her accurately.

Including size. She's... 15'00" tall and 3600 lbs? Or is it 36 feet LONG? Dangit. I need to go check the books again-- it's been a few years since I actually played as her.

Weight tends to matter more if your dealing with GMs and players that will make more use of hard physics as elements of the world/story.

Actually one of the reasons I started working on my own rule set was to overcome several needless arguments of how heavy objects like rocks and such should be versus how hard it is to move said objects given other base line rules...

And lets not get into how you have to adjust any rules implementation in order to account for none earth standard gravity, acceleration or momentum.

I can't say I've ever given much thought to the weight of any of my characters. If I had to though, I'd probably use my own body weight as a basis and adjust it depending on how I imagine the character compares to me.

This is one of my major hotspots, though from a different perspective. As a weightlifter, I get seriously snarky when I see a character described as "massively jacked!!1" or something and weighing something tiny. I will almost always call people out, since it's generally out of ignorance. For reference, I am 5'4" (1.63 m) and weigh 220 lbs (100 kg). A lot of it is fat. Before I started lifting, I was 170-180 lbs. To be fair, when I started lifting I did start eating more to help maintain the muscle (that's what I tell myself ). For "jacked" characters, I use the second chart on this page, tweaking to compensate for sex, species, build, etc. It's a great reference.

BMI is absolute bullshit (sorry). The sooner people realize that, the sooner we can do away with it for good. The only thing it does is make people feel bad about their weights when they shouldn't be concerned. It doesn't take anything important into account: fitness, fat percentage, build. Frankly, it disgusts me.

By the way, massively jacked and super cut characters: you can't keep muscles like that without eating a LOT. Professional bodybuilders DO NOT look like they do in competitions all the time--in fact, they go to great, unhealthy lengths to get cut, including dehydration (tightens the skin). It is so freaking hard to be jacked AND cut, do you even know!?!? Pick one, for glod's sake! When people say "jacked" they usually don't even mean truly jacked, anyway... but that's another story...

Whew, sorry, that really gets me going! I don't even know THAT much about this sort of thing, but I want to make a thread devoted to it!

tl;dr: Muscle weighs a huge amount. It's insanely hard to be jacked and cut so pick one unless your character is spending hours every day and a huge amount of money on their body. (And have access to enough protein.) Also, they'll die when they're like 35 if they keep it up year round. Just sayin'.

And if you need a height/weight chart for jacked doods, reference the second chart on this page: http://www.mm2k.com/bodybuilding-chart.html The first one might be good for normal athletic doods, too.

What Heimdall said is pretty much my view. Though I'm not a bodybuilder, I've lifted weights before and know that muscle weighs more than fat. People don't seem to understand those things and to be fair, it's not exactly their fault. References and charts are always good, as is asking fellow roleplayers and doing some research about a proper height and weight.

chara to chara it varies. rumea is 5'8" and 135. Minerva 5'4" 145. Itachi 5'2" almost 300 but from mechanics. Ash, luci, ferous vary by form and amt of matter stolen to manifest. Etc.

It all depends. I have one character who fluctuates from 110-130 depending on her standard of living and even then she's a bit intentionally scrawny. I do use a height/weight chart and vary the weight so it is appropriate in a way to describe them as skinny or plump.

When people say a character is 'skinny' but is 170 pounds and short, I have a hard time believing that.

I have a character that is female, skinny, and relatively tall. She weighs more than 3300 pounds.

It might also be relevant that she's made out of solid gold.

Sounds like she is a very valuable character

When their boobs are bigger than their heads I miiight believe it! But then again I dom't believe in such large racks.

There the dwarf in me comes into play *googleeyes*

Okay, now that I'm not on my cell I can actually type more about this!

Whoever said the BMI calculator is BS is right. According to that, the actor Mel Gibson qualifies as obese. Our culture already has a distorted idea of what weight is healthy, so our calculators are warped in base. I'm at the healthiest weight in my life, I feel good, I look good, and I still qualify as extremely obese by the standards of the BMI. I mean, I'm not the thinnest stick but I'm not a pig. My icons past and present should be able to show you that.

Ultimately, I find that setting a weight is all relative. Each individual can hold body weight differently. Two people of the same height and weight can show it entirely differently, and even then it's not wholy due to fat vs muscle. Generally, I find that setting a general weight for a character can be good, but if you really want to render them appropriately, determining a body type is the best way.

(Besides, being a little chunky can be good; as my husband says, s3x should sound like applause; can't do that with a twig.)

Ahem.

I think the hardest problem for me is I roleplay a dragon. Generally, since she is ten feet tall and somewhat horse-like as a western style dragon, I put her weight at about 1100 lbs. It was difficult for me to determine a similar creature to compare and relate her to. What I've done is researched the weight of a thoroughbred horse, as she's about that size, and I've used the lower end of their average weight. She's a growing dragon, and still pretty young, so I try to be reasonable when doing that sort of thing.

Her weight in a description such as the RPR has always been changing, and not canonically, as I couldn't really decide on what to do for a character such as her. It was very recent when I actually focused on one animal to relate her to, and that was, of course, the thoroughbred horse. In fact, I just found this thread about a day or two after I came up with a determined weight for her! I am not the best roleplayer when it comes to details, especially on an everchanging and developing character such as Shady, and I do hope others who roleplay with me regularly can forgive me for my little mistakes and loopholes that were created two or three years ago by a much younger self.

For really fantastic characters I usually don't try to define exact weights. It's hard! My main character Heimdall is a dragon too, and it's supposed to be a really really thickly-built dragon at that. So I've just left it up in the air at "over a ton." There certainly is no problem with estimations or just build descriptions rather than exact weight ranges!

Yep, I don't tend to clearly specify weight, either, not even on human characters. People are pretty decent at figuring out what heights are - it's a static measurement and doesn't change - but everyone wears weight differently, and has different combinations of fat and muscle, such that it's nearly impossible to get any kind of information from a number, with or without an accompanying build description.

So I just skip all the guesswork and just use heights and builds m'self. I wouldn't even want to guess at what my gryphonic valkyrie warrior weighs.

Oh, Celestia. What fun is there in making sense?

So, I've spectated several threads like this, but I've never responded. Partly because it turns out to be a surprisingly sensitive topic with a lot of people, partly because I can never compose my thoughts in a way that gets across what I want to say accurately.

I think my main issue is with the basic premise. Why do we only enforce realism in one specific area? One person plays a dragon angel vampire, I play multiple talking ponies with impossibly large heads that can fly and do magic, somebody else plays a radioactive lizard demon with laser beam eyes, and nobody bats an eyelash. But then one dude plays a vaguely humanoid character who's taller and thinner than we find acceptable, and we roll out the RP Police.

Now, I don't mean to be disingenuous (or an abrasive sarcastic jerk), so I should stress that I'm not specifically for or against BMI violations - I don't care either way. I only wish to point out that either the reasoning, or the enforcement, isn't self-consistent, so it's not likely to persuade anybody to change their characters.

Also, does it matter if someone is seven feet tall, and weighs fifty pounds, with no justification? Does it make them OP or something? With all the other ridiculous traits people can tack on to their characters without reason, it seems pretty minor in comparison.

Well, I wouldn't say it's a big huge offense (although some people may, yes, frown pretty deeply when the subject comes up).

But for me at least, it's one of those lil' quirky things that makes me frown just so and look a little disappointed-- especially and primarily when it gets absolutely ridiculous.

Heck, I've even looked at myself and gone, "REALLY, kiddo? You thought that height and that weight would be okay?" I had such an incident a while ago when someone politely corrected me about the weight of Drac's armor. I felt silly about it for a while, but I fixed my error.

A 170-ish pound man with average fortitude and strength probably can't carry 100 pounds of armor, just so we're all square. Ehehe!

For me, it's about trust. When you're in a "serious" RP, wherein characters can be killed or injured through combat, you have to trust that other people are playing fair. Lots of games that have combat mechanic rules will also have rules for how to find your height/weight, and those can make a big difference to your capabilities. If someone has blatantly disregarded those rules, that's a red flag. If you're in a game with rules that are more poorly defined, then you have to really really trust the people you play with to play fair and keep the universe in which you play internally consistent.

If they are playing a strange race, fine -- I'm still going to want to see some limits on the capabilities of that character to make it balance with the other players, unless the game is completely fluffy silliness. But sometimes, I want more "crunch" . Totally ridiculous height/weight/musculature ratios is often a strong pointer to someone who is not playing fair and will try to be "ideal" or "perfect" unto themselves in every way, without regard for other players. Or to someone who just isn't paying much attention, or too lazy to do any fact checking, but this can lead to nearly identical problems for everyone else trying to play around them.

You're right, it DOESN'T matter in every game. But if you like enough rules and just enough realism to add elements of challenge and real risk to a game while still keeping it fair, then everyone needs to play by those rules at least nominally. There are a lot of games where cartoon characters don't exist, after all.

Oh, sorry. I didn't meant to make it appear as if the weight is all I care about, it just happens to be one that is most easily warped and misused.

If someone tells you their 6'1" 120lbs human male character can lift someone who weighs 500lbs, but this character never trained to lift weights, looks malnourished and has no magical or scientific explanation for this power, would that fly with you under the premiss 'this is fantasy so everything is possible'?

Your ponies' appearance and weight can be excused by the fact they're not real, but if you tell me your pony weighs 1000+ pounds but still manages to fly with tiny puny wings, I'd call bull on that.

The thing about fantasy and imagination is that one and one still make two, but on the side we divide by zero and make it happen. Without elements of realism, pleasant roleplay settings become overrun by everyone trying to be better than the other without limitations, just like Kim pointed out. A character's weight can determine whether they would be good at sneaking up at someone, whether you describe their build and form a good image of what they look like, or you put an exact number down that gives a good idea to the character's ability when compared to their height. If this doesn't exist, you suddenly lose a lot of potential in the more serious type of roleplays.

Of course everyone is free to do as they please, but as I pointed out in my first post, something as little as a wrong looking weight makes people like myself less inclined to roleplay with that person. So in my opinion, if you want to be taken seriously and value in-depth roleplay a lot, it can be a good idea to put some thought into statistics like these. Not just weight, but everything. It doesn't need to be real as in, possible in real life, but actions have consequences and appearances, age, gender, weight etc. all may have consequences for the character's social status, abilities and so forth.