Characterization the dump stat way

[james_davis_nicoll]

There's a chance we'll have another 5e campaign. I've enjoyed playing the party tank, so I was looking at fighter choices unlike Rose. Which gets me to Orilo Thuliage, Charisma 8 Goliath.



I'd like an efficient design, so with the Goliath pluses he's Str 16, Dex 12, Con 16, Int 10, Wis 13, Cha 8. Class fighter (with an eye to becoming a Monster Hunter at 3rd) and background Urban Bounty Hunter. He's even bigger than Rose at almost eight feet tall and 400 pounds (big enough his carrying capacity is doubled). Skills: athletics (+5), acrobatics (+3), stealth (+3), insight (+4), and perception (+4), plus the usual fighter stuff.

Goliaths generally live off in isolated mountain areas, so what's he doing in town? Notice the lack of a nickname. Goliaths always have nicknames. Orilo doesn't because he's tragically cursed: his flaw is "remarkable unremarkable" (I assume the flaws given are general guidelines, not the only options). He's not the "unpleasant and grating" sort of Cha 8, but the "completely fails to make an impression" cha 8. It's not in the rules but I'd roll all of his cha-based skills at disadvantage [1]. A Goliath Skywatcher (shaman) suggested the solution to Orilo's curse might be in a smallfolk community so Orilo left his tribe to go work in Campaign City

Obviously, the curse doesn't confer combat advantages.

(I think I will have him default to sneaking all the time unless I remember not to roll stealth)


1: Bounty hunters have Well Informed as a feature. Usually it means they know how to schmooze. In Orilo's, he just hangs around until someone has a telling conversation in front of the unremarkable eight foot tall guy.

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

I do remember Kragar from the Brust series.

[maruad]

Hah! I met the guy Kragar was modeled after! He is/was a nice guy (It has been a long time so I don't know what has unfolded in the last almost 30 years).

[(Anonymous)]

Heh. Another part of modeling the low charisma could be that people are annoyed and disconcerted it took them so long to notice the really big guy just standing there.

Riderius

[james_davis_nicoll]

"eight feet tall and 400 pounds"

It's possible to roll a higher weight than the stated weight rank for the race.

[graydon]

400 lbs seems a bit low!

A robust build person weighing 200 lbs at 6 feet would multiply by 2.37 for eight feet; 474 lbs. 400 lbs would imply a 6 foot person with this build would weight about 170 lbs, which seems low for the high strength and constitution stats.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Oddly, I dropped those values into a bmi calculator and was told he was obese. The nih would like him to be 300 pounds

[graydon]

BMI would be the two-dimensional one, or at least so I recall.

Notorious for not working on anybody taller than 5'10" to the extent that it can said to work at all, which is narrowly defined. (and not how insurance companies use it.)

Which I am pretty sure you know all of, but.

[violsva]

"Morbidly obese" is a frequent BMI result for people with a lot of muscle.

[graydon]

Or even just some muscle.

[(Anonymous)]

Or who are taller than a hobbit.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it has the wrong units, should be mass over height cubed (pet peeve of mine). Using the BMI formula, if you scale a typical human skeleton up to 60 feet tall, it would be obese. Kind of hard to fix that with diet and exercise...

Riderius

[ariaflame]

So during rounds of dice games, he's the one that always misses his turn because others forget he's there?

[keith_morrison]

Or have slightly different proportions. I have somewhat shorter legs for my height, and based on my BMI from my days in the Forces, I would only have dropped down to the "ideal" category by maybe dropping down to under 5% bodyfat and possibly lopping off part of a limb.

Same time I was there, we had a cadet of Polynesian origin, so stereotypical barrel chest, about 5'5" and roughly six feet across the shoulders, looked like he bench-pressed trucks for leisure activities. Morbidly obese according to the BMI, of course.

[keith_morrison]

"Can you describe the perpetrator?"

"Um, not really. Maybe a bit over average height?"

[rwpikul]

The core idea behind BMI is that "height cubed" isn't the right relationship. A 6' tall man is going to be significantly less than 72% heavier than a 5' tall man of the same build because humans don't get wider as fast as they do taller.

The problem with BMI is that "height squared" is too slow, which is what leads to it only working for a limited height range. In reality, the factor should be somewhere between 2 and 3 but do you want to try and tell random people to use an equation with a non-integer power?