Social Interactions for the Big and Tall, and the Short and Small (or Otherwise Oddly Shaped)

I'm not a very strong GM.   This is something I admit freely (and frequently).  Though I'm alright for those I've played with, and managed to hold a group of 10-12 players (!) for many months of regular meetings (my only full campaign), I've never actually been a particularly great story teller.

I partially compensate for this by focusing more on combat than social interaction.  I am definitely more capable of decent fighting than I am any complex social interaction.  I also leverage mechanics to make things more interesting within the combat, though I have a tendency to focus too much on the fight and fighters and have lately let the environment fall on the wayside.  But enough of that!  Here I go on about something that really highlighted my lack of ability:  Oddballs.

Oddly Shaped People

I guess in a way all player characters are going to be oddballs.  If they weren't, they wouldn't be going about trying to get themselves killed the hard way.  What I mean to drive at is characters that are to some degree at odds with their setting.  I don't allow far out ones (setting myself up for failure); I've discarded newcomers who wanted to play half-dragons (or dragon blooded people) in settings where there are no dragons - things like that.  I've even had a Tiefling in a long running campaign for a while.  Common and uncommon fantasy races in an otherwise integrated fantasy city aren't terribly difficult; you just turn on the Chauvinism.

What I had a while back was a player who ran an Andre the Giant expy named Gustav.  This was in the Hyborian Age, so fairly low fantasy with eldritch horrors along the fringe.  While everyone else was a SM 0 human of some kind, Guvstav was a giant, SM 1 and quite acromygalic, in a heroic sense.  When he entered the room, everyone would turn to stare, and in battle people would often think twice before actually going his way.

That's the problem:  He was too noticeable.  Easily a foot taller than everyone else, he would expect to be the constant target of gawking.  While to a degree the standard tavern goers could just look and then resume to minding their own business, anyone they had to interact with was in some fashion going to be commenting on his massive size.

How many variations of "My, you're a tall one!" can I come up with?  Not enough.  More to the point, I felt it got a little repetitive and awkward commenting on these kinds of reactions.  If I glossed over it though, I felt like I was downplaying a major part of his character.  He was the Big Guy in every way.

This is in no way the fault of the player or the character.  I liked Gustav.  I liked that he was able to bring his fists to a sword fight and wreck someone's day.  Unfortunately I'd not much experience with roleplaying characters like that.  Like I said, even non-human races in a fairly standard fantasy setting are easy to do - people have usually seen orcs, halflings, and elves before, they just may not like them.  In a world where most people only see other regular people, someone who's suddenly 7'forever" tall is going to turn heads constantly.

I did have some variance; more forward people would confront him over his height, while cowardly people wouldn't say anything and tremble when he approached, typically cave in to his desires.  The "average" interaction, though, kinda sucked, and I had too few positive reactions about his height.

Gender Roles and Gendered Rollers

Within the same party I had someone playing a woman - Bianca - who had taken to the ways of Chivalry and sought out danger in order to get herself knighted.  I also really liked that character, but it fell into the same problems.  The Hyborian Age is very much a Man's World - women who aren't weak-kneed girls (or pretending to be) get the same kind of reactions.  I ran out of "Girls can't fight!" pretty quickly.  Actually, before the game ended I'd started making positive interactions more common.  Bianca kind of drove the story somewhere, since I could use the quest for knighthood as a tool for getting into trouble, as well as giving the characters a chance to upstage male Chauvinists.  The player, if memories from like 3 years ago serve, liked the opportunity to break the mold like that, but when the Chauvinism was put forward, I got the vibe that the player took it a little personally.

History's full of precedents, so Woman-Hero-in-a-Man's-World is basically never something I'd disallow.  It's handling the Chauvinism role-play elements I need to work on.

That game died off for several reasons, which I may get into at some point.

Closing

I basically need to roleplay more.  In person, I'm not a great conversationalist and subsequently don't have a wealth of experience to draw on.  I happen to be quite short myself, but I don't care of people are tall.  I usually make a note and nothing more, and it changes the way I interact with them in no way at all.  At most, I will use it as a vehicle for humour, as size mismatch is quite visual and easily made fun with.  Similarly, someone's gender matters not at all to me, so I'm a bit short on clever jabs about a woman-out-of-the-kitchen type character.

Hopefully when my Warhammer Fantasy setting'd GURPS game gets back online I can work in some better roleplay and increase my skill in the social aspect of it.  I'm definitely more comfortable doing it via text, so I at least have something to work with.

Until next time!