something I’ve noticed is that a lot of WG games punish you for getting fat, so what about a game where you play as a wizard/mage/magician and your mana is your weight so as you use magic you lose weight so you need to keep your weight high rather than as low as possible. maybe in between battles you need to find the best vendor to sell the valuables to at the highest price and also while in town, spend that money on food, spell books, wands/staffs, etc. you could also have party members that get stronger as they get fatter. as far as I cam remember I’ve only played two games (outside of VNs) where weight doesn’t hinder you and not have any positive effects, and only one where it didn’t have a downside at all (okay well it has a downside but it was unintentional)
side note why do almost no WG RPGs have fat potions?
the reason for no fat potions is probably because being fat is not good in a lot of games as you said. but another reason is why have a potion when you can have a burger instead?
this is just my opinion but I liked it in the few games I’ve played where it has been available. of course just mechanically it works best as a rare permanent stat boost item, but also I like rapid WG so I am slightly biased
Generally its hard to implement the fact that fat is a good thing in most RPG’s, both in the methods of making it make sense but also in just the scripting of it in general. It takes a lot of sprites for progressive weight gain, and the one RPG that actually does that and the whole ‘making fat good’ thing is Grimimick’s GUT.
Mechanically it’ll take a bit to fully balance having fat be ‘powerful’ in the way you’re describing, making it not an incremental climb that makes it easier to progress the bigger you get (meaning that it makes the game easier and easier as you get bigger n bigger which is the point of the game sso it just spirals from there)
Also about that fat potion thing, personally i feel like im a bit better than that. i can make better potions that that and still find ways to give that rapid weight gain, just through different means. I think given that its sort of an easier target, its relatively avoided for its simplicity. (Which doesnt make it a bad thing, itd be funny as hell. its just daunting making something as simple as that actually useful, necessary, etc to an rpg)
It’s not a bad idea for sure, but you may need to normalise the character’s weight yo-yoing from skinny to fat in story, akin to the size changes Emmie undergoes in Some Bullshit for example. This is so that players get comfortable with actually spending their mana.
In games where a character’s weight is an expendable resource, people tend to do what they can to avoid losing weight (for example, employing only the weakest spells or forgoing magic altogether). This conservative playstyle is only exacerbated if opportunities to gain weight are sparse or if it’s slow to amass fat.
That’s also a reason why there were over a dozen food items in ready supply in SB. It’s just annoying to find food you need to power your primary source of damage.