[Tabletop] Pathfinder & D20 rules for Obese Characters (Updated February 2021)

After rediscovering this site recently, I dusted off a project of mine I started last year. and finally got it to a state where I’m happy enough with it to post it to the cruel wilds of the Internet.

I started this last year when my Sorceress in a Pathfinder game was going to eventually take the route of the Bloatmage (or at least the Bloatmage Initiate feat), and wanted to flesh out what really meant to be “obese” in the game. I’ve seen a few other homebrew rules out there, but they were either too complicated, incompatible, or I just didn’t like the theme of them (I like to keep weights more grounded in reality).

Let me know what y’all think, and if you have ideas for improvements or additions, let me know here, or via e-mail (my address is in the document itself).

I tinker around with the document periodically but I don’t always announce it here. I do like to track my changes in the document itself.

I know there’s no artwork for the project yet, but I’m a stickler for artistic permissions and copyright, so I will only use artwork that I can prove is public domain, or I can get permission to use.

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This looks good.

I just see one typo, " **The penalties caused by a character’s obesity are always present and can never be eliminated apart from removing the weight weight."

I don’t think you meant to double type weight there.

Yep, certainly a typo, and I’m sure there’s others as well. Thanks for the heads-up.

Sounds cool! Too bad nobody in my city plays something even remotely to this

Not sure how to get started playing this stuff, even online, especially with this ruleset. Same with the other tabletop rulesets here, I just dunno where to get started.

Not really a complaint, but more of a ‘hey could you point me in the right direction’

Finding people to play with is always difficult, especially if you live in a smaller area. A few years ago I started playing online via a site called Roll20. You can look on the forums or advertised groups to find a game that catches your fancy - not only for Pathfinder or D&D, but dozens of other game system too.

Pathfinder is one of the many RPG games based off of the Third edition of Dungeons and Dragons game that came out years ago. The rules for Pathfinder can be found on sites www.pfsrd.com or the Archives of Nethys

Now actually finding a game with Weight-Gain content will be very hard. Pathfinder does have the one Official prestige class called the Bloodmage (or Bloatmage) that really is fat and obese., but that’s about it. My custom rules here are likely not going to widely known outside of our little circle. I am trying to keep any "gratuitous’ fattening to a minimum in the rules, to hopefully make the rules a bit more palatable for those DM’s or games that aren’t exactly into this sort of thing.

Updated the document with a few changes and additions. There’s still a few more ideas I’m hammering out in my head that I’ll add eventually when I figure them out.

I’ve made some more updates to my document. Reworked a variety of rules, added a few ideas I’ve had sent to me, and squished a couple more spelling errors.

I see two mentions of “cold cold environts” in the document where the effects of obesity are described. I don’t think they’re supposed to be there as it seems they’re referring to any cold environment. Can you check this?

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll look at it this weekend sometime when I get the chance (I’ve been pretty busy lately).

I finished a bunch of long-overdue updates. There’s not a lot of rule changes, but I cleaned up a lot of the document, tweaked a few rules and numbers, and added a new spell. I have a couple other ideas I plan to add in too, but it might be a week or two before I get a chance to get back to it.

The idea is good, I always thought the concept of table RPG was cool but I don’t know how to play because I never played for lack of finding people interested in playing

My first game of like this was a game of D&D I ran myself with my brother and a couple other friends, with the basic books I bought myself, with some initial familiarity to the rules from some AD&D Computer games of the time. It wasn’t until several years later that I was able to play with some other people and be a player.

I posed a couple links earlier in this thread with a couple places to learn some of the rules, and site where you may even be able to find a group to play with online, which has helped the hobby survive even with the restrictions we’ve had to endure over the last year.

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