Shattered Kingdoms

So, it's common knowledge that if giant and a dwarf with equal strength scores hit the same thing, the giant will deal more damage - but how much more? Is it significant?

A long time ago, I made a sprite sorc to experiment with the idea of using Enlarge and Shrink in combat and with combat applications. I retired the character (don't even remember her name) after a pretty one-sided pvp where using the shrink spell in combat felt a little... buggy? I don't quite remember exactly what happened, but spamming shrink on the opponent made them unequip and drop some of (all? most?) their gear, which then some (all?) of the pieces grew to different sizes - definitely wasn't what I was going for at the time.

At any rate, I wonder if any of you have experimented with using shrink/enlarge as combat buffs and debuffs, and what you had discovered when doing it.

I had thought using a tactic like that might not receive a favorable response from the immortals. Pretty sure that would be an abuse of the spell. Thought maybe I am wrong. I half wonder how it would be taken if this was used to get gear from NPC's though without killing them.

I thought the same thing at the time. My plan had been to buff my allies with the normal buffs (haste, giant strength, etc), but also enlarge them and shrink my enemies to mitigate their damage - exciting character vs character combat without relying on one-hit spells. The whole dropping of equipment and resizing weirdness was completely on accident, and (in my opinion) seemed anti fun at least, or a bug at worst. It was years ago, and I don't remember if I put in a bug report about it.

Probably viable with GS, though not sure if its super worth it always. Think bigger means easier to hit and less likely to hit smaller thigns, so more dam/less accuracy. a giant sprite might still have problems with weight even with GS. also it wouldn't improve the HP. Though a dwarf may do alright.

On another note. I think the effect of enhanced damage and size was reduced, so they still hit harder, but it is nowhere near as noticeable as it was in the past. I've noticed that combat actually takes rounds were past mercs could 1 round a good number of things in training. Which is probably a buff for spellcasters since you have a chance without being destroyed pretty much immediately.

There are size-based penalties and bonuses to damage, but they did get reduced a number of years back so they're not as extreme as they used to be.

http://www.shatteredkingdoms.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24878&p=411097&hilit=size#p411097

I believe that you still get those bonuses when using shrink/enlarge magically, but part of me recalls a change where the benefit of resizing for combat was nerfed. I'm not sure how accurate that is, and searching the announcements forum doesn't pull anything up to that effect.

Resizing a PC or NPC has strange side-affects, especially once you release the spell. I believe it has the following logic.

Magically resizing a PC or NPC automatically resizes all of their gear accordingly.
Releasing the resize spell and/or removing gear while under the effects of resizing causes the gear to revert -to it's natural physical size.- This means that if you have gear that started off tiny size, then you magically resize (not using a blacksmith) it to medium to wear it, then get enlarged, then if you remove that piece of armor it goes back to tiny size, not medium.

If it isn't that logic exactly, it's somewhat like that in many ways. I've also experienced inconsistent behavior when casting resize on NPCs or when resizing armor that starts tiny, or other odd things. It's not unpredictable, but I think there are enough weird variables with it that it ends up being hard to control and often times ends up screwing with you.

It's perfectly valid to spam c enlarge on an enemy in order to try and get them to drop gear. For what it's worth enlarge/shrink have will saves attached to them, although I don't believe they cause impairment.

Thanks. That makes sense, considering what I remember having happened.