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A member of my gaming group has a mutant plesiosaur. The description says that the neck is 1/2 of the total body length. The character is 6 feet tall. Does this mean that the top of the head sits on a three-foot neck and the characters only three foot high at the shoulder? That makes the mutant dinosaur the size of a toddler. How do you determine the height of your long-necked characters?

That sounds about right. Maybe drop the length to 1/3 (with Partial Human Looks) if you want the character's body mass to be larger, but I don't see an issue with a mutant plesiosaur having a dwarfish body shape. It's how I would imagine one would be drawn in a comic, which is how I try to view the game world of AtB.

What's the size value of the character?

Yeah.. if your dino is only 6 foot tall total and you picked one with a long neck. I'd say... yeah. kinda dwarfish body with a long neck and head on top of it.

That said you could go the other way too and not really have most people mind. 6 foot at the 'shoulder' with another 3 feet of neck and head. For a total of 9.

GM call. Either way you want to do it, but like Rali I imagine if it were in comics it'd be drawn as the some what dwarfish body with long neck. But as a dino sort of char.. I'd personally want the 9 foot toal there, but that's me. 9 feet is alot taller than most people honestly realize and would cause problems.

If you're trying to play 'human' sized dino chars.. then yeah. dwarfish body with long neck and head.

I would say 6 feet at the shoulder and 9 feet to the top of its head.

Bill - Off hand I don't recall the char's size level. The Plesiosaur has a medium build body type.

I found the description for looks none (which is the only way to play a mutant animal). Changes are of course made for full hands and biped (no flippers)
- Looks: None: The character has an extremely small, wedge-shaped head with small, sharp teeth atop a neck as long as the body. The nostrils are atop of the head, above the eyes. The body is large and barrel-shaped. The tail is short, when compared to a creature of its size. The limbs consist of wide, thin flippers.

(looks like I got mixed up in my description, but the math stays the same.)

See this is where I'm stuck if he's 6ft tall then he has a 3 ft long neck and a 3 ft body. Midget sized. While having a terrifying head/neck, there isn't anything intimidating about someone you could probably go up and shove over.

Pepsi, Say, That's how we had pictured him in our heads, as being a normal to large-ish human sized body with an enormous neck. When we got a bit deeper into it we were like, "wait is his head 12 feet of the ground or only 6? If it's only 6 then he's a tiny little dude (with a massive massive amount of crushing ps). Who's going to be afraid of the midgetosaur terror of the high seas?"


It stands to reason that you'd run in to the same problem playing a Giraffe, any of the Sauropod dinosaurs, a long-necked bird (goose, stork, flaming, etc). You spend all this Bio-E to grow to a respectable size (yeah yeah I know the game was originally geared toward short chars) only to find out that while your head is above the steering wheel the rest of you can't reach the pedals (so to speak).

i would have the head *up to* 12 feet above the ground, but with the neck typically being more curved so that the head is usually "only" 9 feet above the ground.

The Oh So Amazing Nate wrote:I found the description for looks none (which is the only way to play a mutant animal).

Actually, I was thinking you could create an alternative Partial Looks that only reduced the neck length from 1/2 to 1/3.

The Oh So Amazing Nate wrote:While having a terrifying head/neck, there isn't anything intimidating about someone you could probably go up and shove over.

You haven't met some of my ex-girlfriends. (j/k) It's all in the attitude, or if the character's senses are heightened, it would be hard for someone to sneak up on them before the character swiveled their head and neck around to show off those sharp teeth.

Interesting discussion; but I always figured neck length was already factored into the size factor/class. And you're dealing with a critter who, like a giraffe, likely has a Body Type: Long as part of the baseline description.
Yeah, it would be tough having a toddler-sized body, but not impossible, and a great opportunity for role-playing...on one hand the character is able to see people eye to eye, but he can still punch people in the kneecaps. Of course, using the sights on a firearm are going to require some awkward convolutions of the neck, but unless you want to be a right bastard and have that as a disadvantage that needs to be bought off, ATB typically handwaves that off.
I'd say play as is, or re-arrange some points to go up a size level or two. Proportion-wise, that toddler-height body is going to be more like a fantasy dwarf's; rather broad and well-rounded.