Quote Originally Posted by Ephemera View Post
As I recall, there was a certain amount of hand-waving involved...or, rather, the general consensus was that it was more palatable to hand-wave one rule than conclude that Rich is just ignoring the rules for encumbrance fro flying creatures.

That is to say that there's maybe a bit of wiggle room in the RAW about whether a flying creature can lift more than a light load into the air, and I think it was decided that STR 14 would let Roy be a heavy load for her (insert dirty joke here).

It's probably cleaner in many ways to just say that OotS has a house rule about flying creatures and what they can carry (and I suspect you could assemble a consensus who agrees that's more likely insofar as any explanation is "true"), but the thread rules generally try to break as few RAW explanations as possible, and if she's weaker than that, she shouldn't be able to lift Roy at all. Although I guess you can lift twice a heavy load off the ground (not flying) and stagger around, so you might be right that there's no particular reason to justify pegging Roy as a heavy load for her when there's one rule that says he should be a light load and another that suggests he could be 2x a heavy load...
Indeed.

The 14+ str is required to -PICK UP- Roy, not fly with Roy. Celia needed to pick him up, and we can measure that: (14+ str). The fact that that doesn't answer the question about how she flew with him is irrelevant for this point. We can set a lower boundary for her strength based on her picking up this lug of a fighter within the rules. We can separate the rest of it into a further unrelated unanswered side question.