Does size really matter?

[tedcahill2]

Is their a clear advantage to being medium size, as opposed to small, if you're playing a melee focused or archer character?

Medium characters can move faster, and get better weapon damage dice.

Small creatures get a bonus to hit and AC, but reduced speed and smaller weapon dice.

Items and abilities can level the field on to hit, AC, and speed, but the lower damage dice will likely always be an issue. Is it really even an issue though?

[syryous]

Size matters on grapples, trips, and some other things. If you're going ranged. go small, unless you need the human bonus feat.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Medium characters can move faster, and get better weapon damage dice.
Goblins actually retain a 30 foot land speed while small. Helps keep air goblins relevant.

[Metahuman1]

Small races often take penalty's to STR and/or Con as well, so there's that to factor in.

[John Longarrow]

Normally the difference between a medium weapon and a small one is an average of one point of damage. For most builds this isn't relevant as the bonus to hit (plus often the bonus to dex) lets the small combatant come out on top over the long run.

Where this does pop up is with strength based attacks (thrown weapons or comp bows) where the average damage tends to be notably higher for medium characters because they seldom have a penalty to strength.

Small warlocks (or small casters who specialize in rays) fair better than their medium sized counterparts.

In all, it depends on exactly what you are putting together and what stat or stats are most important.

[souridealist]

Yeah, I think it's the strength damage that gets you, at least when it comes to melee. Also, the slower speed (yes, I know, except for goblins) gets compounded by armor - a gnome or halfling in medium or heavy armor will get all of 15 feet / three squares of movement in a round. Which is slow. Even as a halfling wizard, I've found myself occasionally irked by having short legs, although it's rarely more than an annoyance - but fifteen feet on a character trying to get close enough to hit things would probably be painful. You could work around it with mithril, though. (This also isn't to say there aren't ways to make it work; I'm sure there are. Pathfinder has a barbarian archetype that's flavored for fighting giants and gives you all kinds of bonuses against anything bigger than you, for example. But I'm not sure that's what you're asking.)

Small size rogues, of course, can ignore all of that. Small rogues with Weapon Finesse are awesome.

I'm less sure about archers, truth be told. I suspect it depends on the other abilities of the race and what else you want to do, which I guess would mean that no, being Medium isn't automatically better in and of itself?

[Particle_Man]

Mounted combat can become more of a thing, since medium sized mounts can go places that large sized mounts just can't.