grappling somebody isn't like kicking somebody or throwing a fireball at them, you can't grapple peter the joy mutant from painful the same way you could little timmy aged eight from vegaful

one of them is basically triple the size of a regular human or more, the other one isn't, good luck trying to bear hug peter when you're about as tall as beltboy

characters who grapple should have their grappling moves check what size the person they are grappling is, and to do that, you need programming magic

liam made a cool custom script for brad has a pain that actually does just that, but you're still going to need to set up a common event that checks a variable, believe it or not that can be done in the damage formula

here's an example:

i haven't seen anybody try this out yet, but now, we have the tools

also, and this is important, don't artificially extend the heights and widths of your battler sprites

otherwise you might find yourself in a situation where little timmy is treated like he's 8 feet tall because there's too much blank space above him

you only need a single pixel in order to make sure the "white bar" glitch doesn't happen

(image taken from yoloman's video)