Imagine you made a bunch of dots on a person, all over their body, and you assigned each dot a number. Then you did the same thing to a set of armour. You put the armor on the regular sized person so all the numbered dots on both the person and the armour lined up. Then you could make a person bigger or smaller, but the dots would remain in the same relative locations, by effect shrinking and growing the armour. Sometimes, an artist would review how the armour grew and shrunk, and make small custom adjustments to make sure it looked good.

This was basically how it was done in the late 90s and early 2000s when mmorpgs were just starting to come into their own. Theres more complicated methods that have been added onto this basic method to make armour look even better and change shapes even more, but that's far beyond the scope of this sub.

Im not a game developer. But knowing a bit about coding. I think the most reasonable thing is that the asset for armor probably just scales directly vertically with height and horizontally in both directions with fat/muscle/mass.

Im sure it just rerenders the model with different dimensions. It probably has base dimensions, and then they are probably multiplied by character height and mass to scale it up or down.

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ayy u put it really well thankyou !

yea i guess, i thought maybe tho the pixels will get all distorted and weird looking tho if just directly scaled

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The base size for the asset is probably the biggest version. Expanding an image is harder to retain quality than shrinking an image. My assumption is that the same thing applies to this.

You're not wrong that pixels can get distorted, but the distortion when scaling down is very minor.