First person character weirdness

Newish guy here trying to figure out UE4 and the first person character (i took it from the template)

I placed the FBC in my own scene just above a piece of geo, when i play it in simulate mode it drops down and sits on top of the “ground” but when i play it in selected viewport mode it drops through the “ground”.

i had to scale the controller to .25 to fit. Another weird thing is that if i scale it down to .15 it will parent itself to a object that i have animating on level start that sits at 0,0,0. What the Dang?

thanks for any help