Race Height Abnormalities

The title is pretty self explanatory and as silly as it sounds it is something I would like to know more about. Like, does it exist like it does in real life? I am an RPer and I do stick to the minimum/maximum race height but I see a lot of controversy across the web and game about people making their characters taller than the maximum allowed in game. I'm just genuinely curious! {Please Assist!} :P

In example: Making a female Miqo'te that is 5'8'' rather than the in game maximum of 5'3''. Does this happen in the natrual order of things Eorzea or is it completely impossible?

The same can be said for a lack of height. Is it possible for a Male Roegadyn to be say 6'2'' rather than the minimum of 7'1''?

A serious answer would be appreciated! Thanks so much!

I'd think that from a lore/character standpoint it's possible to have a very tall Miqo'te or a very short Roegadyn. The limitations on character height as far as the actual character creation screen are probably just to cut down the work on graphical resources. That way, the developers don't have to worry about how the equipment would scale for characters outside the narrow "normal" size range for their species. Eh, it makes sense to me, anyway. xD

I'm fairly certain that the min and max for character creation is, in fact, the min and max of that race, barring disease, conditions, or magical ailments (Much like real life dwarfism or gigantism).

Could be wrong though.

Or, you know, AGE which we can't actually make an Elezen teenager like Alphinaud.

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Originally Posted by Terrini

Or, you know, AGE which we can't actually make an Elezen teenager like Alphinaud.

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Age is a given but a good thing to point out! I mean a fully developed adult though. :)

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Originally Posted by XantchaArrapago

In example: Making a female Miqo'te that is 5'8'' rather than the in game maximum of 5'3''. Does this happen in the natrual order of things Eorzea or is it completely impossible?

The same can be said for a lack of height. Is it possible for a Male Roegadyn to be say 6'2'' rather than the minimum of 7'1''?

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Height distribution (or similar characteristics) in a population tends to follow a bell curve AKA normal distribution; you have a great concentration at the 'average', and as you progress further away individual data points become rarer and rarer. We would expect 0.3% of the population to be past the 3 standard deviations mark in height (but this includes shorter as well as taller).

The character creator allows about 12.5cm (about 5 inches) variation for a female miqo'te height. This is actually really narrow! If we assume that this range is 1 standard deviation, then 5'8" would fall between the second and third standard deviations (169cm~174cm), where only 5% (or 2.5% really, since we're looking at tallness only here) of the population is. If the character creator range accounts for 2 standard deviations, then only 0.3% (0.15% only including the tall side) would fall into a range this far from the mean.

So, in short, yes that tall miqo'te female probably does exist, but the height constraints given to use in the character creator probably cover the range considered to be 'normal' (a 5'8" miqo'te female basically being very rare).

The same sort of statistical distribution could be applied towards shorter than mean heights as well, but added to this there are other variables that can cause stunted growth.

But all this isn't supported by lore. The devs could say that magically all of species X fall within a certain range or the character creator range, no exceptions. If it follows population trends, then what's possible is much wider than what's typical. Of course RL also has many variables that can affect distribution.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

statistics

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\thumbsup
.. too tired for more lucid comment.

Thanks for the responses so far! That's a very interesting answer, Risvertasashi, and one that makes perfect sense to me. A lot of RPers (not all mind you) disagree with the abnormality theory and frown upon anyone who goes beyond SEs set numbers. Of course this is within reason. Let's face it. A 5 foot Lala I don't see existing EVER!

Anyway! With that said I hope one day maybe the Devs can answer this question for the sake of RP argument. I see a lot of people get into serious debate over this. And there is legit reason to debate over it. But sometimes I see people get cut throat over it.

I personally won't do it until I hear a Dev tell me otherwise. But if other people want to do it that's fine. I just hate to see people go at each others throats about it. :(

Raubahn is taller than the max highlander height btw.

Isn't that one huge Shallowtail Reaver in Sastasha normal, the one that drops the Waverider Gate Key, also taller than any player-made Roe?

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Originally Posted by KikoriL

Isn't that one huge Shallowtail Reaver in Sastasha normal, the one that drops the Waverider Gate Key, also taller than any player-made Roe?

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i think that's more game mechanic thing rather than canon, he needs to be big enough to make people differentiate him from the trash.

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Originally Posted by XantchaArrapago

Anyway! With that said I hope one day maybe the Devs can answer this question for the sake of RP argument. I see a lot of people get into serious debate over this. And there is legit reason to debate over it. But sometimes I see people get cut throat over it.

I personally won't do it until I hear a Dev tell me otherwise.

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Honestly, you're pretty unlikely to get a dev response on this... they don't seem too inclined to comment when these sorts of topics come up. And that's one of the reasons I dislike RP communities... they tend to assume that if something is not explicitly stated in the source material somewhere, it cannot exist.

But, to me, assuming a hard constraint on height just isn't reasonable. Adding to that, player populations don't model those in the real world (ie not a normal distribution); many tend to set the slider at the minimum or maximum, or right in the middle.

I tend to regard the range we can set our characters to as the normal range for that race. There would be cases of dwarfism and gigantism that would lead to a significantly wider total range, but our characters are neither dwarfs nor giants.

I don't quite get why there would be controversy over it from RP'ers, though. Even if there could be other members of a race that are beyond the bounds of the game's height sliders, our characters are not. When we roleplay, we roleplay as the characters we're playing, and those characters can only have the heights that the game allows.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

I tend to regard the range we can set our characters to as the normal range for that race. There would be cases of dwarfism and gigantism that would lead to a significantly wider total range, but our characters are neither dwarfs nor giants.

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The thing is... height doesn't have a hard stopping point. If you try to define hard cutoffs and say "below this is dwarfism, above this is gigantism", you will get people that are 0.1 over/under each threshold. Heights in a population can also be affected by something as simple as... nutrition. Not even as extreme as semi-starving someone.

Now the character creator does have a hard stopping point... but I'll also point out that we can't make fat characters (as in overweight compared to the species' normal range).

Is it really inconceivable that Eorzea could have overweight individuals? Or any of the other myriad of things that could be, but we don't have options for? (Would we really all have the same 4 faces?)

There are rare variations in height between how tall we can be and how tall npcs can be.. Raubahn is a good example of what we would consider "abnormal" because he towers over max height male highlander pc characters if i remember correctly..

Generally speaking most people in Eorzea are about the same height/build (they do city-wide workout days when you aren't around to keep in shape)

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Originally Posted by Aryalandi

Generally speaking most people in Eorzea are about the same height/build (they do city-wide workout days when you aren't around to keep in shape)

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Thanks, that made me laugh XD

But, on a more serious note, the point I'm getting at is this: Game systems are limited because they're artificial systems and, to varying extents, because of stylization. And limited budgets. And so on. Lore/background/etc does generally define what we can see in the system... but I don't think it's reasonable to assume system defines lore/background.

And I'll just leave it with that.

The way I think of it is that our characters are the ones that can buy the off-the-rack clothing in the most common sizes and it fits perfectly. Go to the merchant and ask for a leather jerkin Miqo'te sized - perfect fit!

I don't think I know anyone who can actually do that in rl...
Can you imagine what that would do to loot drops? "Dreadwyrm robe of casting?! Finally! Aww, it's the wrong size. Well maybe with some safety pins .. and open this seam .. can't really lift my arms to cast... *sigh*"