Race Height Abnormalities

[Risvertasashi]

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''?

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.