Race Height Abnormalities

[saber_alter]

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?

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.

[Risvertasashi]

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.

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.

[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.

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.

[Risvertasashi]

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.

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?)

[Aryalandi]

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)

[Risvertasashi]

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)

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.

[Sagittarian]

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*"