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| Artist: Jay Robinson |
There has been some interest in the purple OSR discord about what the relative sizes of various fantasy humanoids should be. I decided to make a quick survey asking people to size them on a scale from 0-10 with humans at 5 and send it around, and managed to collect 79 responses at the time of writing (though I exclude the response at 12/12/2023 14:44:45 from analysis as an outlier).
I'm just gonna do what seems most obvious to me and look at numerical averages, plus or minus one standard deviation:
| Name | Avg | Stdev | Minus | Plus | Dev Geq Man |
| Hobbit | 2.68 | 0.64 | 2.04 | 3.32 | -3.63 |
| Fairy | 0.76 | 1.19 | -0.43 | 1.95 | -3.56 |
| Goblin | 2.76 | 0.7 | 2.06 | 3.46 | -3.2 |
| Gnome | 2.25 | 1.01 | 1.24 | 3.26 | -2.72 |
| Dwarf | 3.5 | 0.71 | 2.79 | 4.21 | -2.11 |
| Kobold | 2.58 | 1.25 | 1.33 | 3.83 | -1.94 |
| Ratfolk | 3.26 | 1.07 | 2.19 | 4.33 | -1.63 |
| Faun | 3.99 | 1.15 | 2.84 | 5.14 | -0.88 |
| Nymph | 4.36 | 1.21 | 3.15 | 5.57 | -0.53 |
| Morlock | 4.43 | 1.14 | 3.29 | 5.57 | -0.5 |
| Hobgoblin | 4.72 | 1.2 | 3.52 | 5.92 | -0.23 |
| Half-elf | 5 | 0.37 | 4.63 | 5.37 | 0 |
| Human | 5 | 0 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| Different Elf | 5.11 | 1.66 | 3.45 | 6.77 | 0.07 |
| Elf | 5.16 | 0.97 | 4.19 | 6.13 | 0.16 |
| Gnoll | 5.43 | 1.33 | 4.1 | 6.76 | 0.32 |
| Merfolk | 5.33 | 0.78 | 4.55 | 6.11 | 0.42 |
| Lizardfolk | 5.5 | 0.93 | 4.57 | 6.43 | 0.54 |
| Half-orc | 5.54 | 0.65 | 4.89 | 6.19 | 0.83 |
| Orc | 5.94 | 0.72 | 5.22 | 6.66 | 1.31 |
| Wolfman | 6.05 | 0.78 | 5.27 | 6.83 | 1.35 |
| Bugbear | 6.65 | 1.22 | 5.43 | 7.87 | 1.35 |
| Troll | 7.64 | 0.86 | 6.78 | 8.5 | 3.07 |
| Ogre | 7.8 | 0.82 | 6.98 | 8.62 | 3.41 |
| Ent | 9.17 | 0.88 | 8.29 | 10.05 | 4.74 |
Dev Geq Man means the number of standard deviations between the average response and 5, the size of a human being. Now, let's just make a couple of observations:
- About 72% of respondents indicated that Elves are human-sized or larger.
- Trolls, Ogres and Ents are very large, three or four standard deviations above puny humans. Orcs, Wolfmen and Bugbears are somewhat large, at least one standard deviation above man.
- Hobbits, Fairies and Goblins are very small, three standard deviations below humans. Note that there's also a strong consensus that fairies are smaller, but goblins are about the same size as hobbits. Gnomes, Dwarves, Kobolds and Ratfolk are also small, one or two standard deviations below humans.
- Fauns, Nymphs, Morlocks, Hobgoblins, Half-elves, Elves, Different Elves, Gnolls, Merfolk, Lizardfolk and Half-orcs are all on average within one standard deviation of humans.
- There is the least consensus on the size of Different Elves, which is unsurprising as that category is kind of just a joke about how many kinds of elves there are. Seventy-five percent of they 68 respondents who gave a size for "Elf, but Different (TM)" gave a size equal to or greater than they gave for Elf. They are followed, in uncertainty, by Kobolds, Bugbears, Nymphs, Fauns, Morlocks and Ratfolk.
Now, there is considerable overlap between most of these categories if standard deviations are included. Some of the categories that do not overlap (that is, their averages differ by at least the sum of their standard deviations) are:
- Fairies are smaller than all but Gnomes and Kobolds.
- Goblins are smaller than Hobgoblins.
- Orcs are smaller than Trolls, but not necessarily smaller than Bugbears.
- Ogres and Ents are larger than all but Bugbears and Trolls.
I don't think there are any great mysteries being revealed here, but I hope you enjoyed reading it. Please note that while I may have majored in math, I never took a statistics class. If you have a better handle on analyzing this kind of data, please try your hand at it.
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