the great humanoid relative size survey

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.

the horrible CRAAB

CRAAB. HD and fighting ability as two mortals, armor as plate. Immune to fire and cold, but takes double damage from either immediately after being subjected to the other.

Spirits of chaos may take on innumerable forms in the depths of the maelstrom, but when they journey into the intertidal regions that border our world they overwhelmingly assume the shape of the craab: a round creature the size of a bullock, with too many legs and no other identifiable organs. Its surface is like baked, unglazed clay, yet it is both strangely supple and tough. When slain and broken open, the tissues of a craab quickly dissolve into murky, brackish and foul-smelling water and the shell crumbles like ordinary clay.

 

Magicians can force a spirit of chaos out of the half-shape of the craab and into another form. The Referee rolls two dice and chooses a form with as many HD as the lower of the two for the spirit. A magician must then expend a spell slot of that level/roll that many MD to force the transformation (no save) in a number of combat rounds equal to the higher of the dice the Referee rolled. If the craab has not been killed before then, its shell bursts open violently and the (unhurt) new form emerges from it, dripping pure water.

unified levels

In my opinion, one of the more interesting things D&D 3e did was treat monster HD/type somewhat like the classes for player characters. Understandably, this was closest to the surface when discussing the possibility of adventuring as a monster. Level adjustment meant that a monstrous character was treated as one or more levels higher than their class level for the purpose of how much experience they needed to reach the next level.

When Savage Species was written, that concept got significantly expanded by the inclusion of monster classes. One could start your career as a stripped-down version of a monster on par (in theory) with other level 1 characters, and gradually gain their more powerful and iconic abilities. However, this still needed a separate class for each monster type and it didn't expose the mechanical guts of how monsters and characters ticked.

What follows is an attempt to do unify monster and character building by giving each an "ordinary track" that governs more mundane advancement, here Nerve (aka Hit) Dice, and optional multi-classing into "extraordinary tracks" that grant special abilities.