The Gaming Den

I've been thinking a lot about grounding fantasy monsters to real animals for a sense of scale and I noticed that minotaurs in D&D average to 700lbs and 7ft tall. That means they weigh about as much as a pony.

But compared to cows, a small one today is between 600-1000lbs, large ones being up to 2000lb, with truly massive specimens and wild gaur reaching 3000lbs.

I figure the spanish fighting bull would be a good basis for a monstrous minotaur to fight, and those weigh around 1,100-1,600lbs

Griffons in D&D though actually are the same size as the upper end of adult male african lion at 500lbs. But griffons are also ridden, so remember that pony comparison and realize that they are again smaller than ponies. So a fully armored knight is going to be like 1/3 the weight of his mount. D&D artwork though presents griffons as something way, way, way bigger than a lion or riding horse:
http://dungeonsmaster.com/wp-content/up ... iffon1.jpg


What other monsters in D&D do you think are in need of rethinking their official size/weight listings? Dragons are something that's brought up often as being too small for riding until they're way too old to be ridden by a plucky paladin boy fighting ogres.

I don't really care about weights, and I don't really care about sizes beyond Small/Medium/Large/etc. As you note, if you start including specific measurements then people will start nitpicking about things being wrong.

EDIT: My only problem with small dragons is that low level PCs are expected to murder sentient toddlers, which sounds kind of creepy.

Maybe said Knight should try his luck with a Hippogriff instead of a Griffin.
And there we are. Nitpicking about things being wrong simply because you started to try and apply to realistic dimensions to fantasy stuff.
Technically speaking, the wings of such a creature would have to have the span of that of sailing planes of today at least for simple gliding alone due to weighth. which would make them unable to exist anywhere but in mountainous regions and also have them drag the wings behind them while on the ground. And if they had to be the flapping flying wings, they would not be able to stop eating to do anything else but fulfill the energy requirements of that body. And then they would need to have a very strange cardiovasculary system, capable of getting blood in the needed quantities and the needed pressure to all 6 limbs, the head and the torso equally while not overloading some body parts while leaving other parts of the body woefully undersupplied by blood and thus oxygen and nutrients.
And then they would need lungs bigger than you could fit into that body to take in enough oxygen to feed into all of that as well i guess.

I am pretty sure not all of what i wrote above is correct, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. Only one Creature. There's a reson why cows are quadruped beings, because legs able to support that kind of weight would have to be much more massive, if you took the load off of two of them and added it to the remaining two legs constantly.

Presumably hippogryphs and gryphons have hollow bones, large lungs, and other adaptations that make them much lighter than you would expect for mammals of their size. And they probably have very large wings, but not so large that they can't fold mostly out of the way. And those wings probably rely on the pectoral muscles for power, leaving the wings with just enough blood flow to keep the feathers, skin, bones, and tendons alive.

But Stahlin says, you're eventually going to get down to 'because magic' or 'because low gravity that we didn't tell you about'.

Low Gravity would also very handily explain giants of all kinds and mighty feats of strength . .

I am pretty sure the flying monsters are never going to make sense. You can't put proportionally sized birdwings on a human sized creature to make them capable of flying. Flying dragons aren't possible at all because birds just don't scale up like that. Same thing with giant bugs...and giant humans really. Low gravity is generally bad for humans and other creatures, so that probably won't help.

OgreBattle wrote: http://dungeonsmaster.com/wp-content/up ... iffon1.jpg

Where are his legs?

shau wrote:Where are his legs?

He's riding side-saddle.

CatharzGodfoot wrote: you're eventually going to get down to 'because magic' or 'because low gravity that we didn't tell you about'.

It's magic that they did tell you about. Magic is in the Hippogriff's creature type. Taxonomically Gryphons can fly for the same reason that Blink Dogs can teleport, because they both belong to the list of magical beasts that are partially made of magic.

shau wrote:Where are his legs?

They were lost in the Xorn War.