litphoria

Fully in support of this, imagination is like, but getting a better picture of the character is more important. The current categories are pretty meaningless, especially if you look at different races - is a "short" halfling just average height for a halfling, or short for even that? How tall exactly is that lizard-person I am playing with, they have only listed "tall" after all? Maybe just turn it into feet intervals - Below 1 foot, 1-2 feet, 2-3 feet, etc..., 10 or more feet or something?

We don't have weight but I guess that's a part of body build.

At the very least a reminder & strong recommendation to specify your character's actual height in context would be very helpful.

Ideally categories exist to group similar attributes together, so that you can search by those groups. Buuut... it does also break down, like Fiora says, when it comes to creatures that are just larger or smaller by default. I've seen most halflings just pick "short" despite being average halfling size, and tiny pixies pick "micro" despite being average for pixies, so it seems people want humans for a frame of reference unlike the trait descriptions say. Something that specifies actual loose height ranges compared to humans could be pretty helpful.

Agreed, height, weight and general measurements should have some numbers attached to them. Since one persons small might not be hte same as nother persons small and they are small details that can add a lot of depth to a character.

What is the problem in specifying this in your trait context?

It's not intuitive and a lot of people don't even realize that's an available option to them.

Does that not seem like a better, more valuable problem to tackle instead, then? There's a hell of a lot more utility in being comfortable with the trait context than trying to remove trait options.

It would also make it much easier to search for, though, if we could search for explicit heights. As Aideen said, all the current options are really subjective - and again, what is the height in relation to? Human height, or the height of whatever species the character belongs to? And there are big differences in even those categories - I might want to play with a tall character of, say, 6 and a half feet, but be turned off by an 8 foot tall character that would still fall under the same category. Might want to search for short humans/elves/similar body-types and not find my results filled with dwarves or (relative) giants that still fall under "Demihuman" and are as such impossible to filter out.

I disagree, searching would be severely worse if you had specify exact figures. Since we have no way to search for ranges, nor any way to do "or" in searching, you'd have to painstakingly go through each possible specific value you wanted one at a time - like height of 5'0" ... 5'1"... 5'2" ... This is rather aside the fact that not everyone uses the same measurement systems for everything, so you're just simply going to automatically exclude people who measure height in m or cm or weight in kg or st.

The profile options are always relative to the other options on a profile. A tall dwarf would be a dwarf that is tall for dwarves. A short elf may still be taller than most humans, and so on. For species that have different physical builds for gender, that should be taken into consideration as well, such as human males usually being taller than human females, or potenialy spider females being larger than male spiders. This is exactly what the options describe, and this has always been so.

It's about making the profiles more Intuitive. Short/tall are not specific and can change from person to person. Having a spot for measurements is a definite increase in profile usability, setting it as a caveat on the existing info has not worked in the past since the current profile system is so obtuse in terms of displaying the important I formation in an easily readable manner.

Ok, but my point is, you already have that. You can add arbitrary details for any trait. If you think that's not intuitive or visible enough, that's fine, but it's a separate request and issue from this one, that involves separate solutions, like displaying trait context more prominently on editing, or showing the first line of each context on the profile view without expanding it.

Or just include measurements on them. IE: tiny, under two feet. Short, under five feet. And so on, so that these more specific info sets can be a search criteria.

Hmmm, I think I've seen that in feedback somewhere, but I believe it was attempting to peg the current profile options against a human-relative measurement.

Well this feedback seems to be about wanting some form of standardized measurements for size related info. Height weight and size of body parts. I propose adding a loose range for them. Small being from x to y. And so on. This will allow more specific searches and any ultra specific detail can be added in the context/preference box.

The profile options are always relative to the other options on a profile. A tall dwarf would be a dwarf that is tall for dwarves. A short elf may still be taller than most humans, and so on. For species that have different physical builds for gender, that should be taken into consideration as well, such as human males usually being taller than human females, or potenialy spider females being larger than male spiders. This is exactly what the options describe, and this has always been so.

My experience is people are using that trait differently in practice. The characters I've seen from short races (yordle, dwarf), even when average height for their race, pick "short" because they want to advertise themselves to people looking for short characters.

Makes sense too. If I find short profiles, wouldn't I want to find all those goblins and dwarves and so on?

Likewise if I want to find tall profiles would a 4½ foot hobbit really be what I'm after?

The only problem I have with that line of reasoning is you lose any ability to determine variability in non-human profiles. If everything is pegged at a human scale, you have no way to really find an exceptionally short dwarf, or a really tall dragon. The former will always be short and the latter will always be tall. It even gets a little more complicated, since, what is short for humans, anyway? A 5'2" woman is short compared to a six foot man, but still within average range for human women.

But either way, that feels like a separate conversation from this suggestion, which suggests for specific values to be used in place of the categories.

That's.... exactly what I keep saying, WA. Give it simple feet measurements - tiny (up to one feet), very small (up to two feet), small (up to three feet), very short (up to 4 feet), short (up to 5 feet), average (up to 6 feet), tall (up to 7 feet), very tall (up to 8 feet), large (up to 10 feet), huge (larger than 10 feet) or something - those are just categories I pretty much pulled out of my ass. At the moment, the system just does not work - if I search for short demihumans I might find anything from kobolds and goblins over dwarves to shorter Genasi or something. Just please give us some hard measurements so we can actually search for our exact preferences.

I'm inclined to agree with Fiora, in a perfect world we could split it up in a "Race- height" IE "Short dwarf" or "Tall halfling" But basing them around human sizes isn't inherently bad, since most people will rather naturally relate to them.

Especially because there is not always (far from always) any consensus on what a race looks like. There are dozens of different settings with dwarves that can all be different, there is anything from Santa's elfs over Tolkien's elves over Drow to some 7-foot tall elves in other settings, trolls are a fun species to compare between settings because you have smaller, 4-5 foot ones and ones that tower over other races at 10 feet or more, Dwarves have representations from Disney's snow-white, where they are almost gnomish small (another race that has no size set, but is often protrayed as 3 feet or so on average, with some portrayals making them smaller than 1 foot), to D&D dwarves that are actually almost human-sized at 4 feet with some even taller outliers.
For fantasy species, there is no "average" - thousands of writers have written about any species you may find in mainstream, all with different ideas about what they look like.

Yeah the lack of actual definite height in most of these species makes having an "average" to use as a reference frame a difficult proposition. Dragons have the same problem so finding a dragon that's tall for a dragon isn't really something I can do. (Other than they're usually "big".)

I think we'd be better off with height being defined in feet from a human reference frame like what Fiora was describing.

Our search engine doesn't have an "or" and can't handle ranges at the moment (body height between short and tall), but we should implement this after it does one or both of those.

Agreed, Using human as a reference for these things makes the most sense.

Should we be making a separate suggestion to change the body height options to have defined heights in feet with new options as necessary?

So, I'm confused. What exactly is being suggested here? A way to input an exact size for your height or associating exact figures with the categories already in the system? The body of this feedback reads very strongly like the former, but all of the comments seem to be reading like the latter.

If a character I am interacting with is 5'3" (1.6m) tall unless the profile mentions it or the player mentions it in a post, I will not know. The same applies to the size of certain body parts (i.e. Genitals) And Weight. If a Person is 100lb (45.3kg) The same situation comes up.

For example, this part of the feedback would not be addressed by simply adding exact figures to the current categories, though it is still addressed by trait context.

How I understood at least the original request was to add at least some numbers to the size categories, since otherwise they are very subjective - making them hard to search for. That's what I went on about, and what others seemed to agree with as well.

it seems like they are requesting the size feature choices to be more specific. Like small being under one foot or something of the sort. Removing average or renaming it to "middle" for 4-5 feet seems fitting.

tiny (up to one feet), very small (up to two feet), small (up to three feet), very short (up to 4 feet), short (up to 5 feet), average (up to 6 feet), tall (up to 7 feet), very tall (up to 8 feet), large (up to 10 feet), huge (larger than 10 feet this seems more fitting to me. Except just rename average to medium

I made a suggestion about body height should define the actual body size a while ago. The general problem is that all traits are relative (not absolute).

I think we'll benefit from an exception in this case in this being an absolute measurement trait.

I've left a note in Desdemona's suggestion about the discussion here and linked the two suggestions together.

^ I dunno what that is and you didn't link so I have to post here.

Yo why can't we have numbers in the form of selectables? 1 foot and under, 2-3 feet, 4-5 feet, 5-5.5 feet, 5.5-6 feet, 6-8 feet, and over 8. Or something, just an example.

It's here: body height should define the actual body size (litphoria.com)