OOTS #1246 - The Discussion Thread

[hamishspence]

In professional boxing heavy weight is effectively 225+. It used to start at 200lbs, they added a but a little heavy weight for the 200-225 people.

Just goes to show how big a gap there is between "heavyweight boxer" and "median D&D human".

The "median rolls" on the Height and Weight tables, for human males, would produce a 5' 9", 175 pound person.

[Peelee]

Just goes to show how big a gap there is between "heavyweight boxer" and "median D&D human".

The "median rolls" on the Height and Weight tables, for human males, would produce a 5' 9", 175 pound person.

I'm fine with those numbers, really.

[Tvtyrant]

John L Sullivan, the first heavyweight champion, was apparently about 190 lbs (it’s not real clear)

Jack Dempsey apparently weighed in at 6’1” and 187 lbs when he won the heavyweight championship against Jess Willard.

And Jess Willard was 6'1 245. Jack Johnson was 6'1 205. Joe Louis was 6'2 201.

Humans got a lot bigger after the 1950s, which is as much from Obsegons and pesticides as from steroids, but they weren't small prior to the chemical revolution.

[hamishspence]

And Jess Willard was 6'1

The wikipedia article for Jess Willard says he was just over 6'6".

[Quizatzhaderac]

That’s great stuff!

But it’s not how real people work.

And D&D is more realistic? Honestly I'd say the Conan the barbarian is very close to the level of realism D&D aims for.

Except boxers, which are perhaps the ultimate endurance athletes. The cruiserweight division is literally made of 6ft 200lb individuals.

And actually they're heavier, because that's what they weight when dehydrated for their weigh ins.

[hamishspence]

Joe Louis was 6'2 201.

As I mentioned:

Using the PHB height and weight tables - the height at which 200 lb is the median weight for a male human, is 6' 2".

200 pounds is exactly how heavy the median 6' 2" person would be.

Which is consistent with the notion that the middle of the weight ranges for each height, represent fairly strongly-built people.

If a character is 6'2" and 200 pounds, describing them as "built like a heavyweight boxer" is plausible.

[KorvinStarmast]

O-Chul is no sumo wrestler IMO.

He strikes me as one of those 175 pounds of lean body mass optimized for what he does. A friend of mine wrestled 178 weight class (IIRC) in high school, and was also the football team's middle line backer (he tipped the scales just under 200 during football season). I think he was about 5'10.

I see 6 ft / 200 lbs as pretty fat; the few exceptions are almost always focused on strength and never endurance.

Drew Brees (recently retired quarterback for the New Orleans Saints) is not fat and that was about his height and weight, maybe a few pounds more, during his last season.

And actually they're heavier, because that's what they weight when dehydrated for their weigh ins.

Ah, yes, back to the days of weigh ins. Glad they are behind me.

[hamishspence]

A friend of mine wrestled 178 weight class (IIRC) in high school, and was also the football team's middle line backer (he tipped the scales just under 200 during football season). I think he was about 5'10.

Would it be fair to say that "built like an American Football player" skews to slightly bulkier than "built like a boxer"?

[KorvinStarmast]

Would it be fair to say that "built like an American Football player" skews to slightly bulkier than "built like a boxer"?

In his case, I think the answer is yes.

Evander Holyfield struck me as being in the "sweet spot" for size and fitness in a heavyweight boxer (IIRC, he had his first successes one weight class down from that) although Ken Norton was cut from roughly the same pattern, but was bigger all over.

[dmc91356]

Would it be fair to say that "built like an American Football player" skews to slightly bulkier than "built like a boxer"?

I think it would be fairer to say that built like an American Football player skews to twice as bulky as built like a boxer (there is no "slight" about it unless you are talking about kickers maybe).

Anyone read the Myth Adventures books? One dimension had a population that included jocks and non-jocks and they looked like two different species!

[hamishspence]

How 'bout open-water long-distance swimming?

Johnny Weissmuller, at 6' 3" and 190 pounds, might be a good starting point for "built like a swimmer" though not so much long-distance (400m-odd).

[Metastachydium]

Johnny Weissmuller, at 6' 3" and 190 pounds, might be a good starting point for "built like a swimmer"

Interestingly enough, apparently not. I checked the Tokyo medalists in marathon swimming; Florian Wellbrock is 6'4" and 168 lb., Rasovszky Kristóf is 6'3" and 185 lb. while Gregorio Paltrinieri is also 6'3" and 159 lb.
Looks like endurance doen't require quite that much bulk and weight, after all.

[hamishspence]

Using D&D height and weight rules, the minimum possible weight for a 6' 3" human male D&D adventurer is 154 pounds.

Which goes well with the mentioned 6' 3" 159 pound swimmer.

[Vikenlugaid]

I see it as a more abstract form of "toughness" than enormous amounts of muscle and fat. O-Chul is no sumo wrestler IMO.

Whatever. Hard muscles + hard bones + hard skin... He is very hard, and that means weight.

[Vikenlugaid]

I thought "marathon runner" was closer to the ultimate endurance athlete than boxer.

Endurance for running, but not for taking hits, and we havent seen Ochul running a lot, we have seen him taking a lot of hits.

[hamishspence]

That's not how D&D rules work. If you want to play a character at the minimum weight for their height, you can - and it won't affect their Constitution in any way.

There is no "You must be at the maximum weight for your height, to have a high Constitution" rule.

[Vikenlugaid]

That's not how D&D rules work. If you want to play a character at the minimum weight for their height, you can - and it won't affect their Constitution in any way.

There is no "You must be at the maximum weight for your height, to have a high Constitution" rule.

Well, yeah! But that only means D&D is far from realistic (and I am not talking about magic here, I mean "realistic for fantasy"). I mean, you can have 18 int and 3 wis, or 18 wis and 3 int, and that doesn't really have any sense, and the same for 18 str and 3 con, none can be that strong and have so low endurance, at least a human.

But if we try to overanalyze the situation, Ochul should be heavy weight.

[Skull the Troll]

Just goes to show how big a gap there is between "heavyweight boxer" and "median D&D human".

The "median rolls" on the Height and Weight tables, for human males, would produce a 5' 9", 175 pound person.

In todays day and age. If youre talking about the 1400's median would have been more like 5'2" and 130 lbs. Even in the 1700's it was rare to make a door a 6 foot person could get through as anyone who's been around the freedom trail can tell you. :)

Well, yeah! But that only means D&D is far from realistic (and I am not talking about magic here, I mean "realistic for fantasy"). I mean, you can have 18 int and 3 wis, or 18 wis and 3 int, and that doesn't really have any sense, and the same for 18 str and 3 con, none can be that strong and have so low endurance, at least a human.

But if we try to overanalyze the situation, Ochul should be heavy weight.

If youre old enought to know Edith Bunker from All in the Family or John Koffee from the Green Mile you'll see examples of low int, high wisdom.

[pendell]

As far as the flowchart goes, I don't think it tells the full story. Sure, Rich isn't going to re-review the books every time he writes a strip BUT he is an extremely detail-oriented person AND he has spent years making D&D his livelihood, including releasing official source material.

SO I wouldn't say he doesn't care about the rules at all. He does care and works quite hard to make his work make sense within game terms. But it DOES mean that, after having spent a week or two writing a strip, getting the plotting and the dialog and the colors and the thought bubbles and the lines and the drawings and the jokes just right, he's not about to just toss the strip and rewrite it because, two days after release, someone points out how this doesn't work by the rules. Especially if the error shows up five strips later and that means he has to redo all five in order to get back on track. It's far more work to correct at that point than it is to just roll with it. If it bugs him to some extent, maybe he'll make a joke about it in a later strip. Or maybe he'll add a paragraph or two to the book when it comes out commenting on the panel and say something like "well, I messed that up but I still got what I wanted from the story."

Frankly, I think it's better for the story and the strip as a whole if he worries more about in-universe consistency than about consistency with SRD 3.5. The reason being, not everyone who reads this strip is an avid gamer or has in-depth knowledge of the core books. Not everyone has a library of supplements at home. And for that audience, the kind of thing that will get a true gamer exercised and demanding blood will sail right over their heads.

The true foundations of D&D, Tolkien and Moorcock and so forth, were written long before the game system was invented. Great stories give rise to great games; very rarely do great games make great stories.

ETA: Besides, what works by the rules today won't necessarily work when the edition upgrades. I remember stories from the very earliest D&D days where liches would be defeated with a 'raise dead' spell. It worked by the rules then; it doesn't work now.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Yendor]

That's not how D&D rules work. If you want to play a character at the minimum weight for their height, you can - and it won't affect their Constitution in any way.

There is no "You must be at the maximum weight for your height, to have a high Constitution" rule.

Just like there's no correlation between weight and Strength, even though that's very much not the case in reality. Going by weightlifting records, the difference between the lightest (human) woman and heaviest man in D&D should be about 5 points, since the latter is lifting about twice as much.

SO I wouldn't say he doesn't care about the rules at all. He does care and works quite hard to make his work make sense within game terms. But it DOES mean that, after having spent a week or two writing a strip, getting the plotting and the dialog and the colors and the thought bubbles and the lines and the drawings and the jokes just right, he's not about to just toss the strip and rewrite it because, two days after release, someone points out how this doesn't work by the rules.

It's not that he doesn't care at all; he's just doesn't care about the minute details. He's not tracking every last hit point or spell slot, or working out characters' weights down to the ounce. If it's close enough, it's good enough, if it serves the story better that way.

[KorvinStarmast]

The true foundations of D&D, Tolkien and Moorcock and so forth, were written long before the game system was invented. Great stories give rise to great games; very rarely do great games make great stories.

I think that's about right. But sometimes, they do, which is a great game when it happens.

[Psyren]

So I went all the way back to the beginning of this silly tangent and I have a question:



Why are we assuming Serini isn't carrying any of it? Sure Serini says "grab them" in Panel 4, but time clearly passes between that and Panel 5. If Sunny grabbed them both, concluded "Mom, both of them are too heavy, can you take the girl?" and Serini grabbed Lien, nothing we see on the page has to change. Serini can even fly with a heavy load, or she might tap herself with a bull's strength wand etc. Indeed, panel 5 does look like they're being carried separately.

Uh, no answer to this? We're just gonna keep looking up average Japanese athlete BMI or whatever we're doing? Er, okay.

[hamishspence]

In todays day and age. If youre talking about the 1400's median would have been more like 5'2" and 130 lbs. Even in the 1700's it was rare to make a door a 6 foot person could get through as anyone who's been around the freedom trail can tell you. :)

That might have been mostly about being conservative with building materials. I've read that medieval people were only slightly shorter on average than modern people (5' 7" or so for adult men, with the medieval rich being slightly taller than that).

So it may go something like:

Medieval peasant male - average height 5' 7"
Medieval knight, medieval Viking warrior - average height 5' 9"
Victorian era commoner male - average height 5' 5"
Modern era male - average height 5' 10"

[Dion]

We're just gonna keep looking up average Japanese athlete BMI or whatever we're doing?

Well, yes. We’re looking for plot holes.

But Let’s go back to the discussion from a few weeks ago about how much cultivated land a Swedish farmer had in the 13th century.

How is Serini planning to feed O-Chul the 200 lbs cruiserweight paladin? Her little garden shouldn’t have enough food!

I believe the Oracle should have told her to grow a bigger garden, but maybe…

[Liquor Box]

We are talking about ground melee ancient soldiers, they fight with melee weapons and need to be strong to be good at it, they need muscles for that, not like a weightlifter, but more than an average person.

An ancient melee warrior would probably be lighter than modern soldiers. We know that across several places in the world historic people (including the warrior caste) were shorter than people are today. Contemporary illustrations suggest that they weren't particularly heavily built.

I did try to google the average weight of a Samurai (the type of warrior O-Chul is based on) but the best I could come up with was 135 pounds. But I appreciate that the source is not very compelling.
https://deadliestwarrior.fandom.com/wiki/Samurai

I do think the average Samurai would probably have been lighter than the average modern japanese man (150 pounds) though.

I see 6 ft / 200 lbs as pretty fat; the few exceptions are almost always focused on strength and never endurance.

I don't think that this is right. People are all built differently and a 6ft, 200pd person will often be perfectly healthy.

[hamishspence]

Remember that O-Chul was not born and raised in the Samurai caste.

Using date from both Good Deeds Gone Unpunished and the main strip:

He's a commoner by birth, he was 12 when he was adopted (by a commoner sergeant, not a samurai), was 42 when he took his first paladin level, and had been a fighter for 12 years at that point:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0545.html

so he took his first fighter level at the age of 30.

[Liquor Box]

Just goes to show how big a gap there is between "heavyweight boxer" and "median D&D human".

The "median rolls" on the Height and Weight tables, for human males, would produce a 5' 9", 175 pound person.

I was avoiding referencing the rules for weight, because this discussion was linked to the argument about whether the rules apply.

But yeah, an average man would be 175 pounds, and an average woman would be 140 pouinds. That would combine to 315 pounds. So the question would be whether their equipment weighs 60 pounds or more.

However, given that the Saphire Guards are based on Japanese culture, it may be more sensible to use the weights from Oriental Adventures, which are ligher - 165 pounds for men and 130 pounds for women. That's 295 combined, allowing 80 pounds for equipment.

Remember that O-Chul was not born and raised in the Samurai caste.

Using date from both Good Deeds Gone Unpunished and the main strip:

He's a commoner by birth, he was 12 when he was adopted (by a commoner sergeant, not a samurai), was 42 when he took his first paladin level, and had been a fighter for 12 years at that point:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0545.html

so he took his first fighter level at the age of 30.

Yeah, but we don't really have good data on the weights of medieval warriors or medieval people generally. So it's a bit speculative. I only mentioned because another poster had suggested that medieval warriors would be heavy than average people today. I think that's clearly wrong. But I doubt we'd find any information from which to convert that into weights.

[Vikenlugaid]

If youre old enought to know Edith Bunker from All in the Family or John Koffee from the Green Mile you'll see examples of low int, high wisdom.

They are maybe low int and high wis, but I don't think either of them have 3 int. Low int and high wis ok, but something as extreme as 3 int and 18 wis is really weird as a concept.
And with the phisical atributes is even more absurd, someone who has 18 strength cant have 3 constitution.

Those atributes have never been realistic at all. It's just an aproximation to have something.

[hroþila]

I'll say it again: medieval diet is completely irrelevant to the OotS universe. These folks have burgers and BBQs and ice cream and buffalo wings and anything we may imagine eating today.

[Fyraltari]

I'll say it again: medieval diet is completely irrelevant to the OotS universe. These folks have burgers and BBQs and ice cream and buffalo wings and anything we may imagine eating today.

Ang gimjang and rice noodles.