Gelatinous cube: Size discrepancy between MM and SRD

[Asmor]

I did a bit of searching on this forum and google and could find no mention of this. The closest thing I found was this page which lists a gelatinous cube as if the original statistics were for a huge creature but they were crossed out and corrected to be for a large creature.

In the MM, a Gelatinous Cube is huge. In the SRD, they're large. I'm assuming that the MM is correct here, but does anyone know what gives, and has this already been addressed?

 

[frankthedm]

I'm assuming that the MM is correct here, but does anyone know what gives, and has this already been addressed?

A Large creature takes up 10'x10' on the battlemat

A huge creature takes up 15'x15' on the battlemat.

The Gelatinous cube is a 10' cube.

The MM is wrong.

This has been addressed in errata.

 

[Asmor]

Ah, thanks! I actually found a copy of the errata during my searches which made no mention of this, but I think that was an older copy. I just checked the most recent and it does list Gelatinous Cubes as large.

Still, it's rather bizarre... This wasn't a simple typo, the GC in the MM is huge. It's got the huge penalty to AC and attacks, it's got 15 foot space/10 foot reach, etc. The errata doesn't fix a problem, as far as I can see, it replaces the huge cube with a large one.

 

[Delta]

Well, it's a standard 3.0 --> 3.5 conversion wonkiness. In 3.0 they assumed it had about as much total body mass as a Huge creature, and designed it thusly. They kept the same stats in 3.5, but changed overall facing categories, then decided facing took precedence for categories, then semi-errata'd the gelatinous cube without touching all the side effects of size.

So yes, it's a poor effect of 3.0 --> 3.5 conversion. My moral is, "When converting a complicated system, there's lots of detailed side-effects you'll probably overlook."

 

[Wolfwood2]

I did a bit of searching on this forum and google and could find no mention of this. The closest thing I found was this page which lists a gelatinous cube as if the original statistics were for a huge creature but they were crossed out and corrected to be for a large creature.

In the MM, a Gelatinous Cube is huge. In the SRD, they're large. I'm assuming that the MM is correct here, but does anyone know what gives, and has this already been addressed?

A Gelatinous Cube is supposed to fill up your traditional dungeon corridor, which is about 10 feet wide. However, doing that really requires a Huge Creature so that it can be forced to squeeze and physically scrape the dungeon walls. If the Cube is merely Large, then it occupies a 10 foot square for purposes of combat but is not physically 10 feet wide, and does not scrape the dungeon walls as it travels.

In order to allow the Gelatinous Cube to fill its traditional function of dungeon clearer, I would go witht he Huge model.

 

[Arkhandus]

Naaah. Gelatinous cubes are oozes and thus don't really have a 'facing' issue; every side is their front, effectively. They don't need to turn or twist to look around; they don't even have much Dexterity so they hardly even move when fighting. They can fill a dungeon corridor without being Huge, since they really do take up a full 10 foot cube; and being oozes, their bodies are relatively pliable, anyway.

 

[phindar]

Yeah, gelatinous cubes grow to fill the size of the corridor they are supposed to clean.