How important is size?

[frankthedm]

Size benefits in 4E won’t be as major in 3E.

Several natural attacks on Large bipeds do not get reach anymore.

Reach no longer grants Op Attacks as the default.

Combat maneuvers helped by size are mostly gone.

Str based damage is no longer multiplied by 1.5 with a two hander

Hindering terrain is supposed to be much more common in 4E.

 

[Aramas]

Str based damage is no longer multiplied by 1.5 with a two hander

And what is your source for this? Looking at the pregen characters, they seem to do 1.5 Str when they wield their weapons 2 handed.

 

[frankthedm]

That was because their weapons had the versatile weapon property. ’+1 damage when wielded 2 handed’.

If the 1.5 rule was still in, they would have been swinging 1d8+5 thanks to str x1.5 and Versatile properties

But the matter is being discussed here. http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=223414

 

[arscott]

The whole concept of Powerful Build (Half-giants are medium but count as large for certain purposes) was created because just making a PC straight-up large led to a whole host of problems. A lot of this was due to the "Monsters work like PCs" paradigm of 3e.

With 4e exception-based monster design, I don't think Large Size will automatically be a problem, and that you can create big PC races without having to resort to weird fixes like Powerful Build.

 

[frankthedm]

The whole concept of Powerful Build (Half-giants are medium but count as large for certain purposes) was created because just making a PC straight-up large led to a whole host of problems. A lot of this was due to the "Monsters work like PCs" paradigm of 3e.

With 4e exception-based monster design, I don't think Large Size will automatically be a problem, and that you can create big PC races without having to resort to weird fixes like Powerful Build.

TBH, some features of being large should apply across the board. Base size, Weapon size, armor size and weapon reaches really should not diverge based on PC/NPC.

Thankfully by making reach only work on one's own turn, one of the biggest reasons for a player seeking large size got removed.

And some more thought of why large PCs will suffer more from bad terrain; Double move is gone and run is only a move action that grants two more speed. This dramatically increases the chance of having one move point left over right when the character was going to enter bad terrain {which costs two to enter] requiring the first move action to be ended and one movement point lost to nothingness. This is worse for a large creature since it will have a much harder time avoiding bad terrain due to the 2x2 base. So many times where a medium critter could have partially moved around bad terrain, the bigger critter has to enter it sooner.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

Wouldn't the draenei also count as large? That, or a human, is what I'd like to play, were I to participate in a 4th edition Azeroth campaign. Of course, they're not as big and beefy as a Tauren, although they'd probably have a charisma bonus from their spiritual affinity for the naaru ....

 

[~Johnny~]

I see Taurens as Medium. If you consider humans to be as big as Medium gets, I understand why you'd want to make them bigger. But I think it's fair to think of humans as medium-Medium and then Taurens as large-Medium. The look of WoW is very "big and bulky," but I don't think Taurens take up twice the vertical space and four times the horizontal space of humans.

Because that's what you'd be looking at on the battlemap: a Tauren taking up ten feet by ten feet. As in, it takes eight humans to surround one Tauren. That's just super big.

 

[Asmor]

It takes 8 medium creatures to surround another medium creature right now... It takes 12 medium creatures to surround a large creature. Additionally, you don't fill the 5-foot square, each 5-foot square is your "personal bubble," the patch of ground that you're moving around in. A tauren (particularly a male tauren), on the other hand, I could see being 5 feet wide at the shoulders and with their stooped posture and horns they probably take up at least 3 feet from front to back.

I think Draenei, the males at least, are about the same size as Warcraft's orcs, which I'd consider to be on the large side of medium. I'd definitely consider the Tauren to be on the smaller side of large, and it's not clear cut that they should be large. I just don't think it's clear cut that they shouldn't be, either.

One big reason to make Tauren large, though, is that means you can use minotaurs as minis for them. (Although Blizz is coming out with a WoW minis game, I've heard it's going to be 40mm scale )

 

[frankthedm]

I see Taurens as Medium. If you consider humans to be as big as Medium gets, I understand why you'd want to make them bigger. But I think it's fair to think of humans as medium-Medium and then Taurens as large-Medium. The look of WoW is very "big and bulky," but I don't think Taurens take up twice the vertical space and four times the horizontal space of humans.

D&D 3.5 Minotaurs are large and they take less than 'twice the vertical space and four times the horizontal space of humans'.

Large is a very wide catagory for size and very brutal on the square grid since as soon as you are bigger than one square, you now must take up 4 squares. Before the grid, small minis ate up 20 MM of fighting space, medium minis took a 25 mm chunk and large minis took a 40mm[1.5 inch] bite from the battlefield. All reasonable sizes. Now since those sizes must confrom to whole squares, the large cratures footprint is made larger.

 

[Mirtek]

Why so touchy?

Tauren race should be normal as the rest, they are not that big. Aren't male trolls taller than female taurens?

In the WarCraft D&D Game the tauren are indeed large (while strangely the trolls are only medium)

Edit: On a closer reading it says that tauren are an average 9f 7.5 feet tall while trolls are only 6 feet (with only a few exceptional trolls reaching 7 feet)