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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 4709621" data-attributes="member: 57383">Well I'm guessing it's partly different strokes for different folks and partly talking at cross purposes. Going by your frequent references to recent scientific studies I was assuming we're after a fairly "realistic" version of a Tyrannosaurus here, and we seem to have ended up arguing were the realism divide ends up. For example, I don't mind the SRD version of the Tyrannosaurus "  It is slightly more than 30 feet long from nose to tail", since I assume the stats are for a base animal at the small end of the adult scale, like a young adult, while you prefer a 40' individual which may be just slightly over the average (although there aren't really enough adult specimens to be very sure about that). I also like starting out at the small scale because it makes it easy to use the stats for the slightly smaller Tyrannosaurs, like Albertosaurus.Still, this is mostly a matter of taste, so I'll probably just tweak the stats to fit my biases if I ever have a party run into the big scaly one.As for the dire tigers, I'm thinking the SRD tiger makes a better comparison. A dire tiger is a creature with no real-world counterpart, but the tiger is just a regular tiger but, nevertheless it advances to a Huge 18 HD monster! Now I'm fine with the idea of a tiger in the same size category as an elephant in a fantasy game, but I don't much care for the way 3E conflates them with "normal" animals which don't show so much real-life variation in size. I prefer to think of such extra-size category creatures as belonging to fictional 'giant' species, or breeds/individuals that have been enhanced somehow. The latter could be represented by adding an appropriate template, somehow an elephant-sized tiger is far more acceptable to me if it is draconic, fey-touched or fiendish.Speaking of real-life animals that are spread across more than one size category, in poor conditions an adult may be under 10' long and 150 kilos or so (Medium in D&D terms), but the largest specimens can reach 20+ feet and 2000+ pounds (Large).Ironically, the SRD appears to have fluffed this up - the regular crocodile is Medium, but does not advance to Large, while the giant crocodile is Huge, but its stats are only about one size category advanced over a standard crocs (Str 19 versus 27, for example).So, if I get around to it I'll add the crocodile to the list of SRD monsters that need tweaking. There's definitely a place for a Huge crocodile in 3ED&D, and there were, of course, once living crocodilians of such size in prehistoric times, such as Deinosuchus or Sarcosuchus, but the current giant crocodile is a poor representation of such, and I think Huge is too big to be a very large nile or salt-water crocodile.That, and they forgot to give the poor things a Death Roll attack.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" />Anyhows, I think we're about down haggling over the standard Tyrannosaurus, so I'll start on my Primal Rex. At least I won't have to worry about realism as far as that monster's concerned, because it's not what I'm aiming for.</blockquote>

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