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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3946743" data-attributes="member: 4937">The simple answer is to make them cooler.The longer answer takes into account several issues:1) Modern humans are much larger than humans historically have been.  Average human height is something like 5' 0" to 5' 4" depending on gender and race, historically, and through much of the world even to this day.  By contrast, modern dutch males run around 6'2" on average.  Other modern Westerners average around 5'11".   So the relative proportions of 5', 4' and 3' adults to what we expect adult size to be seems alot smaller than it should.  We aren't thinking in terms of medieval humans anymore.2) The comparison to children is very very misleading.  A better comparison would be to an actual Dwarf or Midget.  A healthy male adult 'dwarf' could well bench press 300 lb+ despite being 4'6".  There are very few 12 year olds that could do that.  Similarly, I bet you can find little people in the 3'6" range who can bench press 120 lbs or more.  Below that, you are getting into the range where humans can't really be described as 'healthy', but that's because we aren't designed to be that small.  A humanoid race that naturally matured at 3' - 3' 6" would likely be stronger than humans of that size.3) Neither drawfs or hobbits are proportionally identical to humans of the same height.  Dwarfs look like human 'dwarfs', which is what you'd expect.  The have large barrel chests relative to the length of thier limbs.  Hobbits are described as having large hands and feet (and I would presume heads) for thier size, and I would presume that they have wrists and ankles to match.  A halfling male might not be much bigger than my 2 year old, but it isn't unreasonable to presume that they would be about 5 times as strong and have agility not far removed from some of the medium sized cats (like a Caracal, for example).4) The natural habit of players is to go for the 'kewl' factor.  Speaking as a DM, I've never once had a player who played a character who wasn't at or near the upper end of height for a member of his race.  Not once.  Height in humans translates instinctually to authority.  Almost noone wants to play someone who is 'lowly'.  I've done it, but only as a conscious rejection of the trend once I noticed it, and that doesn't count (since standing apart is another way to be 'kewl' in modern society).  The designers are just giving in to the overall wishes of the fan base.</blockquote>

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