What are the height (and weight) size ranges for each size category of creature?

Question

Changelings have the ability to change their height and weight, but not so much they change a size category:

[...] You can also adjust your height and weight, but not so much that your size changes. [...]

While they start out as a Medium creature, there is scope for them to be affected by something like Enlarge/Reduce, which would then enable them to change their height (and weight) to any size within that size category.

As a result, I'm looking for height (and weight) ranges for each size category in the game. (I've not been able to find such a chart)

If there isn't a size chart in 5e, answers from other editions are welcome.

Answer 1

While there doesn't appear to be a simple table in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition dnd-5e, there was one in the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 dnd-3.5e Dungeon Master's Guide 2003, 29. Though it's not as necessary in 5e to have a 'rule for everything', size in 5e is almost exclusively defined by the space a creature takes up in combat. The rest of the dimensions, height, length, width, weight, et al. are left somewhat nebulous. For the changeling, one might start with the height and weight ranges for other medium humanoids, as far as those numbers exist as statistics, for example.

It may be helpful to use the table from the 3.5 DMG as a basis to start your descriptions and rulings from. Truncated below:

Size Category	Maximum Height	Max. Weight	Space
Fine	6in. or less	1/8 Lb or less	1/2 ft.
Diminutive	1 ft.	1 Lb	1 ft.
Tiny	2 ft.	8 Lb	2 1/2 ft.
Small	4 ft.	60 Lb	5 ft.
Medium	8 ft.	500 Lb	5 ft.
Large	16 ft.	4000 Lb	10 ft.
Huge	32 ft	32000 Lb	15 ft.
Gargantuan	64 ft.	250000 Lb	20 ft.
Colossal	64 ft. or more	250000 Lb or more	30 ft.

Height is also length for 'long' rather than 'tall' creatures.

Weight is for creatures made of flesh.

Space is usually what is listed, but exceptions exist.

The linked SRD page (correctly) extrapolates the changes as minimums as well as maximums.

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I view this as a good starting point for description and hammering my monsters to fit the scales of D&D.

Answer 2

No official guidance is given in the rules, however rather than looking at exact height/weight ranges, you can instead look at this list I made and ask yourself if the player is closer in size to a sheep than a human, or weighs more like a horse than a normal person.

Size Category	Example Creatures
Tiny	Badger, Bat, Cat, Crab, Fox, Frog, Hare, Hawk, Lizard, Owl, Snake, Honeybee, Quipper, Rat, Raven, Scorpion, Sea Horse, Spider, Weasel
Small	Baboon, Eagle, Jackal, Octopus, Sheep
Medium	Ape, Black Bear, Boar, Deer, Dolphin, Goat, Human, Hyena, Mastiff, Mule, Panther, Pig, Pony, Reef Shark, Seal, Vulture, Wolf
Large	Brown Bear, Camel, Cow, Crocodile, Elk, Horse, Lion, Ox, Polar Bear, Rhinoceros, Tiger, Walrus
Huge	Elephant, Killer Whale
Gargantuan	Sperm Whale

I have bolded one in each category which I think gives a representative idea of how big/heavy each category is.

Answer 3

Height is never really defined

There's a reason you don't remember such a chart, because 5e doesn't have one. It doesn't really spend a lot of time on height outside of cylindrical spell effects and player characters. The same goes for verticallity in general, really.

The only part the game really defines (PHB 191) is the creature sizes dictating the space the occupy in combat, which doesn't cover verticaly, and is "not an expression of its physical dimensions."

There is a chart on page 248 of the Dungeon Master's Guide which shows creatures of different height, but it doesn't give you what you were looking for without a lot of extrapolation:

It rather obviously doesn't cover anything non-bipedal (the worm isn't much help because that shape doesn't generalize well, and Gargantuan is just anything bigger than Huge anyway), nor does it actually say anything about what the limits or borders are. You could maybe take the depicted heights as (approximate) upper bounds, it gives little for lower bounds if you want to cover all existing monsters. (The extreme end would be rug of smothering which is Large and well... one carpet tall).

Answer 4

About Space Controlled

What we get from official sources about size is about the area you have control over:

Size	Space	Examples
Tiny	2 1/2 by 2 1/2 ft.	Imp, sprite
Small	5 by 5 ft.	Giant rat, goblin
Medium	5 by 5 ft.	Orc, werewolf
Large	10 by 10 ft.	Hippogriff, ogre
Huge	15 by 15 ft.	Fire giant, treant
Gargantuan	20 by 20 ft. or larger	Kraken, purple worm

Which I believe is fuzzy by design. I think it is along the lines of designers thinking, "We all know what medium creature looks like, and what a huge creature looks like, but we don't want to some hard fast rule that 9' is medium and 9'1" is large."

Height

In general, I think a height less then next control space is about what you'll in the most monster stat blocks for a given size, as a general rule of thumb. That is, I wouldn't let a medium humanoid creature get taller than 10ft., because with a sword their reach would logically be larger than the 5 foot space. Small and medium, as currently written, is a weird distinction. So maybe something like:

• Tiny, anything less that 1 feet tall.
• Small 1 to 3 ft tall.
• Medium 3' to 10' ft tall. (average adult humans have a height of 5.6)
• Large 10' to 15' ft tall.
• Huge 15' to 20' ft tall.
• Gargantuan 20' or more.

Keeping in mind, again, that these are just numbers I picked out of the air, based on what kind of makes sense given the control area described above. Most of the time, just setting the max to control size of the next size. Although it does fit with the diagram in the DMG.

Weight

Weight is more difficult and more fuzzy, because a lot of monsters and such are made out of weird materials of different density than human flesh and bone. Perhaps the best bet it to look at the weights of the real life creatures in each category when possible. Here's some for reference:

• Tiny: Bats weigh at up to 3.3 lbs.
• Small: Rats weigh about 1 lbs., larger house cats weigh about 10 lbs.
• Medium: An average adult humans weigh on average 130 to 160 lbs. depending on country
• Large: An average horse weighs 660 lbs.
• Huge: African Elephants weigh 6 metric tons or 13,000 lbs on average.
• Gargantuan: Sperm Whales weigh 31,000 to 90,000 lbs.

I'd be tempted to generalize that out to be something like:

• Tiny < 10 lbs.
• Small: <100 lbs.
• Medium: < 400 lbs.
• Large: < 1,000 lbs.
• Huge: < 25,000 lbs.
• Gargantuan: > 25,000 lbs.

Answer 5

5e only offers height ranges for two categories, but from that, we can extrapolate the remaining ranges

After some (detailed) digging, I found that the Players Handbook lists two sets of measurements for the size categories that Player Characters fit into:

Characters of most races are Medium, a size category including creatures that are roughly 4 to 8 feet tall. Members of a few races are Small (between 2 and 4 feet tall), which means that certain rules of the game affect them differently. [...]

PHB > Chapter 2: Races > Racial Traits > Size

Helpfully, the wording of this tells us describes the general size category ranges, as opposed to just the size category as it applies to Player Characters. So this gives us a starting point for our Height calculation.

We can then use the text of the Enlarge/Reduce spell:

Enlarge. The target's size doubles in all dimensions, and its weight is multiplied by eight. This growth increases its size by one category - from Medium to Large, for example.

Reduce. The target's size is halved in all dimensions, and its weight is reduced to one-eighth of normal. This reduction decreases its size by one category - from Medium to Small, for example.

So if we double our upper and lower bounds we should get the Height ranges for size categories above Medium, and if we halve our upper and lower bounds we should get the height ranges for categories below Small.

First we should sanity check this method, using our two known size categories, and thankfully it works as expected with those upper and lower bounds!

Extrapolating this, and using the size categories we have defined in the rules for 5e (Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge, and Gargantuan) we get the following table:

Size Category	Minimum Height	Maximum Height
Tiny	1 ft.	2ft.
Small	2 ft.	4ft.
Medium	4 ft.	8ft.
Large	8 ft.	16ft.
Huge	16 ft	32ft.
Gargantuan	32 ft.	64ft.

Technically, given the fact Tiny and Gargantuan are the minimum and maximum size categories respectively, their respective lower and upper bounds wouldn't have limits on them as shown in the above table. I found it useful, however, to include them, as this method would also enable us to generate additional size categories above and below the default given ones in the 5e rules.

Weight, is trickier, as the canonical Height and Weight tables, showing in the PHB, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (as well as other 1-2 new race specific source books), list out weights of playable races. We can use these as guideposts, but the ranges are a lot fuzzier and require a lot more work. I'll update this answer when I've collated that information.

Answer 6

I had to delve into this topic today because of an encounter I'm preparing for the weekend, and I went down a rabbit hole so I thought to share.

I used the 3.5 table, enlarge/reduce description, and material weights by cubic feet to arrive at this:

Tiny: 1-2ft, 1-8lb Small: 2-4ft, 8-64lb Medium: 4-8ft, 64-512lb Large: 8-16ft, 512-4096lb Huge: 16-32ft, 4096-32768lb Gargantuan: 32ft<, 32768lb<

You can start from less than 1lb, but the values hold up pretty well as is. If you want to calculate weight by material, you can use water/oil/fat/leather as base (60lb per cubic feet) and then multiply the value according to the difference, for example: Dry Wood is 30lb which means it weights half as much, while iron weights 8.33 times the value.

That's how I did it at least, you can change it to fit your taste.