(necro bump)
I think this is going to become a bigger issue in the future with the myth-generator giving us random creatures. Currently the ingame descriptions are the only vanilla guide we have for creature size, and they are currently often inconsistent and sometimes misleading. But it doesn't really matter, because you either know what the creature is in rl if it's mundane, or you can easily look it up on the wiki if it's fantasy (with the exception of titans/demons/night creatures etc).
But when the game starts generating all sorts of different creatures with different names, we wont be able to confirm their size on the wiki. Is the "large" describing this wandering tratonip a strangler-type "large" or a blind cave ogre "large"? That's roughly 6,960,000 cm
3 riding on the interpretation of a very flexible adjective.
The ops suggestion for descriptions relative to size of the observer would be a big improvement on the current system, but I actually think that simply showing the creatures cm
3 when you view them would be best.
Here's a quick mock-up of what I'm talking about:
So for the bear it's what it would look like if you were just given an "average" size for that creature type, the same as if you were to look it up on the wiki. By remembering the magical number of 60000, dwarf-size, you can easily tell how big something is.
Now for the dogs I'm showing what a more useful system could look like. It would show you the creature's
actual size. I don't agree that it breaks immersion, because its the best (only?) way to represent what you're actual doing, which is
looking at the creature. Anyone with eyes can easily tell which dog is bigger than another by looking at them, even if the difference in size isn't enough to warrant a difference in the adjective being used to describe them. So even if both of these dogs are "large dogs", I can still see with my eyes which dog is bigger, although not bigger enough to jump up to "huge", or whichever adjective is next in the hierarchy
1. Granted, you wouldn't be able to assess them down to their cubic centimetres by eye, so the actual number can be rounded-off to prevent that sort of accuracy if it's a problem.
benefits:
-no need to set up a system of attaching adjectives to creatures relative to the observer (dwarves in fort mode, whichever race you are in ad mode)
-no need to learn a (arbitrary) hierarchy of size adjectives
-it's inherently scalable, if you're being attacked by a titan and a dragon you can tell which is bigger (how adult is that adult dragon?) for example, adjective descriptions break down in usefulness in either extreme
-allows players to easily see which individuals among their war creatures are best, for use or breeding
-same for ranchers breeding livestock for consumption
1 For the record, I have no idea if a 150cm3 size difference between two dogs, like in my example, would be visible to the naked eye, I just made the numbers up for an example. A smarter person than me would implement the real ranges governing visible difference.