Golden Mean Fallacy

This is something that I was vaguely aware of, but didn't realize had an actual name.

Generally speaking, when I'm faced with a situation and someone maintains that its cause/explanation can be one of two very different things, my instinctual response is that the truth most likely lies somewhere in between the extremes.  After all, the extremes are the outliers, and simple statistics combined with a dash of Occam's Razor suggests that answers are usually in the vast middle compromise, the Golden Mean.

This in and of itself isn't such a big deal.  After all, most things are somewhere in the middle.  However, it is possible to fall into a trap where you start to think that every question is automatically solved by applying the Golden Mean, and this trap is called (naturally enough) the Golden Mean Fallacy, or slightly more formally an Argument to Moderation (from the Latin argumentum ad temperantiam).  As long as you remember that it is just a tool for reasoning and not a universal law, though, you're probably safe. 

The examples that Wikipedia lists are somewhat facetious, in my opinion, but definitely illustrative. "Bob says we should buy a computer. Sue says we shouldn't. Therefore, the best solution is to compromise and buy half a computer."  Sort of a cross between argumentum ad temperantiam and reductio ad absurdum, I guess. Or at least something in between the two...

You see an orc guarding a chest

It's a staple of old-school D&D-- your party is wandering through the dungeon, and you see a door.  What's behind it?  Why, it's a 10x10 room, with an orc guarding a chest.

I never really thought much about it.  For years, it was just sort of there.  But this weekend, whilst painting my bathroom ceiling (whose dimensions vaguely approximate the aforementioned room), the thought occurred to me, to wit:

Let's be generous, and have the orc stand over the chest.  Put them both in the corner.  Now, orcs are what, 5 feet tall?  Ish?  And humanoid in shape, so they'll have an arm span of about half that (see the Vitruvian Man).  Give them a short sword, and that's another 2 feet.  So the orc, by itself, with minimal room to swing a sword, already takes up about a third of the available space (roughly 14 foot diagonal).

A typical human fighter is closer to 6 feet tall, and uses a long sword.  So he will use up closer to half of the available space.

This means if the fighter obligingly wedges himself into the opposite corner (very gracious of him), the two of them will have just enough room to swing their swords at each other without overlapping.  If they're using fencing foils, that might work out, but can you imagine an old-school orc fencing?  Any sort of decent swinging/cutting hack-and-slash weapon and the visual starts to get a little silly.

And now that we've established that, here's the 64 gp question-- where, exactly, during all of this derring-do, are the wizard, the cleric, and the thief standing?!  Out in the hall, I guess.  Otherwise someone's going to be the recipient of an unfortunate elbow, if they're lucky.