How many hp in a block of stone? And what is its falling damage?
How many hit points does a 10-ft. cube of stone have? How does this scale for larger shapes?
I'm sure this involves construct bonus hit points and VSCs somehow, but I don't recall the details.
Also- how much damage does a block do when it falls on someone? Or when it is gently lowered on someone. I remember there being some controversy over this, but I don't recall how it turned out.
[edit]I have a 10-ft. cube of stone weighing about 30 tons (62 thousand pounds). Does that sound about right? In which case it would count as a a Gargantuan creature, and should get a construct hit point bonus of 80 (the MM says 60, but the golems in the Bestiary use a different convention). So 80 hp for a 10-ft. block of stone? A 20-ft. block would have 120 hp, a 40-ft. block would have 160 hp, and so on.
Unless I've totally misunderstood something.
Hmm. The earth weighs 5.97 x 10^24 kilograms, which is 6.5 x 10^21 tons. I get... 193 thousand hit points for the earth?
[edit] That was with logarithms. Using UK's tables it is more like 160 000 hit points.
i.e. 10 size categories is a billion-fold increase, so the earth is 20 size categories more than a 6.5 kilo-ton object which is Titanic, and has 160 hp. Every two size categories doubles the construct bonus, so that's 10 doublings; about 1000 times as much.
But I see in another thread that the earth should have only about 100,000 hit points. And the moon, which weighs 1/81 as much, should have around 60,000. It should be a little less than half the hit points of the earth, if calculated in this way; reducing the weight by 64 should halve the hit points.
Hmmm. Close enough. I think.
Last edited by Cheiromancer; 24th November 2006 at 04:51 PM..
Looking at the Dungeons section of the SRD, it says a 10 foot section of 5-ft. thick unworked stone is 900 hp. Presumably a 10-ft cube is 1800 hp. But comparing this with the Wall of Stone spell suggests that they meant a 5-ft. cube. Or maybe a wall of stone is just tougher. Anyway, there is a considerable discrepancy!
The earth would have about 7 billion hit points if you follow the WotC rules. (8000 miles x 5000 ft. in a mile x 12 inches in a foot x 15 hp per inch)
How many hit points does a 10-ft. cube of stone have?
60 hp with hardness between about 5-8 depending on how hard the stone is.
Or possibly 80 hp, I'm not sure if I changed that for the bestiary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheiromancer
How does this scale for larger shapes?
Staggered double.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheiromancer
I'm sure this involves construct bonus hit points and VSCs somehow, but I don't recall the details.
Also- how much damage does a block do when it falls on someone? Or when it is gently lowered on someone. I remember there being some controversy over this, but I don't recall how it turned out.
Well Crush is +3 VSCs above slam. You also take into account the mass (which size category) and density (as per VSCs).
So a Gargantuan stone block (+7 VSCs?) would deal 8d6 damage (off the top of my head).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheiromancer
[edit]I have a 10-ft. cube of stone weighing about 30 tons (62 thousand pounds). Does that sound about right? In which case it would count as a a Gargantuan creature, and should get a construct hit point bonus of 80 (the MM says 60, but the golems in the Bestiary use a different convention). So 80 hp for a 10-ft. block of stone? A 20-ft. block would have 120 hp, a 40-ft. block would have 160 hp, and so on.
Unless I've totally misunderstood something.
Hmm. The earth weighs 5.97 x 10^24 kilograms, which is 6.5 x 10^21 tons. I get... 193 thousand hit points for the earth?
[edit] That was with logarithms. Using UK's tables it is more like 160 000 hit points.
i.e. 10 size categories is a billion-fold increase, so the earth is 20 size categories more than a 6.5 kilo-ton object which is Titanic, and has 160 hp. Every two size categories doubles the construct bonus, so that's 10 doublings; about 1000 times as much.
But I see in another thread that the earth should have only about 100,000 hit points. And the moon, which weighs 1/81 as much, should have around 60,000. It should be a little less than half the hit points of the earth, if calculated in this way; reducing the weight by 64 should halve the hit points.
Hmmm. Close enough. I think.
Well its possible I was one category out from the start (I thought Gargantuan was 60 hp added to a construct, but if I have changed it in the Bestiary then my initial calculations could be one VSC out).
Secondly, its been a while since I worked this out (pre-bestiary in fact) and its possible I may have forgot to calculate the additional size category that would take effect because the object is spherical (or roughly equal on all sides*)
*That would give a natural creature 1 HD per foot, rather than 1/2 HD per foot for a humanoid. So thats a doubling of HD - effectively an increase of +1 VSC.
So I can see how you could work it out as 160,000 hp. Double my original 80,000.
With regards your 193,000 calculation I think I may have been using a slightly lighter tonnage per square metre of the Earth. I think I was using 4.5 or 5 tons/sq. metre
7 billion hit points would punch a hole straight through the earth, but it would only be a 10-ft. tunnel; the bulk of the earth would be unaffected. You'd need to do 10 trillion times as much damage to destroy the whole thing.
Would it be a reasonable addition to the rules that if you punch through a barrier you affect an area as wide and deep as the distance penetrated? That would bring the earth back to 7 billion hit points if done at one blow.
What did your investigations into falling/crushing damage turn up?
My reasoning (which treats objects the same as creatures, even if most of their stats are 0):
When you have something drop on you, it's like being Crushed by it. Since you don't need any kind of skill to crush things, nonproficiency or the object not being designed as a weapon shouldn't matter. This means that Crush attacks by objects that are designed as weapons probably deal extra damage, although they could get Improved Natural Weapon as a bonus feat.
Increasing the fall height by a factor of 64 increases the damage by a factor of 2. This means increasing the fall height by a factor of about 12 increases the damage by a factor of 1.5. To make things simple: Every factor of 8 increase in fall distance (over 5 feet) results in an increase in damage by one VSC.
Terminal velocity: For two objects of identical shape, Terminal Velocity varies with the square root of density. This means that for every VSC possessed by the falling object, its terminal velocity increases by a factor of 8. This handily means that for every VSC possessed, it can gain a maximum of 1 more from falling. Being extremely crude here, let's assume that the base terminal velocity is 2 VSCs, reached after falling 320ft.
Especially aerodynamic objects can gain up to 2 free terminal velocity VSCs from their shape, while very unaerodynamic ones can lose up to 2. If these are important, they should be noted in the creature's entry. Similarly, high or low density atmospheres can change the maximum effective falling distance. In high or low gravity situations, simply multiply the distance fallen (or the maximum effective falling distance, if reached) by the number of times the gravity exceeds 1g.
Summary:
Normal creatures (and objects), deal normal damage with Crush if they are simply trying to crush from the ground. They gain additional Size Categories worth of damage for falling long distances, up to a maximum of 2+number of VSCs possessed.
Now: A 10ft cube of stone is a large object that due to its high volumetric efficiency and density has 2 Virtual Size Categories This means that its base falling damage is 4d8. After falling 40ft or more, this increases to 8d6, and after falling 320ft or more it deals 8d8. It can continue falling further to gain extra damage until it has fallen 20,480ft, where it will deal 15d10 damage.
These damages should be used as both damage dealt by falling objects and damage dealt to falling objects. Skill checks that reduce the effective distance of a fall only reduce it for the falling creature, not anything it lands on.
A second example:
From the first Immortals session I ran, a Grease spell and a failed Balance check by an Orichalcum Guardian lead to it falling a rather long way (about 14 miles in fact, since it fell through a Gate with the other end positioned high above the ground). It has 15 VSCs, and so has a maximum effective falling distance of A Very Long Way. Air resistance basically has no effect on the damage it takes. 14 miles means it gains 6 additional size categories due to its speed, and deals 1,920d10 damage to the ground, and itself (Golems have very bad Jump and Tumble scores). This averages to 10,560 damage, which was in fact sufficient to destroy the Guardian, as it had already taken a small quantity of damage, and Hardness 100 is not significant against that sort of threat. The energy released by dropping one and a quarter million tons of Guardian fourteen miles onto a solid surface is equivalent to the detonation of 750 Gigatons of TNT.
I like this math; It is more realistic than just plain mesuring X denomniations of 5', and scales well. The only "hole" I found in your example: Blocks and things are entirely the thing trying to crush you, so they should deal damage at +3 VSCs, not 2.
Yes, theres a reason Bowser in the Mario games fills his castle with Thwomps. They hurt.
Perhaps a simpler method of determining Terminal Velocity should be used; the less times one needs to find the square root of something, the better. While the mechanics should stay the same, I think it would be best if it were a tad easier to figure out. Pulling out a calculator in the middle of the game (unless you allready have one on hand) or doing extreme ammounts of math really slows things down.
Other than that, It looks great.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabstercorian
What if someone wanted to play an Awakened Neutronium Golem Wizard?
I don't know whether this is a thing of beauty or evil.
You don't need to work out the terminal velocity to get the damage, only the distance after which it is reached. Since Size is all logarithmic, the only thing you need to do is addition.
Crush damage seems to be already using the creature's entire body, according to the Epic Bestiary page 6, and doesn't get any extra damage on top of that.
It occurs to me that these rules could be used for ramming things (use the creature's Fly speed as its Max. Effective Speed) and jumping on them, although those are very risky forms of attack. If I were writing a book I'd throw in some feats to reduce the damage dealt to the rammer/jumper. Obviously if you took Improved Natural Weapon (Crush) you could choose not to apply it to the damage you dealt to yourself, but there should probably be Improved Jump Attack and Improved Ram feat/ability trees that further reduce it. This gets silly if you got rammed by a Superluminal creature (There's no Relativity in D&D, thankfully), but they'd almost certainly destroy themselves in the process. Unless you were to rule that all the Divinely enhanced speeds used some form of mass lightening magic or supernatural effect, and only natural speed could do damage, which would prevent possible exploits.
While pointless, it might even be possible to derive damage for arrows and suchlike by assuming they're Diminutive objects Ramming their target very quickly.
Last edited by Buugipopuu; 26th November 2006 at 07:03 PM..
The energy released by dropping one and a quarter million tons of Guardian fourteen miles onto a solid surface is equivalent to the detonation of 750 Gigatons of TNT.
The math works out to be about 100 kilotons. If it fell 14 miles (about 21,000 metres) in an earth-like gravity well, it take about a minute to hit the ground and would be going a bit less than half a mile a second when it hit. It would have an energy of about 500 tera-joules, which according to this is about 100 kilotons.
I wonder how the damage of nuclear explosions was calibrated? It would be neat if the numbers for falling objects could be reconciled with the energy yield of atomic bombs.
...
It occurs to me that these rules could be used for ramming things (use the creature's Fly speed as its Max. Effective Speed) and jumping on them, although those are very risky forms of attack. If I were writing a book I'd throw in some feats to reduce the damage dealt to the rammer/jumper. Obviously if you took Improved Natural Weapon (Crush) you could choose not to apply it to the damage you dealt to yourself, but there should probably be Improved Jump Attack and Improved Ram feat/ability trees that further reduce it. This gets silly if you got rammed by a Superluminal creature (There's no Relativity in D&D, thankfully), but they'd almost certainly destroy themselves in the process. Unless you were to rule that all the Divinely enhanced speeds used some form of mass lightening magic or supernatural effect, and only natural speed could do damage, which would prevent possible exploits...
Well, since the only thing that can travel at the speed of light, usually, is Light, I would say when you move so fast, you effectively "become" light, and could not ram anything very well. I am sure if you found the "density" of a light particle/wave, you could figure out how much damage A Neutronium Golem deals when the resident Time Lord decides to play "Pinball" with your galaxy.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabstercorian
What if someone wanted to play an Awakened Neutronium Golem Wizard?
I don't know whether this is a thing of beauty or evil.
The math works out to be about 100 kilotons. If it fell 14 miles (about 21,000 metres) in an earth-like gravity well, it take about a minute to hit the ground and would be going a bit less than half a mile a second when it hit. It would have an energy of about 500 tera-joules, which according to this is about 100 kilotons.
I wonder how the damage of nuclear explosions was calibrated? It would be neat if the numbers for falling objects could be reconciled with the energy yield of atomic bombs.
I calibrated the yield from the Kiloton Epic Spell, which seems to work, since 160,000 damage comes out as roughly the fragmentation energy of an earth-sized planet. I think the reason for the discrepancy is because the Kiloton spell's damage is for an omnidirectional blast, meaning it would deal much more damage if focussed onto a single square. Falling onto something will deal more damage to the falling object than it would have taken merely by standing sort-of close to a nuclear device of equal energy. Focussing a 100 kiloton device onto a single 5-foot square would deal about 4,410 damage, which is close enough given the extreme approximations involved.
Quote:
Well, since the only thing that can travel at the speed of light, usually, is Light, I would say when you move so fast, you effectively "become" light, and could not ram anything very well. I am sure if you found the "density" of a light particle/wave, you could figure out how much damage A Neutronium Golem deals when the resident Time Lord decides to play "Pinball" with your galaxy.
I don't think that will work. The 'size' of a photon is linked to its wavelength, which is inversely proportional to its energy. This means that photons of macroscopic wavelengths have amazingly tiny energies, and that bigger objects would actually do less damage. The whole "becoming light" thing makes very little sense from a physical perspective anyway. Given that it's already possible to violate Relativity with Gate, assuming that it doesn't apply would be the most sensible resolution.
Last edited by Buugipopuu; 25th November 2006 at 02:37 PM..
I don't think that will work. The 'size' of a photon is linked to its wavelength, which is inversely proportional to its energy. This means that photons of macroscopic wavelengths have amazingly tiny energies, and that bigger objects would actually do less damage. The whole "becoming light" thing makes very little sense from a physical perspective anyway. Given that it's already possible to violate Relativity with Gate, assuming that it doesn't apply would be the most sensible resolution.
'Twas just a suggestion. I didn't want to guess if relativity applied to Cosmic beings and the like.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabstercorian
What if someone wanted to play an Awakened Neutronium Golem Wizard?
I don't know whether this is a thing of beauty or evil.
You don't need to work out the terminal velocity to get the damage, only the distance after which it is reached. Since Size is all logarithmic, the only thing you need to do is addition.
Crush damage seems to be already using the creature's entire body, according to the Epic Bestiary page 6, and doesn't get any extra damage on top of that.
Does that table not suggest that a normal person will reach terminal velocity at 40 feet? Wouldn't it be better to move the natural scale down one row?
Also maybe the effect should be based on 10 ft, 20 ft, 40 ft, 80, 160, 320, 640 etc. Until reaching terminal velocity. I think a normal creature reaches terminal velocity at between 800 ft. So thats between 640-1280. So we could use 640.
Medium size crush damage = 2d6 damage Thats sustained at 10 ft.
So a normal person falling 640 feet would sustain 10d10 (average 55 damage)
For each size category difference change the damage up or down as apporopriate.
e.g. A colossal creature reaching terminal velocity would sustain 40d10 damage.
Then we need to factor in density, which seems a tad more complicated...and something I would prefer to tackle on a full stomach later. I'm off for me dinner.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buugipopuu
It occurs to me that these rules could be used for ramming things (use the creature's Fly speed as its Max. Effective Speed) and jumping on them, although those are very risky forms of attack. If I were writing a book I'd throw in some feats to reduce the damage dealt to the rammer/jumper. Obviously if you took Improved Natural Weapon (Crush) you could choose not to apply it to the damage you dealt to yourself, but there should probably be Improved Jump Attack and Improved Ram feat/ability trees that further reduce it. This gets silly if you got rammed by a Superluminal creature (There's no Relativity in D&D, thankfully), but they'd almost certainly destroy themselves in the process. Unless you were to rule that all the Divinely enhanced speeds used some form of mass lightening magic or supernatural effect, and only natural speed could do damage, which would prevent possible exploits.
Very interesting.
Fits with the idea of Superman flying into an opponent rather than flying past them and punching them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buugipopuu
While pointless, it might even be possible to derive damage for arrows and suchlike by assuming they're Diminutive objects Ramming their target very quickly.
Thats what I initially assumed to get crush damage.
Reverse engineering that suggests that an arrow (1d8) wielded like a dagger would deal 1d3 damage.
Does that table not suggest that a normal person will reach terminal velocity at 40 feet? Wouldn't it be better to move the natural scale down one row?
My original calculation had it that way, I must have typo'd in the table. I think having a doubling of fall distance translating into +1 VSC leads to falling damage quickly becoming larger than its kinetic energy would suggest, although going by my rules, falling damage isn't very dangerous over human scales and densities. I would recommend converting the first die (or 2 for soft surfaces and 3 for reasonably flowing liquids) into nonlethal damage.
I would also suggest altering Tumble and Jump checks that allow counting the fall as X feet shorter to instead remove one damage die per 10 feet negated, and force a DC 15 Reflex save upon landing or have the damage increased by one die step (failure means taking a really bad landing, such as head first) in order to make falling more lethal for low level characters.
Density is easy, since things experience the same acceleration due to gravity regardless of their mass, so they simply deal extra damage in the same way that their mêlée attacks do for their density, and it increases terminal velocity as indicated on the (now fixed) table.
I hate to bring the whole "hp of a planet thing up again", but something's just bugging me. A 96-foot (Colossal) cube of iron with a volume of 884,736 cubic feet, a density of 7.7 grams per cubic centimeter, and a mass of 425,288,434 pounds (212,644 tons). This is within the weight range of a Macro-Diminutive creature, and as such the cube gets as much hp as the bonus hp a construct of that size would've received: 240 hp.
Now, a acid arrow spell at Caster Level 3rd does but 2d4 acid damage and another 2d4 one round later, so that's an average of 10 acid damage per casting. Acid damage isn't reduced by object hardness, and you just need a ranged touch attack to hit. This means that to destroy a 96-foot cube of iron, you just need to hire 24 3rd-level wizards and have them all cast acid arrow at the cube. This is somewhat believable.
It gets weird in the grand scale. Earth has the dimensions of a Mega-Gargantuan creature with a diameter of 7918 miles, and the weight of a Mega-Titanic creature at 6.58e21 tons. A Mega-Titanic construct gets 122,880 bonus hit points, so that's our hp value of the Earth.
122,880 ÷ 10 = 12,288 castings of acid arrow to destroy the Earth. It shouldn't be hard to hire 12,288 3rd-level wizards, spread them out across a wide plain, and get them to "harmlessly cast a acid arrow at the ground".
Now the catch-22 is that if we increase the scaling of object hp, it would be more realistic in the sense that a small army of wizards couldn't blow up Earth, but it would take a lot of the "epic-ness" away since Sidereals and even Eternals would have an extremely hard time trying to blow up a measly planet.
Granted though, 9000 hp for a Gargantuan rock and 36,000 hp for a Colossal rock seem far too inflated. I don't even see a pattern as to how hp was determined.
EDIT: Forgot that magic missile can't damage objects.
EDIT 2: Sup /tg/. I heard that America is going to blow up the moon on On July 4th, 2008.
Last edited by Adslahnit; 8th December 2007 at 01:43 AM..
Also, 35k Wizards might be impossible on some worlds. Example: In a homebrew campaign I run, with dark-ages European population densities, and 1/10th the normal rate of magical availability, I don't think there are even 35,000 beings on my campaign world capable of using magic at all. Now, there are a few very powerful entities around which fill in the gap a bit, but there are certainly not 35000 wizards.
Though your point is taken; I think the HP of stellar objects in general should be at the low end of the scale. Why? Because when the PCs finally get to the high end of the scale, they can muse about how the collateral damage from their (Quantum) Fireballs bring ends to worlds or how the NPC Blackguard has an aura of Galactic Extinction!
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anabstercorian
What if someone wanted to play an Awakened Neutronium Golem Wizard?
I don't know whether this is a thing of beauty or evil.
An asteroid strike, converted to DnD, is a 10 trillion pound block, falling from a 60 million foot height. The planets are barely scratched.
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