How many hp in a block of stone? And what is its falling damage?

Cheiromancer said:

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.

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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.

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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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.

Buugipopuu said:

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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.

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'Twas just a suggestion. I didn't want to guess if relativity applied to Cosmic beings and the like.

Hi Buugipopuu mate!

Buugipopuu said:

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.

Code:

Distance  Bonus VSCs  Natural VSCs needed
5'           0                0
40'          +1               0
320'         +2               1
2560'        +3               2
20480'       +4               3
ect

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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.

20 = +1 VSC - 2d8
40 = +2 VSC - 4d6
80 = +3 VSC - 4d8
160 = +4 VSC - 8d6
320 = +5 VSC - 8d8
640 = +6 VSC - 10d10 (Terminal Velocity)

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.

Buugipopuu said:

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.

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Very interesting.

Fits with the idea of Superman flying into an opponent rather than flying past them and punching them.

Buugipopuu said:

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.

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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?

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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.

Going off on a tangent here, d20 Future seems to have hit points listed for meteoroids of various size: www.dandwiki.com/wiki/MSRD:Space,_Time,_and_Dimension_Travel#METEOROIDS

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.

Magic Missile cannot damage objects.
SRD: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicMissile.htm - 2nd Paragraph, Last line.

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!

An asteroid strike, converted to DnD, is a 10 trillion pound block, falling from a 60 million foot height. The planets are barely scratched.