Why would you leave out the official quote I provided for you that a dragon being magical in combination with the wing strength is how it flies. It makes it appear that you argue disingenuously when you do things like this.
(1) I was replying to [MENTION=94143]Shasarak[/MENTION], who I thought was suggesting that flying dragons are physically possible.
(2) That is inlcuded in my (iii):
it doesn't really make sense to think of the world of D&D using such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. A world in which beings have "innate magic" that combines with their muscualture to let them fly is not a world in which scientific categories such as
gravity and
fluid mechanics have application. (Whichi was [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION]'s point some way upthread.)
I also think it is worth nothing that in 3E (at least according to the d20srd) a dragon's flight is not SU.
Of course they are biomechanically possible. That is what the physics says.
What kind of respiratory system does a DnD Arthrod have? Maybe you are imagining the wrong sort.
I'm talking about the real world. Are you asserting that D&D giants are biomechanically possible in the real world? If you are, that's interesting because I thought the general opinion was that, with the possible exception of fire giants, they are not.
Likewise with respect to arthropods - as per the webpage I linked to in my earlier reply to you, my understanding is that an arthropod the size of a D&D giant scorpion would (in the real world) not be able to respirate and would also have serious exoskeleton problems. Are you saying that the website is wrong?
You have no idea about the internal structure, though. The bones, cartilage and more could be different enough to make the health issues vanish. It's only a biologic impossibility for HUMANS with larger builds. Nothing says that giants are just large humans.
So what - giants in D&D have bones made of steel?
And they don't have lungs or other organst like humans do?
At what point do you accept the proposition that the physical, biological etc traits of the D&D world don't correspond to those in the real world? What do you think is at stake in saying "The physics is indistinguishable, it's just that the materials are different?" As if the nature of materials (biological and otherwise) in the real world was not itself a manifestation of physical properties.
In any event, the "Giant" entry in the AD&D MM opens with these words (p 44): "Giants are huge humanoids." As a feature of D&D, giants are inspired by fairy stories, myths etc about giants (eg this is why we have Cloud Giants). The person who first wrote down the story of Jack the Giant-Killer wasn't envisaging that the giants Jack was described as killing were, in reality, biologically feasible but radically non-human creatures who just happened to take human form!
Treating D&D as a sci-fi game seems ridiculous to me. I don't get it at all.
EDIT:
Except that they are incredibly obviously not just scaled up humans. They predate humans, being almost as old as dragons. They have innate magic and resistances, such as immunity to cold and fire. These things make it crystal clear that they are giants, a unique race, not just jumped up humans. It's far more of an assumption to view their internal structure as human, than it is to view it as unique and supportive of their size.
I don't understand how you think this claim about the fiction of the game - which is absolutely laden with mythical and supernatural notions - counts as evidence that giants in D&D are biological beings whose physical, chemical and biological nature conforms to that which is possible in the real world.
How do you think you are defending some form of scientific naturalism by pointing to supernatural, mythic "history"? It's just about the most basic category confusion I can think of.
