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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7701808" data-attributes="member: 4937">If you are going to try to engage me in an argument on 'realism', at least get your facts straight.   Fire giants are only 12' tall.  There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't scale up the frame of a silverback gorilla to produce an upright posture in a 12' tall creature.  That's not even improbable much less impossible.  Giant sloths and other prehistoric creatures show evidence of being able to assume an upright posture in 5 ton, 12' tall creature, able to reach upward 17'.  I mean that's pretty much exactly fire giant size, except that fire giants are less heavy.  And fire giants in particular have a stocky shape that gives their legs plenty of room for oversized bones to hold them up.  Now you are just get nonsensical.  We don't have to assume anything.  We don't have to have questions about the physical limitations. Fire giants have a strength score for crying out loud.  That's why I said that even if you don't approach this from a realism standpoint, even if you just approach this from a game rules standpoint, the math doesn't add up.  What I can guarantee you didn't happen, is that the designers didn't work backward from this picture to figure out how high that strength score needed to be to carry all the crap that the creature in the painting was being loaded down with.  And for another thing, let's even assume that in fact this giant as a 42 Strength or whatever it would take to have that sort of carrying capacity in a large sized creature.  Why in the heck if you are that strong would you bother with this sort of configuration?  Again, if two tower shields as a battering ram makes an effective battlefield weapon, why hasn't anyone ever adopted it?   Certainly there have been humans strong enough to carry two 30 or 40 pound shields.  Why didn't some ancient civilization make this a thing?   And the answer is, because it doesn't work very well even on its own terms.   It doesn't make you particularly more of a battering ram than having one shield.  It doesn't make you any more capable of bashing down and through foes, and in fact it makes you less capable.  The guy with one shield, takes your charge on his shield, and stabs you with his spear in your immobile, unvisored, exposed face.Nor do I think this is even a particularly effective anti-human strategy.  Because humans would certainly know they can't go shield wall to shield wall and win a shoving match with something that has 40 times their strength and 10 times their mass.  Humans are going to skirmish whenever possible, which means you need mobility and the ability to engage at range.  And this giant has given up mobility, given up reach, and given up one of giantkin's most effective weapons - their uncanny ability to throw rocks accurately at long range.</blockquote>

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