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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3435060" data-attributes="member: 29746">Fair enough, but as you've already pointed out yourself, your own rules get patently absurd at other points. The problem then becomes to find a place where it "looks good."Conceding the point that real-world physics has as much to do with D&D as bread has to do with the core of the sun, this then brings me back to the original point of my earlier post: the estimate of planet hit points that you've been using is far, far too low. Zarquin's number looks remarkably close to yours, so presumably zarquin's argument is much like the one you yourself use. However, since D&D is so clearly not based on real physics, then no argument that begins with real physics can be used to estimate D&D numbers with any validity. Therefore, the method which was used to arrive at a number of 720,000 hit points for an entire planet is wrong, because it used real-world physics numbers as the foundation of its argument.The better method, in this case, is to go purely by D&D rules- take the number of hit points given to a stone 10 feet thick (easily derived from the known number of 15 per inch of thickness- the result ends up being 1800) and then scale that up to planet-thickness. Using a value of 8,000 miles (approximate diameter) for Earth, that's 4,224,000 x the number given above. The number comes out to be 7,603,200,000. That's how many hit points an object made of stone that's the size of a planet has in D&D. Note that the SRD rules don't say how wide or high an object with "X hit points per inch of thickness" has; only the thickness itself matters. We have only one dimension to work with and cannot go on volume. It is, perhaps, a valid method to assume that "thickness" simply refers to the object's smallest dimension, however large its other measurements are, and this means that a sphere of stone 10 feet across would have 1800 hit points- and a sphere of stone 8,000 miles across (like a planet) has exactly the number I stated above.We could also calculate it using an Earth Elemental or other monster that's made entirely of stone, and scale it up using the normal size increase rules (and the valid-within-D&D-rules paradigm that a doubling of base hit dice increases the size category by 1 step) until it's planet-sized. Doing this, we can start with a Medium Earth Elemental, average human size (4 HD, 30 hit points), and scale that up to average Earthlike planet size: Mega-Large. Doing this, we get 8,388,608 HD and a CON score that's 84 points higher (granting +42 hit points per hit die in the process), yielding an average of 415,236,096 hit points- before we take into account any Toughness, Improved Toughness, or Great Constitution feats it gets with its 2,796,203 feat slots.Whatever effects you have that deal with cosmic-scale events like destroying a planet have to be dealing damage of that order or more to be even remotely believeable.If you want to say that the VSC rules are an attempt to correct this flaw in D&D rules, then we go back down to basing D&D numbers on real-world physics again, however slightly- and the argument I made in my first post must then be answered on real-world physics terms. Doing otherwise simply combines apples & oranges and tries to make them all look like pears. In other words, the reasoning becomes specious.</blockquote>

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