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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 385643" data-attributes="member: 3051">These types of scientific debates are fine in D&D, as long as you accept at the end of the day that science takes a backseat to fun and game balance.I'd say that Strength is more abstract than you calculated.  For example, I have a Human and a 12' Giant.  The Giant is 8 times the mass, so yes, the pressure would be twice as much on his skeleton.  However, I'd say that the Giant's skeleton would be thicker to compensate, as you mentioned.  This makes for a thicker-looking creature; it won't be exactly the same proportions.(Example: picture a Dwarf as being a scaled-up Gnome.  Thicker body structure.  Or picture a 3E Halfling as being a scaled-down Human, with thinner bone structure giving them the higher agility)So far so good, but how does that apply to STR scores?  Just because I weigh eight times as much as you doesn't mean I can hit you eight times as hard, because there's a speed factor there.  If my arm weighs eight times as much, and my muscles have four times the cross section and twice the length, do I still break even?  Probably not; I'd swing slower, so I'm slightly less likely to hit you (the -1 attack penalty), less likely to dodge out of your way (the -1 AC penalty), and when I DO hit, you'll take more damage thanks to the increased force behind the blow (the higher STR) but it won't scale up as much as my weight does.Now maybe I DON'T swing slower, but that'd require a different muscle structure, which means you can't assume scaling up keeps things the same.This doesn't mean I can't support my own weight.  It just means I can't hit you eight times as hard.Now, you were arguing that bipeds and quadrapeds should scale the same.  But there, it's a question of what fraction of your musculature is oriented in the correct direction.  If a quadraped increased in size by a factor of 8, its carrying capacity increases by the same factor because its entire body is structured in a way to let it balance on its legs.  It increases the pressure on each leg, of course, but the creature is still stable and the load acts the same as the creature's normal body.  That is, assuming you balanced the load correctly around its center of gravity.A biped, however, wouldn't increase by a factor of 8.  First of all, the load isn't distributed evenly; if you're carrying something, you're carrying it above your center of gravity and off center (either in your arms or on your back).  Bipeds aren't automatically stable, either, so you're more concerned with torque around your center of gravity (Force * Distance, and distance is doubled) than you are about pressure on the legs.  Since distance doubles with size doubling, the force you can carry increases by a factor of 4, because your musculature will be built to take 8 times the total torque of before (torque would be resisted by your own body's rotational inertia, which scales by a factor of 8).It's the price we pay for having two hands free to punch someone in the face.Just remember: Dragons can fly.  Once you accept that, all the physics doesn't matter.</blockquote>

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