Someone
Adventurer
Cthulhudrew said:I was reading something recently about the unsuitability for the human skeletal structure to sustain really large people. Now, I should probably know more about this than I do, but sadly I never really paid much attention in my physical anthro classes (was always more into the social/cultural anthro), so I must claim ignorance.
We've got a lot of smart people here, so maybe someone else can comment on the veracity of this theory, and if true- what sort of bodies would "real" giants need in order to sustain their mass? In short, what would D&D's giants look like in the real world?
Probably already mentioned, but the most basic objection against direct scaling is known as the cuadradic-cubic law. Basically, it says that keeping everything else constant if you increase a body's size, surface and variables that depend on surface (like muscle strenght) increase quadratically (that is, if you doble the size muscles would roughly be 4 times as strong) but the volume and variales that depend on volume's increase is cubic (so, for a doubling in size, you get an increase in weight by a factor of 8)
So a human body simply augmented would lose ability to move itself. The key is the "keeping everything else constant". Variations in materials strenght (stronger bones, better muscles) and construction (wider build) can allow biger sizes. And justify why they have those high natural armor values.