Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanW
A SM +4 giant needs 25 times the metal just to cover himself with the same thickness of armor. Because muscle power scales with cross-section rather than volume, that will also be proportionally just as heavy to the giant as the original was to the human, despite being tinfoil to the giant. Cube-square law hates giants.
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This is fundamentally what you're fighting against, and what you're going to have to think about how to overcome. Step one is to figure out how much DR you want them to have and compute how much it would weigh (using armor scaling and heavy plate), so you have some inputs.
There are a few different options:
- Change the weight scaling of armor for Reasons. Figure out how much you want it to weigh, and adjust the weight scaling until you have what you want based on the 'real' weight. Remember that weight scaling is exponential, so your scaling adjustment will be too. The disadvantage here is that your strong human-scale characters may want to pile on the now-lighter armor as well.
- Change the strength scaling of large creatures, probably (as mentioned by Anthony) by adding lifting strength to avoid adding melee damage. Figure out how much extra strength is needed as a function of SM, and have that be a bonus to being larger. If you allow large player characters, they may find ways to abuse high lifting strength, though.
- Change the damage scaling of large creatures[1] so that large creatures have some inbuilt levels of IT:DR (from Powers) or something similar, and have it apply before DR. DR 6 with IT:DR (5) for SM+4 is effectively 30DR, and also solves the issue that a SM+4 giant with 50-odd HP is taken down by an uncomfortably low number of human-sized arrows to the vitals.
[1] You may want to do this anyway, to prevent your giants from dying of repeated weak attacks