Giant Math

[Johnny Angel]

I've been playing GURPS for a little while now, and I've started to get more comfortable with creating my own monsters and converting things from other systems. That being said, I still consider myself something of a novice when doing so. If the community would be so kind as to double check my math and methodology for something I'm working on, I'd greatly appreciate it.

One of the players in my current DF game is playing a cleric of Thor. He has received a message that he is expected to report for duty along with other members of the clergy to do battle with some Frost Giants to the North. So, with that in mind, I set out to create Frost Giants.

First, I had to decide on how big they were. I wasn't entirely sure with what I wanted to go with here, so I decided to go with something loosely based on Pathfinder's Frost Giants. The main reasons being that their dimensions and characteristics are available via the Pathfinder OGC and because (outside of GURPS) the group is familiar with Pathfinder.

The typical weight of a PF Frost Giant is 2800 pounds according to the information found here: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/mon...ue/giant-frost
The same place also suggests 15 feet as the average height.

Now that I had some figures to work with, I turned to page 51 of GURPS Fantasy. I figured out what GURPS deems the average human weight (150 pounds) by reversing some of the numbers used in the section there. 480000/3200 = 150

I then divided 2800 pounds by 150 to see how many times heavier than an average human a Pathfinder Frost Giant would be. 18.66666.... which I rounded up to 19.

I then needed to figure out what the HP and ST multiple was by finding the cubed root of 19. Since I didn't feel like doing so by hand, I found a cube root calculator online here: http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calcul.../cuberoots.php
2.668402 is the answer I got. For simplicity sake, and because it seems reasonable to nudge giant ST up a little, I'm going to round up to three. According to GURPS, the baseline human has ST and HP values of 10.

10*3 = 30, so that sets the average Frost Giant ST and HP at 30.

I double checked this number by using the other method mentioned for finding typical ST values for a man-shaped creatures. I found the cube root of 2800 pounds, doubled it, and then rounded down. 14.09*2 = 28.18. Twenty-eight after rounding down. That's close enough to the value of 30 I arrived at to convince me that the math is producing consistent results so far, so I'll stick with 30. Again, I feel good about giving giants a bump upwards because it seems thematically appropriate. (Perhaps 28 is the racial average, but 30 is more common among combat savvy giants.)

The next step is to figure out how big these giants should be. Pathfinder says 15 feet, but I wanted to see how the GURPS math would play out; using page 51 of GURPS Fantasy and the information I have thus far.

The weight multiple of 19 falls between two of the values found in GURPS Fantasy, so I went with the higher value as the book suggest. Going with the higher value (again) also fits with my vision of giants. Doing so leads me to multiply the average height of a human by 3. The height range for an average human is 5'3"-6'1".

Multiplying by 3 gives a range of 15'9"-18'3" for Frost Giants; assuming my math is right, that gives an average height of around 17 feet tall. SM+3


...so what are things looking like so far....

Frost Giant

ST 30 HP 30
SM+3