Fighting against Large creatures..

[Psychotime]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Nutronium Man might have the mass and HP of an elephant, but he's 6' tall, 2' wide at the shoulders, and fits neatly in one combat hex. His relationship to area effects seems to be intuitively very different from an elephants, despite that they have the same HP.

Aren't the fantastic examples the exception, not the rule?

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

Anyways, the issue with the dragon, therefore is based on weight, and weight, if my understanding is correct, is related to HP. So, the larger a creature is (SM), the lower its density, and the more vulnerable it should be to fire. So I'd have each hex of a multi-hex creature that is on fire add another multiple of damage -1, to a minimum of 1 damage.

Originally Posted by Psychotime

Aren't the fantastic examples the exception, not the rule?

This is what I was referring to in my post, excerpted above. GURPS assumes that ST and HP have some relationship with your mass, and more so with objects and monsters. This is given by the SM discount for ST--the more voluminous a creature is, the more likely it is that it will have significantly more ST and HP.

So, the Neutronium Man that Bruno referenced, if he has no difference in weight and his increased HP is of the cosmic or magical kind(ie, he has no extra mass that he can lose, just like a normal creature), his effective resistance against burning attacks would be coming from the origin (cosmic, magic, whatever) of his power, not from realistic physics.

All fire is a heat transfer system, and that heat energy must go somewhere. In this instance, it goes into our character or monster. The character or monster can safely absorb heat energy based on the following conceptual formula, which is admittedly vastly simplified:

(Total HEAT of all burning attacks on the character)=(body's coefficient of heat) * (mass of the body) * (temperature change of body)

Once that temperature change reaches the limits of the body, it is dead. That's best related to HP. Higher than human coefficients of heat are probably best related in GURPS terms as some level of Injury Tolerance. And the mass of the body is pretty clearly weight.

Thus, a bigger creature that can have more fire applied to his body will certainly take more damage than having a fire of the same intensity applied to a limited area of his body. It's very much like getting soaked from rain--the droplets don't have to be bigger to get you wetter, they just need to come down everywhere all at once.