PF - Gigantean Demands

[unseenmage]

The Gigantean Template from Green Ronin makes mega giant versions of normal creatures.

I had the idea to apply this template to a base race and either play the result or run it as a heroic NPC. The idea being that they would hail from a planet(s) where kaiju are the norm.

Which got me wondering, how much more would a Gigantean character need to eat?

What other unexpected changes lie in wait for playing such an enlarged character and how would we overcome them?

[Ottriman]

Alright I am simply going to do these as they come to mind.

The template makes you 16 times larger (usually something like that), this multiplies your surface area by 256 and your volume/mass by 4096.

A lot of interesting consequences occur due to this.

Now ofc the boring answer is "creature collapses under its own weight" so in order to make up for the difference its tissues would have to be 16 times as strong. Since the tissues are 16 times as strong, various natural materials like wood or clay will seem rather lackluster to it. Human skin has an ultimate tensile strength of 20 megapascals, cast iron of 200 megapascals. This dude would have 320 megapascal ultimate tensile strength skin. His bones would be more durable than most metals available on modern earth. For more comparisons on ultimate tensile strength read the wikipedia article on ultimate tensile strength (cannot link it to you because of links not being allowed for me).

The creature would exert 16 times the ground pressure, if it's humanoid that can quickly add up to sinking in places that aren't sufficiently firm.

Data on wikipedias article on ground pressure, cannot link due to forum limitations.:smallfrown:

Lets take the example human male and multiply by the ground pressure by 16. 128 psi is great enough to sink in non-firm ground.

As for eating: 4096 times the biomass makes it sound like 4096 times the food but its not that simple. A large part of the caloric consumption for warm blooded creatures has to do with keeping up body heat. Since there is 4096 times the thermal energy in the creature but only 256 times the surface area to cool down with it would take far longer to freeze in a cold area, if it even could!

With no real need to burn calories for warmth we could use reptilian energy efficiency which approximately divides the energy needs by 3. 4096 / 3 Is approximately 1365 times the food needed.

Since humongous creatures in d&d do not increase movement speed linearly with size, his top speed would resemble something like a walk or brisk walk relatively speaking.

Aaaand that is all that comes to mind, hope I helped.

[Florian]

To sum it up: Ever wondered why Big-T either eats or sleeps, nothing else?

[Tuvarkz]

Getting a ring of sustenance might be the cheapest way to go about it.

[unseenmage]

It occurs to me to wonder what the skill DCs would be for kaiju-ized characters to interact with human scale objects/environments/items?

Do we have any RAW that would point us in the direction of an answer?