Originally Posted by
Greywander
I think you're missing the point. I have a giant that is twice the size of a human. How heavy is the giant? How big is the giant's weapon? How heavy is the giant's weapon? How much weight can the giant carry?
The point is, how do I answer those questions?
I wasn't starting off of the assumption that the Square-Cube Law applied to D&D or any other fantasy setting, I just wanted to explain what the issue was first before looking at some ways of handling things different and how those fail to capture all aspects of how very big things are often portrayed in fiction. The reason I bring up the example of the cubes again and again is because it's such a basic, elementary demonstration that something twice as big should be 8 times as heavy, no matter what physics your universe is running on.
If we want strength and weight to scale at the same rate, then we could just make a giant twice the size of a human be 8 times as strong, but then I feel like strength ramps up way too fast. It seems like we'd want to instead make the weight scale up more slowly, but I don't know how you'd do that in a way that makes sense, given the cube example.
I dunno, maybe I should just accept that a giant's greatsword would have the same proportions as a shortsword. That just looks weird, though. I guess the crux of the issue is that one part of my brain thinks the giant should have identical physics to the human, while the other part of my brain can't ignore the cube example and that the physics must necessarily be very different. And I guess I'm trying to find a way to reconcile these, a way for the giant to have the same physics as a human without violating the example given by the cubes.