Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX

[Pauly]

Most military-oriented fantasy that takes itself even remotely seriously focuses heavily on humanoid soldiers fighting other humanoid soldiers on battlefields - and actually the modern trend is strongly towards 'humans only' - for exactly this reason.

Or if they do fight monsters they fight A monster or monster type. None of the trawling through the bestiary from days of yore.

[Gnoman]

In most fantasy settings I'm aware of, the most common foes to fight are humans or at least humanoid, even if they're often bigger and stronger than baseline humans, they're not absurdly so - orcs, goblins, Trollocs, zombies, draconians, etc. More exotic monsters are more rarely encountered, and are treated as a specialist threat. This would likely push weapons into the same channels that they went historically.

[Mechalich]

In most fantasy settings I'm aware of, the most common foes to fight are humans or at least humanoid, even if they're often bigger and stronger than baseline humans, they're not absurdly so - orcs, goblins, Trollocs, zombies, draconians, etc. More exotic monsters are more rarely encountered, and are treated as a specialist threat. This would likely push weapons into the same channels that they went historically.

I could see changes in muscle and organ structure even in humanoids leading to shifts in weapon design/choice, but it would be similar to the way shifts in armor composition did the same. For example, Trollocs are larger and stronger than humans, but are marginally less agile and, due to both their size and the high variability in their physique, have limited access to armor. Consequently, anti-trolloc weapon designs might emphasize broader points than those intended for use against humans to maximize flesh-cutting power as opposed to armor penetration.

I imagine this would lead to duplicate arsenals in groups that face most trolloc-type opponents and armored humans with some regularity, similar to how an archer would carry different arrow types. The Witcher, in which Geralt has one sword for fighting people and another for killing monsters, gestures in this direction, albeit in a limited way.

[Mr Beer]

Significantly > man-sized opponents = spears or variants thereof.

[gbaji]

Significantly > man-sized opponents = spears or variants thereof.

As a general rule, yes. But that can often assume we're talking about larger humanoid shaped opponents. What about a giant serpent? Where a thrusting weapon against a curved armored surface may not be the best approach and arguably becomes less effective the longer the shaft and farther away you are. Thrusting with a sword up close may penetrate just fine, with a spear from 15 feet away? Not as much. Just too hard to get a "straight in" line of attack without glancing off. What about tactics against draconic foes? Even setting aside breath weapons and flying, creatures that shape (and with some variable combinations of limbs/claws/bite) may have multiple attack angles, and may require some special tactics to approach and attack successfully (though I still might see spears being pretty useful in that case as well).

And that's before we consider more "exotic" creatures, like Ropers, or Shoggoths, or slime variants. Or *really big* things. I came up with some custom rules for running a Purple Worm in my game (I wasn't playing D&D). We're talking about something with about a 20' diameter, and some 200' long. Super thick hide. Piercing weapons were great for penetrating, but did literally nothing to its total structure (You're literally poking it with a toothpick and doing no significant tissue/muscle damage underneath the skin). Crushing weapons? Mostly bounced off. Only slashing weapons could do much (you're cutting muscle that it needs to move, and tearing gashes in its side, which may let the blood/ichor out), but even then, what's the total length of your swing relative to the size of the creature? Pretty small. So even the most powerful "can cut through anything" type weapons could only basically cut a good sized gash in one segment of the creature.

It was a fun exercise in creature design. And was absolutely about the players figuring out the best tactics and weapons to use, and basically cutting enough gashes in the thing that it eventually just couldn't move anymore and collapsed. It didn't even attack in the usual way. Basically it flexed as it moved through/by them, so merely attempting to stand next to it within weapons range as it steamrolled by had a chance of being caught up in a flex and shoved away violently (possibly before even getting in a good swing). And, of course, those who weren't able to get out of the way of its massive maw, could get swallowed (which presented a whole new set of problems).

One of the most difficult things to do in any game is come up with a consistent set of combat rules and weapon system that can handle the "normal" range of human vs human combat (and hopefully do that well), while also scaling up (and down) to larger/smaller creatures, exotic creature types/shapes, and still do so in a manner that respects the "traditional" uses and pros/cons of historical weapons. And a lot of that is going to be based on an understanding of *why* some weapons were historically used in different situations, since that can tell you about how effective they may be (or may not be) in more exotic gaming situations.

[Lapak]

As a general rule, yes. But that can often assume we're talking about larger humanoid shaped opponents. What about a giant serpent? Where a thrusting weapon against a curved armored surface may not be the best approach and arguably becomes less effective the longer the shaft and farther away you are. Thrusting with a sword up close may penetrate just fine, with a spear from 15 feet away? Not as much. Just too hard to get a "straight in" line of attack without glancing off. What about tactics against draconic foes? Even setting aside breath weapons and flying, creatures that shape (and with some variable combinations of limbs/claws/bite) may have multiple attack angles, and may require some special tactics to approach and attack successfully (though I still might see spears being pretty useful in that case as well).

Thinking of the Runelords series of books here, where the primary non-human threat in the first series was giant evil bug/crustacean type things, too heavily armored for spears to be useful most of the time. The (superhuman) characters fighting them in that series mostly relied on all-metal long-hafted warhammer-type pole arms, IIRC - increased the reach enough to survive but had enough force to crack a shell rather than skidding off. It really does depend on what you're fighting once you leave the 'basically humanoid' realm, but gets muddy in fantasy because we're already talking about things that don't quite work given normal physics (body shapes don't scale up readily, superhuman warriors can use weapons regular people can't, etc.)

[Rynjin]

From what I remember the superhuman characters primarily killed them by attacking their weakpoints for massive damage; a maneuver mostly too dangerous for people who didn't have endowments.

[Grim Portent]

Spears and pikes work fine against elephants, rhinos and other large animals, especially in groups. Unless something breaks the laws of physics I see no reason to assume any creature would be able to resist them.

Scales, chitin, osteoderms and so on can only realistically be so thick before they stop scaling well, especially chitin what with it being an invertebrate thing and all. After a certain point spears become the best weapons for killing things because they can pierce through thick hide, part scales and so on and penetrate deep into organs. People don't hunt crocodiles with swords after all.


If you toss realism out the window them what weapons would be effective is also completely out the window because the laws of physics are working differently. If you scaled a crab up to the size of an elephant and didn't have to care that it would suffocate or crush itself under it's own weight then it would probably be more or less immune to any man scale attack that isn't on exposed flesh. Something like a pickaxe or warhammer might be able to pierce or crush them in a small area, but chitin isn't like stone or metal, it's organic and doesn't crack or crumple quite the same way.

[halfeye]

If you toss realism out the window them what weapons would be effective is also completely out the window because the laws of physics are working differently. If you scaled a crab up to the size of an elephant and didn't have to care that it would suffocate or crush itself under it's own weight then it would probably be more or less immune to any man scale attack that isn't on exposed flesh. Something like a pickaxe or warhammer might be able to pierce or crush them in a small area, but chitin isn't like stone or metal, it's organic and doesn't crack or crumple quite the same way.

Chitin is strange stuff alright, but there's a reason larger crustaceans typically have calcium based backing for it. I'm not sure that there isn't another limit on the size of arthropods, the lungs on spiders are really inefficient as sizes get larger, but coconut crabs have better lungs and they're still limited in size. Lobsters that have gills, but they also don't grow much beyond a certain size.

[Grim Portent]

Chitin is strange stuff alright, but there's a reason larger crustaceans typically have calcium based backing for it. I'm not sure that there isn't another limit on the size of arthropods, the lungs on spiders are really inefficient as sizes get larger, but coconut crabs have better lungs and they're still limited in size. Lobsters that have gills, but they also don't grow much beyond a certain size.

My understanding is that weight is the biggest problem rather than their lungs/gills per se, though their circulation isn't great as I understand it.

The big issue with growing big is that exoskeletons are heavy compared to bones and have to be shed rather than growing with the animal. Shedding is dangerous for multiple reasons and gets harder the bigger the exoskeleton is. There's a theory that some lobsters die as a result of growing too large to moult rather than any directly aging related diseases (telomerase FTW,) but given their habitat it's hard to prove their maximum size or cause of death in the wild.

Really big invertebrates are all boneless for a reason.

[halfeye]

My understanding is that weight is the biggest problem rather than their lungs/gills per se, though their circulation isn't great as I understand it.

The big issue with growing big is that exoskeletons are heavy compared to bones and have to be shed rather than growing with the animal. Shedding is dangerous for multiple reasons and gets harder the bigger the exoskeleton is. There's a theory that some lobsters die as a result of growing too large to moult rather than any directly aging related diseases (telomerase FTW,) but given their habitat it's hard to prove their maximum size or cause of death in the wild.

Really big invertebrates are all boneless for a reason.

Shedding is a problem all right, but it's mainly due to chitin being dead stuff that can't grow. There's no reason that a non-chitinous exoskeleton couldn't grow, all the exoskeletons we know of are chitinous though. Lignin is similar, and has similar conequences.

[Mechalich]

Arthropod size is limited by a combination of factors, including respiration, molting, and locomotion. The two largest lineages of arthropods known, the giant millipede Arthropleura and the giant sea scorpion Jaekelopterus, appear to have had very thin exoskeletons. The circulation issue isn't the lungs, but rather the nature of the open circulatory system. Arthropods don't have arteries and veins, their hemolymph if pumped by the heart into direct contact with the organs and then drawn back through a series of pores. This system loses efficacy at larger sizes. Still, under the right environmental conditions arthropods can get quite large. Jaekelopterus holds the aquatic record at 2.6 meters of length, and Arthropleura hits 2.5 on land.

An interesting possibility, in fantasy, is an animal with a jointed exoskeleton and an closed circulatory system like that of vertebrates. This would, potentially all for larger animals, or a higher activity level among very large exoskeletal animals.

[gbaji]

If you toss realism out the window them what weapons would be effective is also completely out the window because the laws of physics are working differently. If you scaled a crab up to the size of an elephant and didn't have to care that it would suffocate or crush itself under it's own weight then it would probably be more or less immune to any man scale attack that isn't on exposed flesh. Something like a pickaxe or warhammer might be able to pierce or crush them in a small area, but chitin isn't like stone or metal, it's organic and doesn't crack or crumple quite the same way.

I do think you can have consistent sets of rules even in alternative worlds/whatever in which things that are impossible happen. You can have giant spiders, crabs, serpents, dragons (even ones that fly!), while still coming up with some reasonable and consistent ways of handling such things. You don't have to just toss all the rules out just because some of the rules are broken.

And yeah, things like "Ok. If we imagine some magic allows for creatures with 8 inch thick chitin to exist, what weapons would be effective against them" do tend to still work as a basic thought experiment. So you can create rules that model such things. You just have to spend a bit more time thinking about them.

[Mechalich]

I do think you can have consistent sets of rules even in alternative worlds/whatever in which things that are impossible happen. You can have giant spiders, crabs, serpents, dragons (even ones that fly!), while still coming up with some reasonable and consistent ways of handling such things. You don't have to just toss all the rules out just because some of the rules are broken.

The way evolution works, a lot of things are 'impossible' now, because of events that happened in the Cambrian or even earlier. For example, you can't have a six-limbed tetrapod because there's no way for that developmentally to occur without, you know, killing the embryo, but there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why large animals can't have six limbs. It's actually quite difficult to tease out biological options, especially in the region of overall organismal design or 'bauplan,' that aren't available because of evolutionary history from those that aren't available because some aspect of chemistry or physics says 'doesn't work, sorry' in part because we can't (yet) design organisms from scratch outside the bounds of said evolutionary history and find out.

[halfeye]

The way evolution works, a lot of things are 'impossible' now, because of events that happened in the Cambrian or even earlier. For example, you can't have a six-limbed tetrapod because there's no way for that developmentally to occur without, you know, killing the embryo, but there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why large animals can't have six limbs. It's actually quite difficult to tease out biological options, especially in the region of overall organismal design or 'bauplan,' that aren't available because of evolutionary history from those that aren't available because some aspect of chemistry or physics says 'doesn't work, sorry' in part because we can't (yet) design organisms from scratch outside the bounds of said evolutionary history and find out.

Absolutely. We do seem to be heading in the direction of being able to design organisms quite quickly at the moment though.

[Grim Portent]

I do think you can have consistent sets of rules even in alternative worlds/whatever in which things that are impossible happen. You can have giant spiders, crabs, serpents, dragons (even ones that fly!), while still coming up with some reasonable and consistent ways of handling such things. You don't have to just toss all the rules out just because some of the rules are broken.

And yeah, things like "Ok. If we imagine some magic allows for creatures with 8 inch thick chitin to exist, what weapons would be effective against them" do tend to still work as a basic thought experiment. So you can create rules that model such things. You just have to spend a bit more time thinking about them.

Consistent parhaps, but it's largely going to fall down to stylistic choices and retroactive justifications than any real logic. I'm not sure we can even predict what properties shells, be they chitin, calcium, ferric or otherwise, would have once you get outside the thicknesses and structures we know of, it's not unusual for materials to exhibit divergent properties when arranged differently or in different quantities.

What weapons would kill a giant crab? In the real world it would be spears and even arrows, like every other large animal, because a crab past a certain size can't be heavily armoured.

In fantasy though it's usually going to be hammers or picks, because they work on metal armour and that's basically the same thing isn't it?

[Vinyadan]

The big issue with growing big is that exoskeletons are heavy compared to bones and have to be shed rather than growing with the animal. Shedding is dangerous for multiple reasons and gets harder the bigger the exoskeleton is. There's a theory that some lobsters die as a result of growing too large to moult rather than any directly aging related diseases (telomerase FTW,) but given their habitat it's hard to prove their maximum size or cause of death in the wild.

Really big invertebrates are all boneless for a reason.

You might want to google the Holy Order of the Claw as a way to have an answer in the future

[halfeye]

Really big invertebrates are all boneless for a reason.

B. latro is the largest terrestrial arthropod, and indeed terrestrial invertebrate, in the world;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab#Description

On land they're not.

[Grim Portent]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab#Description

On land they're not.

9 pounds is not a big animal by any definition. You can pick up a coconut crab in one hand with some effort.

It's the biggest terrestrial invertebrate, but it's still tiny as animals go, and miniscule compared to the size of the larger soft bodied invertebrates. Even the giant octopus, not even close to the biggest invertebrate in terms of mass, outweighs it several times over.

The coconut crab is an impressive animal in many ways, but it's not exactly a standout in terms of size.

[Vinyadan]

Even the giant octopus, not even close to the biggest invertebrate in terms of mass, outweighs it several times over.

About this specific example: water in general increases sizes, though. Bears and elephants are pretty small, compared to water mammals, and an ocean turtle can be twice as heavy as the heaviest land tortoise.

Anyway, if we use the megafauna 100-pound indicator, the coconut crab is certainly below it.

[Mr Beer]

I think teams fighting heavily armoured giant monsters would still have people wielding long spears in order to fight at a distance and target vulnerable points. I suspect an exoskeleton that utterly nullifies any use of 18 foot pikes with hardened steel tips designed to pierce armour, would be too strong to damage with warhammers or mauls. Remember a pike can be set into the ground and if the creature advances, it uses it's own bulk to pierce itself - surely applying force that a human can't match. So I think a heavily armoured foe that can still be injured with difficulty might be best tackled with a mix of pikes, polearms that can be swung and employ a spike or hammer head and maybe sharpshooters targeting eyes or other such vulnerable points.

D&D-style oozes tend to have a wide range of immunities and a small list of specific attacks that can be employed successfully. A more realistic protoplasmic monster would be probably vulnerable to fire and caustic or corrosive liquids. So any weapon which allows liquids to be sprayed onto the beast would be the key "melee" weapon and then for distance attacks, ceramic or glass vials with liquid inside, thrown pitch torches, fire arrows and catapaults with larger containers of liquids or buckets of live coals.

[KineticDiplomat]

Re: Weapons and Humanoids in Fantasy

The issue here is that "realistic" means understanding arms and armor as an intersection of production capability and need. This does not tend to produce cool results, and at some point as a fantasy environment you're going to start fibbing...at which point you run into trying to produce "realistic" results for something based well outside the bounds of reality.

Take the spear. Comparatively easy to make - examples go well back into pre-history, literally hundreds of thousands of years. And pretty much any beast without true armor is threatened by a man with spear. Elephant, tiger, crocodile, gorilla, giant snake...a man with long spear has a pretty good chance to kill it. So here we have something easy to use and easy to make that could reliably kill most "realistic" fantasy beasts.

It also is pretty good at killing humans, and by extension, other humanoids. There's really only a narrow portion of muscle powered warfare where the spear or pike aren't the dominant melee weapon...and even that is up to debate by how you frame dominant.

The bow falls in a similar niche. Turns out shooting someone or something from a safe distance is popular. Turns out that if you're not armored, it has a pretty good chance to kill or maim anything short of the truly huge (think elephant).

So the "realistic" fantasy answer is usually to either armor up, remove the lethal mechanism (aka poking a hole in, crushing, or cutting through flesh and organs somehow isn't fatal - usually because magic), or just make the thing so big that things Ike spears would be like poking you with a thumb tac.

But that causes its own issues. How exactly do your primitive orcs go about wearing plates of heavy iron - they have the muscles, but do they have the agrarian society pumping out their presumably higher caloric needs to the point where there is enough excess productivity to both mine iron in the right quantities and smith it? If so, are they really orcs any more, in the style the common fantasy wants to use them?

f the dragon is naturally covered in plate and several thousand pounds, then chances are very little you have in the way of personal weaponry is going to matter. "The PC" doesn't kill the dragon with basic chopping and stabbing, barring something like stabbing it in the eye while it sleeps. There's still plenty of realistic ways to kill it, but not the kind that most fantasy game systems envision. Definitely not the kind where someone is making "and this is the cool dragon slaying sword."

We could go on, but you get the point. Realistic weapon looks are often uncool (you killed thraaka dum the ogre master by...stabbing him once in his belly with a common spear? Yes) or not winnable in the core game play loop sense (you roll to hit, and it's irrelevant. Anyhow, you die). And tracing weapons dev off it becomes irrelevant either because "I have an answer...it's a spear" or "we aren't killing that one on one, shoot it with a siege engine" are going to be main directions you go.

[gbaji]

The way evolution works, a lot of things are 'impossible' now, because of events that happened in the Cambrian or even earlier. For example, you can't have a six-limbed tetrapod because there's no way for that developmentally to occur without, you know, killing the embryo, but there's absolutely no intrinsic reason why large animals can't have six limbs. It's actually quite difficult to tease out biological options, especially in the region of overall organismal design or 'bauplan,' that aren't available because of evolutionary history from those that aren't available because some aspect of chemistry or physics says 'doesn't work, sorry' in part because we can't (yet) design organisms from scratch outside the bounds of said evolutionary history and find out.

I think we were more talking about "violates the laws of physics" sorts of things rather than "that's not how evolution progressed on planet Earth" sorts of things. And yeah, once you get to "20 ft crabs with 6" thick shells", you're getting into the "how the heck can this thing move/breathe/whatever" questions. But handwaving that away as "a wizard did it", doesn't mean you also have to handwave away other logical concepts of combat. You can still go through the thought experiment of "Ok. Let's assume that 20ft crabs with 6" shells exist, and can walk around, and attack folks with their claws and whatnot. What weapons would work against them?".

Now you could also have "rules" in your fantasy world in which 6' humanoids can stride around wielding 20' long flaming swords of adamant, cutting through solid rock or something. And yeah... You have to take that sort of thing into account as well. Didn't say that the thought experiments were always going to be easy.

Consistent parhaps, but it's largely going to fall down to stylistic choices and retroactive justifications than any real logic. I'm not sure we can even predict what properties shells, be they chitin, calcium, ferric or otherwise, would have once you get outside the thicknesses and structures we know of, it's not unusual for materials to exhibit divergent properties when arranged differently or in different quantities.

Sure. But fortunately, most game systems abstract and simplify such things already. We don't have to know the precise tensile/ductile/whatever properties of every material in every type of armor option available in a game to do basic things like "it weighs X lbs/encumbrance/whatever , and has Y armor class/points/whatever". We can then abstract rules for slashing/crushing/thrusting weapons, with slightly different damage/reach/whatever effects based on weapon type (and perhaps specific properties of each weapon within each type). We can make that as simple or complex as we want, while still making the game system "usable". That's always going to be a balance between how much detail and realism you want versus how playable you want your system to be, but those rules are always going to be at least to some degree a simplified abstraction of "real life" (or whatever passes as "real life" in the game world you are simulating).

And yes, we can then go further and create specific creatures, with yet more special rules to handle their odd/unusual shapes or defenses. And already having the existing weapons system rules, most game systems should allow for insertion of these sorts of things. Are they ever going to perfectly match the "real world"? No. Can't. However, you can still consider "real world" weapons capabilities when creating those abstracted rules (and creature specific sub-rules).

As I did in my purple worm example earlier. I considered not just how thick its hide was (armor points in this case), but how different weapons would work against both the hide *and* how effective at damaging the tissues/muscle beneath. And in that case, I came up with a sort of "segmented HPs" model, where hitting one section just couldn't do much to the whole (unless someone actually was wielding a 20' flaming adamant sword, I suppose). And pointy weapons were less useful as a logical result of examining the body type.

What weapons would kill a giant crab? In the real world it would be spears and even arrows, like every other large animal, because a crab past a certain size can't be heavily armoured.

In fantasy though it's usually going to be hammers or picks, because they work on metal armour and that's basically the same thing isn't it?

Kinda depends on how you scale up that crab's armor, and how that interacts with some combination of weapon damage and armor piercing potentials. Hammers and picks may be great at smashing parts of the thick armor, but may not penetrate very far into the crab to hit its vulnerable bits. Maybe spears will more readily poke a hole in the armor (or just bounce off?), but do even less damage unless you just happen to target the right spot (deeper penetration, but narrow hole, which could miss vital bits entirely).

I could certainly see hammers being pretty useful against the legs/claws of the crab. Spears almost certainly less so, but maybe a wash against the body, with the distinct advantage that you could probably poke it with a spear without getting as far into claw range doing so.

To be honest, long before I'd insert rules in my game to distinguish different types of weapon damage, I'd put in rules for reach effects for different weapons. So the biggest advantage to using a spear in a hypothetical (perhaps more simple) game where all weapons just have "damage", and all damage works equally against all "armor", spears would allow one to attack from farther away. So even if we added more rules to model weapon types against different armor (and creature) types, I'd still maybe want to be the spear guy fighting the giant crab, while someone else goes up and stands right under it with their sword and shield.

[Mechalich]

I think we were more talking about "violates the laws of physics" sorts of things rather than "that's not how evolution progressed on planet Earth" sorts of things. And yeah, once you get to "20 ft crabs with 6" thick shells", you're getting into the "how the heck can this thing move/breathe/whatever" questions.

Well, it depends how wedded you are to the 'crab' aspect of 'giant crab' as opposed to 'thing that looks extremely crab-like but has the appropriate adaptations to actually be 20' tall.' Because a decapod with big claws that's 20' tall with segmented appendages is not necessarily something that violates the laws of physics, it just won't operate 'under the chitin' anything like a crab does on Earth. In many ways this depends on how you think about fantastical creatures, do you treat them via fantasy handwaving, or do you try to think about them as designed organism that should, as much as possible, actually work.

Now, the 6" thick shell bit is a little different, since nothing of such size is likely to have such massive armor. Triceratops, for instance, was a 25' long animal with a massive defensive frill, but it was nothing like 6" thick (more like 1-2"). This is one of the problems of fantasy creatures, attempts to 'scale up' linearly, when that is not how biology actually works.

Of course, even 1" thick mineralized chitin would be some pretty formidable armor, probably equivalent to plate and many of the strategies useful against a human being in plate, ie. knock them down and stick a dagger in the joints, aren't going to be useful on something like a gigantic crab or even a completely non-fictional ankylosaur. And this is definitely a thing game systems have trouble with. There's a comparable problem of anti-personnel weapons versus vehicles that shows up a lot in modern games, such as the rather common situation of someone unloading an entire assault rifle clip at a target in an SUV.

I'd imagine, in a fantasy setting where large, armored, and extremely tough animals were common - especially if they were domesticated or semi-intelligent, such as the troll-powered army of Mordor in Peter Jackson's LotR films - specialized anti-big-animal weapons would exist just in the same fashion as modern militaries carry anti-armor weapons to take out vehicles. History is clear that specialized anti-elephant tactics were devised in the places and periods where elephants were common enough in warfare for armies to need to think about this, so fantasy civilizations would to the same.

One other important thing to note, with regard to biology, is that big animals have big appetites, which means they have low population densities overall - herd animals may form huge, localized aggregations, but those herds have to move to survive - so the actual number of these things is going to be fairly small. Also, because big animals generally start out as much smaller animals, the solution to say, the local T-Rex problem, is generally 'smash all the eggs' and then wait for the adults to die off.

[Vinyadan]

I suspect that some particularly large placoderms might have had 15-cm thick armour, but they were fish, and it only covered the forward part of their body. Among land animals, I'm not sure that even the armour of ankylosaurus reached such thickness.

[Mechalich]

I suspect that some particularly large placoderms might have had 15-cm thick armour, but they were fish, and it only covered the forward part of their body. Among land animals, I'm not sure that even the armour of ankylosaurus reached such thickness.

Dunkleosteus, among the largest placoderms (certainly that's well-studied), had armor that maxed out at 5-cm thick, so not much thicker than the largest armored land animals. Or course, in evolutionary terms there are considerations beyond pure physics. Armor is energetically expensive to produce, so there's no reason to evolve overprotective defenses. Nothing's going to evolve armor beyond whatever's necessary to protect from the local apex predator. Triceratops evolved that sturdy frill in environment containing T-Rex, who had a bite force for the ages.

Predator size, however, is sensitive to energetic constraints, specifically, a predator can only get as big as the energy they are able to pull out of the environment (this is why a lot of the biggest predators are giant crocodile relatives that had the metabolic advantage of being cold-blooded). In a fantasy scenario it's possible to produce hyper-productive environments - for instance a tidally locked planet where it's constantly sunny on one side - beyond anything ever seen on Earth which would allow for super-sized animals and the development of incredible levels of armor and weaponry as a result.

[halfeye]

In a fantasy scenario it's possible to produce hyper-productive environments - for instance a tidally locked planet where it's constantly sunny on one side - beyond anything ever seen on Earth which would allow for super-sized animals and the development of incredible levels of armor and weaponry as a result.

There's a possibility that on a tidally locked planet, all the air would freeze out at the back, making the whole thing effectively airless.

[VoxRationis]

There's a possibility that on a tidally locked planet, all the air would freeze out at the back, making the whole thing effectively airless.

Not to mention the fact that the only part of the planet that wasn't scorching or frozen would have sunlight at an oblique angle, minimizing photosynthetic productivity.

[D&D_Fan]

In a fantasy scenario it's possible to produce hyper-productive environments - for instance a tidally locked planet where it's constantly sunny on one side - beyond anything ever seen on Earth which would allow for super-sized animals and the development of incredible levels of armor and weaponry as a result.

There's a possibility that on a tidally locked planet, all the air would freeze out at the back, making the whole thing effectively airless.

And the whole thing of that the front of the planet is constantly exposed to the sunlight and doesn't have at atmosphere to block harmful radiation.

It would be inhospitable to most life that needs to breathe and is vulnerable to radiation and needs to eat food that also doesn't need to breathe and isn't harmed by radiation.

I could see some radiotrophic fungi and some water bear, but even that environment could be too intense for them, since they still need some water I suspect.

So no, if there was life, it wouldn't be bigger, it would probably be quite small little things or it wouldn't exist at all.

[Satinavian]

I do think fantasy worlds should develop different kinds of weapons than the real world.

But no because real-world weapons are best at killing humans and other targets should produce other weapons, but because real-world weapons are best at being wielded by humans.

Now, some of the more basic primitive concepts like a spear or club would probably work for anything that can grab things, but the more sophisticated the weapon is, the more likely it would be not a good fit for inhuman physiology. And then there is also the thing that humans tend to be naturally talented at throwing things and how that influences all the ranges weaponry.