# How much does my giant weight?



## Quasqueton (Nov 9, 2004)

I really wish the MM listed a creature's weight. Most entries in the MM have a note about the creature's height, but nothing about its weight. It doesn't come up often, but when it does, the game enters slow motion while the DM tries to figure some number for the situation.

"Can we drag the ogre's body over to block the door from opening?"

"We want to roll the dragon's body off his pile of coins."

"Let's more the dire wolf's body out and fortify this room."

Maybe we could have a thread (this one?) where folks with knowledge and understanding on such things could list the general weight of the various creatures in the MM.

Quasqueton


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## jgbrowning (Nov 9, 2004)

I think an average cubic foot of human weighs around 46lbs.


joe b.


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## diaglo (Nov 9, 2004)

Quasqueton said:
			
		

> I really wish the MM listed a creature's weight. Most entries in the MM have a note about the creature's height, but nothing about its weight.




i guess they want you to use the size modifiers.

take Medium creature base weight.. say human


maybe even factor in the on 2 vs. 4 vs. multiple feet...

or just make it up. i'd make it up personally.


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## shilsen (Nov 9, 2004)

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I think an average cubic foot of human weighs around 46lbs.
> 
> 
> joe b.



 Can I get that with fries?


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## Pbartender (Nov 9, 2004)

Quasqueton said:
			
		

> I really wish the MM listed a creature's weight. Most entries in the MM have a note about the creature's height, but nothing about its weight.




Huh?  It's right there in almost every single entry, and usually right at the beginning.  To use the title of your thread as an example...

From the SRD:

"Cloud giants’ skin ranges in color from milky white to light sky blue. Their hair is silvery white or brass, and their eyes are iridescent blue. Adult males are about 18 feet tall and *weigh about 5,000 pounds*. Females are slightly shorter and lighter. Cloud giants can live to be 400 years old."

"Some fire giants have bright orange hair.. An adult male is 12 feet tall, has a chest that measures 9 feet around, and *weighs about 7,000 pounds*. Females are slightly shorter and lighter. Fire giants can live to be 350 years old."

"A frost giant’s hair can be light blue or dirty yellow, and its eyes usually match its hair color. Frost giants dress in skins and pelts, along with any jewelry they own. Frost giant warriors add chain shirts and metal helmets decorated with horns or feathers. 

An adult male is about 15 feet tall and *weighs about 2,800 pounds*. Females are slightly shorter and lighter, but otherwise identical with males. Frost giants can live to be 250 years old."

"Skin color among hill giants ranges from light tan to deep ruddy brown. Their hair is brown or black, with eyes the same color. Hill giants wear layers of crudely prepared hides with the fur left on. They seldom wash or repair their garments, preferring to simply add more hides as their old ones wear out.

Adults are about 10-1/2 feet tall and *weigh about 1,100 pounds*. Hill giants can live to be 200 years old."

"Stone giants prefer thick leather garments, dyed in shades of brown and gray to match the stone around them. Adults are about 12 feet tall and *weigh about 1,500 pounds*. Stone giants can live to be 800 years old."

"Very rarely, storm giants have violet skin. Violet-skinned storm giants have deep violet or blue-black hair with silvery gray or purple eyes. Adults are about 21 feet tall and *weigh about 12,000 pounds*. Storm giants can live to be 600 years old. Storm giants’ garb is usually a short, loose tunic belted at the waist, sandals or bare feet, and a headband. They wear a few pieces of simple but finely crafted jewelry, anklets (favored by barefoot giants), rings, or circlets being most common. They live quiet, reflective lives and spend their time musing about the world, composing and playing music, and tilling their land or gathering food."


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## Dr_Rictus (Nov 9, 2004)

The main thing to know is, for objects that are similar aside from scale, volume goes up as the cube of height.  So, a 12-foot tall giant, if he's made of the same stuff as a human, would weigh eight times as much as a 6-foot tall man.

So, let's say m and h are the mass and height of one creature, and M and H are the mass and height of another creature with the same build.  And assume both creatures have the same density (not a good assumption from an engineering point of view, but if you go down that road you quickly conclude that giants are impossible).

Then what you have is:

(M/m) = (H/h)^3

or equivalently:

M = m * (H/h)^3

An 9-foot tall giant, for example would weigh *roughly* 3.4 times as much as a 6-foot tall human.

Then, if you really want to get into detail, consider the creature's build.  For example, giants are depicted as more stocky than humans.  You have to put a number on how much more, from the point of view of the thickness of their limbs and trunk.  Square that to get the increase in cross-sectional area, and hence the increase in volume for a certain height.  A truly massive giant (built like, say, a dwarf), for example, might have limbs 50% thicker than a normally-proportioned human at the same scale.  This would make him 225% (1.5 squared) as heavy.  For our 9-foot tall giant, that'd come out to about 200 * 3.4 * 2.25 = 1520 lbs.

The numbers for giants in the Monster Manual (cited above) are mostly in line for human proportions and density at the given height.

The same general rules of proportion apply to any body shape, whether human or whatever.  You just need a good baseline, which may not always exist (for example, nothing in the real world is shaped like a dragon).  Taking your dire wolf question, though, a wolf is probably a reasonable approximation for a lot of quadrupedal predators, though.  An adult male grey wolf weighs about 90 lbs, and is 5.5 to 6 feet long, and about 2.5 feet high at the shoulder.  This implies that the Monster Manual listing (9 feet long, 800 lbs.) probably doesn't include the tail, and represents a wolf about 5 feet high at the shoulder.


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## Khayman (Nov 9, 2004)

In the real world, any increase in height results in volume increasing by a cube of that change. So, (assuming the density remains the same) if you are a 6 foot tall 200 lb human and you suddenly doubled in height to 12 feet, you should weigh in at a dainty 1600 lb (2x2x2 x200). 

_However_, if the increase is natural --- say the result of evolution or breeding or another biological change --- certain body proportions tend to change proportionately, which may alter the end weight by a fraction. Doubling the height of a creature generally requires a fourfold increase in support area, so giants would tend to have big feet. There are similar increases in the size of the feeding apparatus, thus the big guts and huge jaws you see in ogres and hill giants. (Apparently storm giants do more sit ups.)

This assumes real-world physiology and physics are at work. Weird results could occur due to differences in tissue density (eg, dwarves, genasi, warforged), dimensional shunting of mass, and so forth.  In reality, tissue density will increase as a structural response to increased load. Certain creatures, such as sauropds, got around drawbacks of high local mass by having hollowed-out vertebrae and the like.


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## Dr_Rictus (Nov 9, 2004)

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I think an average cubic foot of human weighs around 46lbs.




Humans weigh only slightly less than the same volume of water (since they just barely float in water, and the really muscular ones sink).  Water weighs about 62 lbs. per cubic foot.

So 46 lbs/ft^3 is too low.  At that density, one quarter of a floating human's body volume would bob above the surface of the water, which pretty clearly isnt' so.

Not that knowing the density does you any good, though, since you don't really have a way to compute the volume of a creature aside from proportionality to other, known creatures.  And if you can do that you can derive the mass directly.


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## jgbrowning (Nov 9, 2004)

Dr_Rictus said:
			
		

> Humans weigh only slightly less than the same volume of water (since they just barely float in water, and the really muscular ones sink).  Water weighs about 62 lbs. per cubic foot.
> 
> So 46 lbs/ft^3 is too low.  At that density, one quarter of a floating human's body volume would bob above the surface of the water, which pretty clearly isnt' so.




Cool. Thanks for the info.

joe b.


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