I'm wondering mainly for tree stride (where if you cut down the tree the person is hiding in they die). Obviously it depends on the size of the tree but what are some reasonable values?
Wood has a hardness of 5 with 10 HP per inch of thickness. I guess you'd just measure the diameter of the object in question and multiply by 10.
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Wood has 10 hit points per inch and hardness 5, so that's a decent place to start. Presumably that metric is for manufactured wood, but I don't know enough about carpentry to know whether living wood would be much different.
Edit: Ninja'd looking up tables. X D
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Wood has a hardness of 5 with 10 HP per inch of thickness. I guess you'd just measure the diameter of the object in question and multiply by 10.
Because trees are round, you might also amuse yourself by then multiplying that result by Pi. (This will account for an increasing percentage of the tree's trunk being of denser heartwood, and other difficulties attendant in chopping down a massive object as opposed to a sapling. Those sequoias live thousands of years for a reason.)
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"The trunk of a typical tree has AC 4, hardness 5, and 150 hp... (massive) trees...have AC 3, hardness 5, and 600 hp."
Should they be treated as having vulnerability to fire? That would make sense.
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Should they be treated as having vulnerability to fire? That would make sense.
That would actually depend on the species of tree. Some trees will go up like they're soaked in gasoline even when the wood is green. Other types of wood just smoke, blacken, spit boiling sap, and refuse to burn at all when they're green.
"The trunk of a typical tree has AC 4, hardness 5, and 150 hp... (massive) trees...have AC 3, hardness 5, and 600 hp."
Well all right then. That's much better.
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Forest fires tend to happen, not because a living tree catches fire, but because something dead and dry is ready to go up, and catches other things like grass and debris and builds into a strong enough fire to actually catch a green tree. A living tree, even in a drought, is unlikely to be the first thing to catch fire.
Some trees, like eucalyptus and jack pine, are evolved to burn. Others, like ponderosa and sequoia, grow very thick bark, and are eventually almost impervious to fire once they reach a certain size.
Probably a dumb question but why don't they make houses out of the kinds of trees which don't burn easy?
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There is a big difference between a living tree and dead wood. Lumber once it is harvested is left to dry out before it is used to build houses. Also the types of wood that are more resistant to fire tend to be hard wood like oak instead of softer woods like pine. Hard woods grow very slowly compared to soft wood and usually don’t get as big. Building a house out of oak would be a lot more expensive than building it out of pine.
Probably a dumb question but why don't they make houses out of the kinds of trees which don't burn easy?
Few woods burn "easy" when they're sitting out in the open as a block. Houses burn down because they're enclosed boxes, and a fire inside burning other material heats up the interior until it's an oven and volatile gases cook off and "flash over". Then it's a house made of pyrolyzing charcoal and alcohol vapors at 1,800F. There doesn't need to be much stuff burning in a room to flash over an entire house.