Giants: How big should they be in an a Fantasy RPG?

[Yora]

{3.5 Thinking}Because players should not need to be near epic levels just to fight a huge giant. Nor should a bunch of spell like abilities be a prerequisite for a giant to be huge.

Even though I don't want huge giants in my game, the reasoning behind this is flawless. Having to wait for the high levels to be able to have some things in the game is the main problem with the d20 games. Which is the biggest change 5th Edition has made so far.
So probably it's best to have both available and pick those that are right for any given campaign.

 

[frankthedm]

Even though I don't want huge giants in my game, the reasoning behind this is flawless. Having to wait for the high levels to be able to have some things in the game is the main problem with the d20 games.

You must spread some Experience points around before giving it to Yora again.

Agree. I especially feel there should be more enormous foes {Gargantuan / Colossal] for PCs to fight, even at lower levels. When I saw the cover of Dungeon 124 which had the default PCs fighting enormous worms on the cover, it raised my hopes since the first Age of Worms adventure was supposed to be a low level adventure.

"Holy crap, low level PCs fighting gargantuan burrowing worms! How the hell did 3.5 pull this off without being an auto TPK?"

Instead that cover was just a teaser of things to come.

 

[Celebrim]

Personally, I'm quite happy with the classic MM giants both in size and flavor.

In art, giants are often depicted as rising to heights heights of 400' or even 800'. Even smallish giants are generally depicted as being 60' or more in height, although one thing is certain is that how big a giant is often changes from scene to scene as scale is seldom an important concept in such stories. But its really hard to maintain a degree of grittiness when you have giants of that scale. You are going to veer either from a faerie tale feel, where versimiltude means adherence entirely to literary convention only, or else to some sort of Dragonball-Z/God of War like epicness where versimiltude again means adherence solely to a set of literary conventions. Neither produces a world that is particularly easy to believe in on inspection.

Instead of focusing on the height of a giant, I think it is more important to focus on the weight of a giant. A 24' high giant weighs about 16000 pounds, and a 30' high giant weighs nearly double that. These are incredibly big creatures. Even a 12' high giant is going to weigh 2000 pounds or more. For those that think such creatures small, don't look at a painting, use your imagination to picture one in a room with you, stooping over, enormous and space filling. Next time you are standing next to a seven foot tall man, imagine one as a center gaurding an NBA blackboard, his shaggy head extending to the top of it, the hand of his upraised arm a good 4-5' above the blackboard, and some atheletic 'giant of a man' like Lebron James flying up to try to dunk on him but only rising to the lane filling wall of his chest - a childlike figure next to this massive creature. Giants are plenty big. Pictures do not do them justice.

Common giants - like the D&D Hill Giant - are of a good size to integrate into the ecology and social order of your fantasy world without blowing away belief. The bigger giants, 16-24' range, are of a good size to represent the transition point between the mortal and the divine. These are the huge scions of the gods from ancient days before men ruled. Descendents of demigods with immortal blood from a time when the Gods first looked on the Genie and found them comely and desirable. Anything bigger than that, and you are now in the world of the divine immortal challenges which man with his petty strength dare not face unless he is practically a demigod himself.

I really don't like the impulse that leads people to think that Dragons need to be the size of Godzilla to be interesting. I personally feel it is a failure of imagination. It's an impulse that I think comes from always viewing the world of play in the third person, looking down at it rather than standing in it. If players (and DM's) could truly view the world in the first person, I think that they'd realize that D&D monsters are plenty big enough

 

[Celebrim]

Agree. I especially feel there should be more enormous foes {Gargantuan / Colossal] for PCs to fight, even at lower levels. When I saw the cover of Dungeon 124 which had the default PCs fighting enormous worms on the cover, it raised my hopes since the first Age of Worms adventure was supposed to be a low level adventure.

The problem with that is simply: "Where do you go from there?" If at low level you are already capable of fighting colossal creatures, then how to increase the scope, theme, and magnitude of the action as you level up? Either you are going to have to move on to truly trans-collosal creatures, which to be quite frank, I doubt people can truly grasp the magnitude or implications thereof, or else you are going to keep the same creatures but simply give them bigger numbers. I think it very important that bigger numbers usually describe a creature of greater actual in game magnitude. If not, you move to a World of Warcraft style universe where the 'bears' don't get bigger, they just get bigger and bigger numbers. It feels arbitrary and anticlimatic, and it seriously raises the question of why do you want a game which involves levelling at all? If you want a game where 'at low level' you are facing things of great magnitude, perhaps you'd be better off with a game with no levels, no leveling, and assumes everyone starts off as something already superheroic? What is the point in having graduations in skill and prowess if they don't over time alter the viewpoint of the playes? Why level up if the game isn't going to change as a result of it?

D&D does an amazingly good job of representing everything from a lowly apprentice to a mighty archmage, from a common soldier to a sword swinging caped fantasy superhero, from a common street pickpocket to a legendary thief. If you really don't want to have the lower range of those archetypes available, if you don't find low level play enherently interesting, then perhaps you should avoid the low levels entirely and start at 10th level. Don't invalidate that play just because you want something different from you game.

One problem any system is going to encounter is what to do to represent the extreme ends of the system. D&D has this as the 'house cat problem', where it has traditionally been hard to capture the degree of difference between a wasp, a rat, a cat, and the cat's human owner because it's hard to have fractions of 1 in the system. If you squeeze giants down into the low levels as well, then the problem only gets worse. Not only will the cat be a danger to the farmer with his hoe, but puss-n-boots will need not trick the giant into turning into a mouse either. The 8 pound cat will simply scratch to death the 2000 pound giant, with no cunning required.

 

[Yora]

There's a rather famous drawing of norse giants from the 1910s which I think has them at a size that completely sufficient to make them giants.

Link

And they just barely make it into the Large size category for D&D.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm in the 8' tall is an ogre camp. Giants start at 10'-12' - if it ain't ten foot it's not an ordinary adult giant but that's all giants need at a minimum. On the other hand, the sky's the limit. Literally. Why cut down anyone else's fun?

 

[Celebrim]

I'm in the 8' tall is an ogre camp. Giants start at 10'-12' - if it ain't ten foot it's not an ordinary adult giant but that's all giants need at a minimum. On the other hand, the sky's the limit. Literally. Why cut down anyone else's fun?

I agree that people ought to be able to paint giants however they want. If they want hill giants to be 25' tall without adjusting the stats, then that is their business.

But the problem for me is that that there is some continuity breaks in the mechanics of you take that to the extreme. D&D traditionally (by that I mean back in 1e) handled size very poorly from a realism stand point. In 3e, there was an attempt to make size matter, which on the whole I'm happy with, but the system does have some realism problems (like most systems) for things below Tiny and larger than Huge. Even (maybe especially) if we assume the fantasy giant with fantasy musculuture, at some point I for one start asking, "How is a 6' human really threatening this creature with its little teeny sword? How does a human expect to survive being stomped on by a creature that weighs 40,000 pounds, much less hit by an axe weighing multiple tons?"

And the 3e scale even ends at around 40'. Unless you start creating rules for transcollosal creatures, you don't have a lot of difference between something that is 40' high and weighs 50,000 pounds, and something 400' high that weighs 5 million pounds. At some point you have to say, "Wait a minute, this creatures skin is 5' thick stone. It's wearing a shoe made of iron that is 2' thick, and the creature is so heavy that that iron plate crumples and moves like stiff cloth, and a 6' tall creature can't even reach it's ankle. How in the world is a sword, even a magical one, even a threat? Better yet, why is the wasp swarm I conjured even doing damage? And it's got a 40' long foot a 200' long stride, and exerts about 6000-10000 pounds of force per square foot just when its standing on you. The game can't even model how this thing moves, much less combat with it."

We just don't have rules for even modelling that in the game. You could create them, and they might make for an interesting game/scenario but they aren't something that the game attempts to model in any fashion. If you want to get into that sort of scale, you are basically on your own.

 

[Desdichado]

Wow, do people really care that much specifically about the size of their giants? Maybe I'm really missing something special here, but I've never really used giants. At all. I find them completely uninteresting. Making them bigger doesn't make them more interesting, it just makes them more preposterous.

Yes, I'm well aware of the literary, folkloric and even mythological roots of giants, and hence their inclusion in the game. Given that, the only thing that seems surprising is the biophysics lectures that some of these posts produce. If the antecedents of the monster type are fairytales and mythology, then trying to calculate the mass or weight of a giant and use that to put biomechanical limitations on what you'll accept seems to be spectacularly missing the point.

Plus, the recent(ish) discovery of increasingly larger and larger dinosaurs like Argentinasuaurs, Bruhathkayosaurus, Sauroposeidon, Futalognkosaurus, or the ever elusive Amphicoelias continue to demonstrate that we're generally too conservative when coming up with these biomechanical limitations anyway. :shrug:

 

[Celebrim]

If the antecedents of the monster type are fairytales and mythology, then trying to calculate the mass or weight of a giant and use that to put biomechanical limitations on what you'll accept seems to be spectacularly missing the point.

Including I would think you, because there has been very little discussion of the biomechanical limitations of large creatures in this thread. The vast majority of opinions have either been stated as opinions, or if the opinion has been based on some criticism then the tendency has been to criticize very large creatures internally to the assumptions of the game.

That is, the bulk of objections to 'huge' giants have been based on things like the difficulty and cost of obtaining minatures, the difficulties such large creatures place in mapping or the use of battle mats, the failure of such creatures to conform to the games internal guidelines with regard to HD, the unsuitableness of huge giants for use at lower levels, the difficulty in imagining combat between humans and such massive creatures, the presence of illustrated giants on the smaller end of the scale, and so forth. The closest we came to a discussion of biomechanics, was a discussion of the impact of huge creatures on the ecology, which ended up with the comparitively uncontested assumption that the ecology could probably handle them. The most common opinion seems to be simply that there doesn't seem to be a compelling need for anything larger than what we have at present, but you are welcome to it if you want it.

My own litany of numbers had nothing to do with biomechanical limitations, and everything to do with having or not having rules that produced outcomes that conformed to casual expectations of how creatures on vastly different scales interact. I'm perfectly content conceptually with a walking mountain in a fantasy setting, but not with running a combat with one in terms of trading blows round by round and chipping away at a few hundred (or thousand) hit points using attacks scaled for a medium-sized creature.

Plus, the recent(ish) discovery of increasingly larger and larger dinosaurs like Argentinasuaurs, Bruhathkayosaurus, Sauroposeidon, Futalognkosaurus, or the ever elusive Amphicoelias continue to demonstrate that we're generally too conservative when coming up with these biomechanical limitations anyway. :shrug:

If you confine yourself to the well attested examples, a 24' tall biped with a frame like a stocky human still ends up being a really big creature.

 

[Desdichado]

Y'know, I specifically did not respond to you personally, because there was a rash in the last page or two on biomechanical discussion, as well as some earlier stuff here and there throughout the thread. I'm not missing the point. Nor am I responding to anything specifically that you said. I'm making my own point, perhaps as a related tangent to the discussion in general. There's really no call to get defensive.