Jester David
Hero
They're eight or twenty seven times the mass of your average human. I'm okay that they're not just 3 points stronger
If you are really concerned about this, giving giants a larger racial bonus to accuracy when throwing rocks would let them pummel parties from a distance.
Besides which, I'm thinking your referring to the classic case of 1e as you experienced it. In 1e as I experienced it, giants were among the more feared opponents precisely because their ability to hit wasn't just based on HD, but they got bonuses to hit from their strength - making them one of the few foes that could challenge a PC in melee once you got better than 0 AC. Frost giants got +4 to hit and +9 to damage when using weapons in all the 1e games I played.
If you want a low level giant, the Ubue from the Tome of Horrors is pretty cool.Do you think giants' strength scores are too high? For example a fog giant has a strength score of 35 it is a huge giant. If you reduce the giant by two size categories it's strength drops by 4 leaving a rather robust 31 on a medium sized creature. Are they simply inflated to make them threatening for higher level characters. Should giants be retooled to face lower level heroes? Does this just reflect changes that have occurred when the level range for all characters is 1-20 or higher? Monsters must be scattered, sometimes rather thinly, across all these levels.
Those are house rules.
Not sure what happened to my earlier reply, but here goes again.
In 3E, there was a feat somewhere that basically allowed you to use your Strength mod to hit with ranged attacks provided they were with thrown weapons.
IMC, I give all giants this feat, swapping out one of their others. It solves the problem of giants' threat at range being abysmal for their CR.
It's called Brutal Throw and it's in Complete Adventurer.
I've never played a game of 1e that wasn't. The organic nature of the rules, the somewhat chaotic organization of the rules, the lack of complete explanations, and the sometimes incoherent nature of the rules themselves meant everyone was playing what they liked or understood.(snip) First edition was great for rules arguments.