D&D 5E Giant Weapons

[Snoring Rock]

I am running the G series out of Tales from the Yawning Portal. The party killed a giant that had a magic weapon. This has to be a huge giant-sized weapon. How do you handle this? A weapon a giant uses like a sword that does 3d12 +6 damage, certainly cannot be wielded by a PC right?

 

[pukunui]

Right. That said, some of them might shrink to human-size because magic. (I wouldn't have them all do that, though. Some of them will just end up as heavy, unwieldy* loot.)

*See what I did there?

 

[Kobold Stew]

never mind

 

[Ganymede81]

Maybe the PCs could harvest either the components or the magical essence of the blade in order to make their own equivalently powered magic weapon.

 

[Snoring Rock]

Maybe the PCs could harvest either the components or the magical essence of the blade in order to make their own equivalently powered magic weapon.

That is an option I had not considered.

 

[Li Shenron]

I am running the G series out of Tales from the Yawning Portal. The party killed a giant that had a magic weapon. This has to be a huge giant-sized weapon. How do you handle this? A weapon a giant uses like a sword that does 3d12 +6 damage, certainly cannot be wielded by a PC right?

I would just say that it cannot be wielded, unless the PC finds a way to increase their size to that of a giant.

 

[CapnZapp]

If the size is reduced, so is the damage expression.

Which pretty much means there's no point in doing so.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[Zardnaar]

If the size is reduced, so is the damage expression.

Which pretty much means there's no point in doing so.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

Erm you get a magic weapon?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In the campaign I ran, the party inherited a number of magical weapons which were originally intended for giants, and I just let them use stats for whatever was the best fit. The paladin's frostbrand longsword was originally a giant's dagger. The barbarian's vorpal greatsword was originally the longsword of a balor, although that's a case where it would still have been too large to wield at all if not for the heavy enchantments on it. Even the warlock's pact rod originally belonged to a giant, but since rods only come in one size, he had to wield it as though it was a staff.

In the absence of codified guidelines, just do whatever makes sense to you at the time. If you haven't thought about something in advance, remember that the world is structured in such a way that cool adventures happen, and that's the reason our games take place here instead of somewhere else.

 

[Hillsy7]

I am running the G series out of Tales from the Yawning Portal. The party killed a giant that had a magic weapon. This has to be a huge giant-sized weapon. How do you handle this? A weapon a giant uses like a sword that does 3d12 +6 damage, certainly cannot be wielded by a PC right?

I came up with this as a trade-off for wielding a Two-handed weapon one-handed....You could apply it to giant weapons in 2-hands in the same way, perhaps??

1) You cannot take reactions: Wielding the weapon effectively takes too much effort and cencentration
2) You cannot benefit from any Fighting Style benefits (2-weapon fighting, duelling, GWF)
3) You cannot wield a 2nd weapon.

Obviously as this would be a 2-hander, Number 3 wouldn't count. I'd maybe throttle back the damage a bit 2d12+STR isn't totally insane depending how far into the game you are, especially if it's at the cost of a fighting style. A lot I guess would depend on how important AOs are (enemies can just run past a guy with the giant weapon and eat the casters).

Conversely you could mimic the Loading property - or perhaps treat it similar to "Bad News" in Critical Role (i.e. 1 attack to set the weapon, 1 to attack - so a fighter with 3 attacks could attack-set-attack, then next turn Set-Attack-Set).

Perhaps require a successful STR check to attack (even a 20% fail rate is going to get annoying)

Just some ideas to get your juices flowing....