D&D General Miniatures shouldn't be edition-dependent (a Fire Giant size rant)

Sacrosanct said:

I’d have more sympathy, but if you think that’s a problem, imagine those of us with 80s minis trying to use them at the same table as modern ones lol. Where the ral partha hill giant is as big as a modern human reaper barbarian

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Yup. All my minis for PCs are true 25mm scale, not the oversize ones. I just use homemade tokens for monsters, anyway, about 90% of the time.

wingsandsword said:

I already thought of that and ruled it out.

The legs are in a wide stance, it would not fit in a large base. It was clearly designed to take up an entire "huge" space.

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Just stack minis on top of the base. Or take a pink paint and draw a 10 by 10 grid on the base, and tell people to stack minis on the base.

I had a old 1e LEAD Frost Giant which had 3/4 inch by 1 2/3 inch base. Next to a 5E Frost giant it was take your son to work day when you put them next to get other.

MarkB said:

The only thing it has to do is change the physical space it takes up on your table. Every single one of those other things you've listed, you can choose to leave exactly as they are for the Large creature.

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I know personally it would bother me to have a creature with a Huge-sized base and the stats of a Large-sized creature. It's not exactly rational, admittedly, but if something is supposed to be a Large-sized creature I want a Large-sized mini.

I'm also okay with having tokens for Tiny, Small, and Medium creatures, but when you get to Large size or bigger I want something to represent a creature's height.

wingsandsword said:

I realized I never used giants in my D&D games, because I had no minis for them.

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I never let that stop me before. The vampire can be represented by a bottlecap.

pukunui said:

They changed the size of giants for 5e because they wanted them to be truly gigantic and of epic proportions, not because they wanted to encourage people to buy more minis or to make previous minis incompatible with the new game.

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I would also add that any discussion about giant size changes should consider multiple editions.

BECMI: (rule cyclopedia, the B/X version is the same size)
Fire giants are large (16 feet tall), they have 11d8+2 hp, do 5d6 damage and have an AC (converted to ascending) of 16

1ed AD&D EDIT: I found the book, and I'm glad I did!
Fire giants are large (12 feet tall), have 11d8+(1d4+1) hp, do 5d6 dmg, have an AC of 17 (converted to ascending)

2nd ed AD&D
Fire giants are huge (18 feet tall), they have 15d8+(1d4+1) hit points, do 2d10+10 damage and have an AC (converted to ascending) of 21

3.5 D&D
Fire giants are large (12 feet tall), they have 15d8+75 hit points, do 3d6+15 damage and have an AC of 23

4e (essentials)
Fire giants (base) are large (exact size is ?), they have 174 hit points, do 2d12+13 damage and have an AC of 34 (!)

5e
Fire giants are huge (18 feet), they have 13d12+78 hit points, do 6d6+7 damage and have an AC of 18.

(one should also do an analysis of size rules in D&D, what the cutoffs were and their impact on combat in general, not just giants).

So we see an increase in power and size from B/x to 2nd ed, with the giants having more HP, better AC and doing a bit better damage.

In 3.X, giant size decreases but their AC improves, they do more damage and they have a lot more HP.

the 4e giant's size doesn't change too from 3.x, the main change is a massive improvement to AC

in 5e the HP stays the same, the damage barely creeps up, the HP stays the same (despite 5e having "HP bloat?") and the AC is adjusted to reflect the bounded accuracy of 5e. However, they return to their majestic old school size.

SO IN CONCLUSION:

3.x and 4e giants were abnormally small.

EDIT: the addition of 1e AD&D adds an interesting curveball to the analysis. Apparently giants have gone through TWO cycles of shrinking and growing! Interestingly, both rounds of shrinking were accompanied by a rule complexification (AD&D, 3e). However, the AD&D giant wasn't significantly more powerful than the previous one, while there is a significant power just in 3e.

The Green Hermit said:

Could you just switch all giants to the larger size? That way, you could just get larger bases for the others.

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I agree with this. I get 3E says giants are large, but IMO that's kind of silly. Ogres are large, shouldn't giants be bigger?

If you really need the size categories to be EXACTLY as 3E says, I think the only advice we can give is "Be more careful next time and buy the correctly sized minis."

WotC is going to tweak monsters every edition; they probably aren't doing it to screw the miniature buyers.

Urriak Uruk said:

I agree with this. I get 3E says giants are large, but IMO that's kind of silly. Ogres are large, shouldn't giants be bigger?

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Depends. There's a lot of space in the "large" range. In 3e terms, you'd be looking at from 8 to 16 feet tall, 500 to 4000 lbs. It doesn't look to me like 5e defines anything with that degree of precision - so maybe the lesson here is don't do that.

billd91 said:

Depends. There's a lot of space in the "large" range. In 3e terms, you'd be look at from 8 to 16 feet tall, 500 to 4000 lbs. It doesn't look to me like 5e defines anything with that degree of precision - so maybe the lesson here is don't do that.

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Not saying that the Large size isn't a broad range, but I am saying that even the smallest of giants, Hill Giants, definitely feel like they should be at least one size greater than ogres, half-ogres, and centaurs. I'm not saying precision is important, but if you want your giants to be GIANT, they should feel bigger than other large creatures.



If you look at Volo's cover, I think it is very hard to justify giants as anything smaller than huge. Now, if you want 3E minis of giants that's ok (it's your game, play giants the way you want), but it's pretty obvious that this is not the 5E assumption, so don't buy 5E minis for giants.

Urriak Uruk said:

I agree with this. I get 3E says giants are large, but IMO that's kind of silly. Ogres are large, shouldn't giants be bigger?

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Well, given that half-giants are a thing in D&D, and not just in Dark Sun either, they're setting-independent per the 3.5e Expanded Psionics Handbook, the idea of a human and a 17+ foot tall being mating is absurd.

With a "large" giant that might be 8 or 9 feet tall (on the low end, for a Hill Giant), that's not going into the realm of the absurd with regards to physical possibilities.

As was noted, "Large" in D&D 3.5e means anything from 8 feet tall to 16 feet tall. The tallest human alive, according to the Guinness book of Records is 8"2', and could count as "Large" per 3.x rules. The tallest man ever, at 8"11' almost certainly would be "Large" size.

An Ogre or Troll might be 8 or 9 feet tall. A Hill Giant might be 10 or 11 feet tall. . .a Fire or Frost Giant might be 14 or 15 feet tall. All size category "Large" for rules purposes.

It's much like how a four foot tall Dwarf, and a seven foot tall human (who in the real world would probably be asked if he's a basketball player) would both be size "Medium", size categories are a broad range for game mechanics purposes.

wingsandsword said:

Well, given that half-giants are a thing in D&D, and not just in Dark Sun either, they're setting-independent per the 3.5e Expanded Psionics Handbook, the idea of a human and a 17+ foot tall being mating is absurd.

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Unless it states otherwise, I'm fairly certain half-giants are not made through physical mating. In Dark Sun, it is specifically stated that they are an experiment made from sorcery.

And are we seriously going to start bringing biology as reasoning for how D&D half-races work? None of them should be able to mate at all without magic.

So again I'll reiterate; run your 3E game the way you want, but the 5E assumption is clearly that giants are Huge. So don't buy 5E minis!