Adventuring at a different size scale?

[Theo R Cwithin]

Is anyone aware of rules for "rescaling" an encounter to the perspective of very small characters? For example, suppose the party is shrunk to Tiny size, or the party consists of tiny creatures (like NIMH's rats as reskinned humans?).

Is there a way to keep party stats unchanged, and scale up a creature to a new size relative to the party - for example, resize a Kobold up to Large? Ordinary HD advancement doesn't seem to work right for this.

And what about the opposite: downsizing creatures in an encounter for Huge or larger adventurers?

My gut tells me this isn't possible in any consistent, quick-n-easy way. I can see all sorts of problems of doing this without a completely new set of re-scaled rules, spells, monsters, etc. - especially not beyond lower levels. But i thought I'd ask to see if anyone has done something similar.

 

[Herzog]

size penalties and bonusses on ac and to hit are matched, so those shouldn't be a problem.

the same goes for size bonusses and penalties on grapple checks.

you could use table 5-1 in MM1 page 296 to scale up str, dex, con, and possibly hit dice.

other than that, you could simply use the stats of an appropriately sized creature (hill giant, ogre, anything that is larger than the party) and use the physical description and behaviour of the smaller creature.


Of course, that doesn't take into account the size of a 5 foot step, or the area effects and ranges of spells.....

 

[Bladesong]

If everything changes in scale then do nothing...i.e. if everything on a planet is tiny just run everything as normal, but feet is centimeters or millimeters.
If on the other hand you are saying that for instance only the party has been reduced the "easiest" way to simulate this is by letting the characters do everything as normal (i.e. damage, movement, etc.) but you as DM convert it.
By way of example: if the party is 1/10th normal size, their damage dealt is only 10% of normal. What this means is if a fighter rolls a hit and says he does 15 points of damage, he really only does 1 point of damage to the "hulking kobold". If the wizard says he does 31 points of damage with his fireball spell, he really does only 3 points. In any case they should never do less than 1 hp of damage. Now if you want to be accurate, the party's opponents would do 10 times more damage so if the same "giant kobald" rolled 2 points of damage, you would say it does 20 (I would only do this with physical damage, spells should remain the same). All you would really need to take into account would be bonus/penalties to hit due to size and you would have to wing that a bit...a 3 foot tall kobald would be "huge" or larger to a 6 inch tall character. So the kobold would do a bunch of damage if he hit, but he would be -8 or worse to hit in the first place so it balances out.
It is even easier if you do not change the damage output of the now larger creatures.
Reducing the damage done by characters is really the only change I would make...that way you do not have to change the stats of their opponents.
Don't worry too much about movement the characters will almost always be in the same square as their opponent and they would never be able to outrun them, so they will be looking for places to hide more than anything.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I ran a scenario like this - what I did was to base the opposing creatures on similar monsters in the MM or elsewhere, while keeping the PC stats consistent.

For example, for a pair of housecats, I used the 1E stats for Vulture Lions (from Dieties and Demigods) and converted them to 3E stats. I considered using Dire Tigers, too. Pick something that is the righ challenge for your PC's and reskin it. Use Hill Giants for large bipedal creatures, etc. Exactly how this will work will depend to an extent on what scale you will put the PC's at (mine were reduced to 1/24th size - 3" tall).