Anders Johnson, a Swedish artist over on ArtStation, has an awesome image in which he compares the relative sizes of various D&D giants.
I like how the "Large-sized" giants (from 3e) grew up to be "Huge-sized" in 5e.
Funny, I was about to say how I disliked that the large sized giants grew up to be huge sized.
Every single one of these giants is 4-5 ft too tall, and the picture really does a lot to show why this is a problem.
Less is often more.
I love this graphic!
Question - why should the giants be 4' shorter?
I think they did this just to differentiate True Giants from lesser giant types in the game mechanics.
It's less of a mechanical impact as well now that reach is disassociated from size/height in a linear way.
The growth in giants is simply another example of number inflation for it's own sake which has been infecting every new addition of D&D. What is being simulated stays roughly the same, we just use bigger and bigger numbers to do it. Because, bigger numbers means better, right?
2e AD&D Monstrous Manual said:
- Cloud Giant = H (24' tall)
- Fire Giant = H (18' tall)
- Frost Giant = H (21' tall)
- Hill Giant = H (16' tall)
- Stone Giant = H (18' tall)
- Storm Giant = G (26' tall)
Stop right there and tell me in 5e exactly what game mechanics are strongly effected by the extra 5 feet of height given to the giants. How does it actually effect play?
Right. So in other words, the actual physical reality of the giant becomes less and less important as it's height increases.
These are joke giants, not true giants.
My baseline view of giants came from the bad B movies I watched as a kid. If a giant wasn't as tall as the Amazing Colossal Man or the 40' Woman or, y'know, Godzilla, it wasn't really all that giant!Maybe our baseline view of giants has more to do with the edition that we started playing in?
So actually all they've done is go back to 2e AD&D heights, and technically the Storm Giant has shrunk a size category from Gargantuan in 2e to Huge in 5e.
So... I'm not sure your argument about number inflation really has merit since these stats are from TSR in 1995.