D&D General Comparing Giant Sizes

Anders Johnson, a Swedish artist over on ArtStation, has an awesome image in which he compares the relative sizes of various D&D giants.

 

[Salthorae]

A 21' foot humanoid is totally huge as it is. Eighteen foot tall Cloud Giants are just huge. A 110lb sword, 14' foot long, and 8" broad is huge. Nothing bigger is needed to terrify, and in fact any bigger would cease to. For me, bumping them up 24' tall shrinks them. They move from inhabiting a fantasy world to a cartoon world where scale doesn't matter and is likely to change from scene to scene anyway.

Honestly, It wouldn't matter if I saw 21' tall or a 24' tall Cloud Giant, I'd never be able to tell the difference.

A Hill giant? maybe, we do have basketball poles as reference points that modern people can conceptualize, at least the height of a 12'. 1.5x a basketball pole is harder.

It really doesn't matter to me their height. I just go with what's in the MM of a given edition.

That said, I still love this picture

Take out the #'s and assume the human is actually a halfling and the scale's the same

 

[Bitbrain]

Anders Johnson, a Swedish artist over on ArtStation, has an awesome image in which he compares the relative sizes of various D&D giants.

View attachment 115361

Awesome!

If my understanding of scale is correct, an ogre (being roughly 10 feet tall) would stand level with the underside of the hill giant’s manboob...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

1e/3e giants weren’t giant.

A 12’ tall human-shaped person is a few feet taller than the tallest human in living memory. Nowhere near the difference of scale that these creatures should represent. The greatest giants should have faces bigger than the tallest natural human.

When I think of the iconic storm giant, he is rising from the deep, a whole ship comparable in scale to his face!

The smaller true giants should be such that they can interact in fairly normal ways with a human. Half-giants should seem possible, but not with the greatest giants.

I’ve a cloud giant mini that seems to be wielding architecture as a sort of mace. She isn’t quite big enough compared to the human minis, but the visual is still evocative and I don’t expect minis to have the right proportions anymore (ancient dragons are tiny things).

Why even have these creatures if they aren’t something that must be dealt with differently than something like an ogre?

 

[BigBadDM]

I want my Fire Giant riding a Tarrasque mount. Grow him to whatever size to make this happen.

 

[Celebrim]

With apologies to the original artist, my OCD requires...

Ahhh... much better. I can breathe now.

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

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?

Huge size is actually an important break point in game play terms for enemy creatures since it is two size categories larger than medium and there are no large sized PC races.

You can move through the space of any creature two size categories smaller than you. Giants get the ability to move through the space of any PC which can be pretty huge for area control. In addition to that you cannot grapple or shove any creature that is more than one size category than yourself so by default you cannot grapple or shove a giant. Your fighter and barbarian want to hold the line to protect the squishy wizard? Well they're going to have a difficult time of that since giants can just step right over them. Which for giants is very fitting. If you have a creature whose very definition is that they are "like people but big", they should be of a size where that matters.

 

[dave2008]

1e/3e giants weren’t giant.

A 12’ tall human-shaped person is a few feet taller than the tallest human in living memory. Nowhere near the difference of scale that these creatures should represent. The greatest giants should have faces bigger than the tallest natural human.

When I think of the iconic storm giant, he is rising from the deep, a whole ship comparable in scale to his face!

The smaller true giants should be such that they can interact in fairly normal ways with a human. Half-giants should seem possible, but not with the greatest giants.

I’ve a cloud giant mini that seems to be wielding architecture as a sort of mace. She isn’t quite big enough compared to the human minis, but the visual is still evocative and I don’t expect minis to have the right proportions anymore (ancient dragons are tiny things).

Why even have these creatures if they aren’t something that must be dealt with differently than something like an ogre?

12’ is 2x the height of The average human. And 4 feet taller, or 50% larger, then the tallest human ever. That is not insignificant.

My son is 4 1/2 tall inches taller than me. That makes me feel short. I can’t really imagine how I would feel if he was 6 feet taller than me.

 

[Celebrim]

Huge size is actually an important break point in game play terms for enemy creatures since it is two size categories larger than medium and there are no large sized PC races.

You can move through the space of any creature two size categories smaller than you. Giants get the ability to move through the space of any PC which can be pretty huge for area control. In addition to that you cannot grapple or shove any creature that is more than one size category than yourself so by default you cannot grapple or shove a giant. Your fighter and barbarian want to hold the line to protect the squishy wizard? Well they're going to have a difficult time of that since giants can just step right over them. Which for giants is very fitting. If you have a creature whose very definition is that they are "like people but big", they should be of a size where that matters.

That's actually reasonably cool. I do like how that makes size matter (even if I'm not sold on the absolutes they are perhaps useful as simplifications for ease of play). I am gladdened that the size choice might have something to do with the limitations of the system, and they just work better in the system if they are a bit bigger. On the other hand, since most of the giants would still be on scale with the upsized Hill Giant, this feature is something they'd mostly all have even if they were reduced and still on scale with 1e and 2e so with the possible exception of the smaller giants like Hill Giants these "size matters" mechanics would still be in play.

 

[Umbran]

For me it comes down to not believing that people who want bigger giants are capable of imagining just how big a 12' tall humanoid actually is.

Well, thank you for laying it out here - your issue is ultimately in your lack of trust in teh capabilities of others. Not exactly a compliment - "Those masses, they just don't understand. I, with my superior cognitive function, do!" But, well, thanks for the honesty, at least?

Me, I look at those sizes, and think of the usual depictions seen for Jack and the Beanstalk - in which Jack is lucky if he comes up to the giant's knee, and rather often only comes up to the giant's ankle. That mythic referent leaves me needing giants that are 3 to 4 times the height of a man, as seen in these images, not two to three times man-sized, which is what you seem to prefer..

 

[Celebrim]

12’ is 2x the height of The average human. And 4 feet taller, or 50% larger, then the tallest human ever. That is not insignificant.

It's not only going to be twice as tall, it's probably going to be once you account for the need for more bone mass something like 10 to 12 times as heavy as a typical human.

But really, think about how huge Thanos or The Hulk is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Think about how gigantic those hands and fists and heads are. And then think, Thanos and The Hulk are basically just Ogre sized. Thanos is about 8' 2".

Why go that size? Because anything bigger and you start to have problems putting him into human context.

A 12' tall humanoid towers over Thanos or the Hulk. If a hill giant of them is a basketball center, the crown of their head is at the top of the backboard. They basically fill up the whole lane by themselves. A giant of a man like LeBron James leaping up to slam dunk the ball encounters a wall of living flesh. LeBron and similar NBA stars that tower over people, are diminished to childlike figures. Isn't that big enough if you want to imagine a melee combat between a mere mortal and a giant? Just imagine basketball between a LeBron and a Hill Giant and you'll see what I mean.

And that's the small end giants.