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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8273662" data-attributes="member: 82106">Personally, I think [USER=7020832]@FrozenNorth[/USER]'s version of the story rings pretty true. You make some points, people might well be more careful. OTOH 16' is not that tall, most trees in a forested area are easily much taller than that. So I would think that engagement range is going to be SHORT, 10 meters or less typically. OTOH dogs are pretty darn good guards, so daytime alertness probably means there's a decent chance of detection with some warning. This is probably enough, since you 'play the odds' on security. The reasoning is, the Giant has to live its whole life, it isn't going to take a 10% chance of death just to do what? Wreck some houses for a lark? Instead though, WERE I A GIANT, I would be coming in like gang busters at 3 AM. By the time anyone realizes there's an attack and gets organized, you will be long gone. You CANNOT underestimate chaos in the real world.  If you have ever been in a real disaster situation you will begin to understand. People DON'T just automatically self-organize, and there is a very large, surprisingly large, 'Entropy' to a situation. You wake up at 3 AM hearing screams and crashing sounds, dogs barking, etc. What do you do? Is it a giant? Is it an earthquake? A dragon? WTF? Sure, you store your sling and your spear near the bed, so you grab them and stick your head out the door. All you see is a bunch of people running left and right, and then something BIG smashes through the house next door, with a body dangling by one leg in its grip. Stunned you begin to fumble a sling stone into position and move away from the door to be clear to cast. Meanwhile the giant turns right and disappears into the darkness. 20 minutes later it turns out 3 people are dead, 2 houses are damaged, and the giant may or may not have been hit by a couple weapon attacks. And it is hardly going to matter which system you 'run' this under. Some will mechanically do a bit better job than others, I guess. In AD&D you have maybe 60' visibility, and the giant has 15" movement. So the above is pretty natural, it got a surprise round or two based on your unpreparedness, so by the time you moved outside it got initiative and moved out of your vision range. In that game the villagers COULD hurt the giant, it would have about 35 hit points and AC4, so it would take a bunch of them to do much, but as an organized group with reasonable weapons they could indeed repel a Hill Giant attack. 2e giants have more hit points IIRC but the basic outline is similar. I don't know about 3e giants, never messed with them. 4e giant would be a level 1-5 solo. Surprise is less of a mechanical big deal here, but the whole thing is unlikely to be a straight up combat. I think the general result WOULD look roughly similar to 1e. 5e seems to say the giant is easier to hit but has a LOT more hit points. I think it still works out about the same.One thing that you see here is that D&D doesn't really attempt to model things like the 'chaos of battle' in any realistic way, so mechanical analysis of this kind of situation doesn't really work. This is another illustration of my core point that RPGs cannot simulate reality, not with rules.</blockquote>

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