D&D 5E FeeFiFoFum *splat* goes the giants

[dave2008]

This is a bit more than a "little luck".

To do 35 (which is the max) for a hill giant is a .1% chance. A 7th level wizard (assuming a 14 con) generally has 43 hitpoints. So sake of argument: Lets give that wizard a nice low AC 12. The chance all 3 giants hit him is 51% percent, basically a coin flip.

I didn't get to the rest of your argument yet, but average damage for Hill Giant is 18 x 2 (2 attacks) = 36. It is not that hard to get there if the target is within reach.

 

[ad_hoc]

The real problem with Hill Giants is encounters with them are inherently really swingy, more so than many other monsters. Much of the time, they get handled FAST because they can be shut down easily (if a hypnotic pattern had been used instead of a fireball? probably even less resources would have been required!)

But if circumstances are right? They can pound a PC into goo pretty fast!

The CR system is all about measuring how swingy a combat can be.

The DM can look at it and see "the party risks defeat" and know that if it is a swingy combat against the PCs they might lose. That's really good knowledge to know.

The designers are less concerned with what happens if the PCs win easily.

"Risk" doesn't need to mean often either. It could mean 1-5 out of 100 fights. A campaign full of battles with a 1-5% TPK chance will likely be over sooner than you might think.

So 'this encounter has a chance to be a TPK' is a really good thing to know.

 

[dave2008]

I actually like the idea of hill giants hiding in ambush. Probably 2 hiding and one in the road with access to cover. The one in the road throws rocks, then ducks behind cover. The distracted party is then ambushed by the two hill giants in hiding which quickly beat down 1 PC. That fits the definition of deadly.

 

[Stalker0]

I didn't get to the rest of your argument yet, but average damage for Hill Giant is 18 x 2 (2 attacks) = 36. It is not that hard to get there if the target is within reach.

I was using the example provided of hill giants throwing rocks from cover. That's where the one attack per giant came from. As for the 51%, the giants have an 80% chance to hit the AC 12 I mentioned. 3 hits = .8 * .8 * .8 = .512 = 51% chance.

 

[dave2008]

I was using the example provided of hill giants throwing rocks from cover. That's where the one attack per giant came from. As for the 51%, the giants have an 80% chance to hit the AC 12 I mentioned. 3 hits = .8 * .8 * .8 = .512 = 51% chance.

I realized that, but I don't know why you would just take that example in the overall discussion.

 

[Stalker0]

But with a slightly different setup - let's say the cunning Hill Giants Engineer an ambush (or let's say I take a cue from an adventurer's league module and throw a hill giant that has a headband of intellect at them as one of the giants). Let's say they then surprise the overconfident party and melee attack the mage - that mage is in serious trouble!

As I have been repeatedly reminded in this thread though, the DM should adjust encounter difficulty for things like surprise and ambushes.

So I have now changed my encounter from 2.1x deadly to 3.1x deadly (I guess we just increase x by 1 since we are already completely outside the bounds of the encounter system, who knows), and of course this assumes that the hill giants with a ....ehem....-1 stealth check are ambushing the party. Assuming every single party member has a 10 passive perception, the odds that all 3 giants will win stealth and the entire party is totally surprised is 9%.

So yeah at a 3x deadly we finally have a 9% chance to ambush the party and maybe kill the wizard.... 3x deadly. And hence this is where I get such numbers in my game. I find deadly x2 is a "reasonable encounter", and deadly x3 is where things are actually tricky and my players might get scared. It takes a LOT of stuff to maintain 2x deadly encounters.

 

[Umbran]

No, you have no right to complain...

Mod Note:
Could you please refrain from playing the art of arbiter of rights? Thanks.

 

[Mort]

As I have been repeatedly reminded in this thread though, the DM should adjust encounter difficulty for things like surprise and ambushes.

So I have now changed my encounter from 2.1x deadly to 3.1x deadly (I guess we just increase x by 1 since we are already completely outside the bounds of the encounter system, who knows), and of course this assumes that the hill giants with a ....ehem....-1 stealth check are ambushing the party. Assuming every single party member has a 10 passive perception, the odds that all 3 giants will win stealth and the entire party is totally surprised is 9%.

So yeah at a 3x deadly we finally have a 9% chance to ambush the party and maybe kill the wizard.... 3x deadly. And hence this is where I get such numbers in my game. I find deadly x2 is a "reasonable encounter", and deadly x3 is where things are actually tricky and my players might get scared. It takes a LOT of stuff to maintain 2x deadly encounters.

The Hill Giants don't have to have full surprise, they just have to get lucky on initiative or even just survive long enough to try to splatter the mage (I've seen plenty of inexperienced parties NOT focus fire, a big mistake in this scenario).

But, in general, I 100% agree with you. Hill Giants tend to not live up to their CR rating against higher level groups - they're dumb (relatively) easy to hit meatbags - that hit hard if the party isn't careful.

So IMO, IT WOULD, be great to have a more nuanced CR system that could account for such things.

 

[Lyxen]

Feats, multiclassing etc. are technically optional but they're in the PHB and widely used (adventurer's league, for example, allows both). Is it REALLY to much to ask for a CR system that can handle them better?

But it IS handling them out of the box, it's clearly an advantage for the PCs, just up the difficulty one rank because of this. It is straight in the DMG, the problem is people not reading it completely and not wanting to realise that feats, multiclassing, rolled stats (yes I have never seen anyone say "I rolled my stats and they are lower than the standard array", all people who roll stats have extremely high main stats), magic items, etc. are all advantages, so for each of these providing a not negligible advantage they should up the difficulty one rank, and they will not have problems.

 

[Oofta]

I was using the example provided of hill giants throwing rocks from cover. That's where the one attack per giant came from. As for the 51%, the giants have an 80% chance to hit the AC 12 I mentioned. 3 hits = .8 * .8 * .8 = .512 = 51% chance.

So depending on how you formulate your statistics, on average the wizard still goes splat the first round of focused fire. If the giants somehow survive for more than one round while even one of them closes the distance while still focusing fire, there's a far better chance the wizard dies.

Deadly doesn't mean it's guaranteed a PC will die, just that there's a good chance.