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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 6052798" data-attributes="member: 63">How do you make a combat with truly titanic monsters work mechanically? Say the party, all 30th level epic demi-gods, must retrieve the heart of the Elder Dragon in order to save the world, and that wyrm happens to be 500 feet long, with jaws wide enough to swallow a normal dragon in one go. What sort of narrative can occur in this battle? Obviously a battle map is kind of pointless here -- unless you have an 8-foot wide mini to represent the foe. How can you run this battle and have the game mechanics be meaningful without it simply devolving into "you hit it with the strength of a thousand men; it takes 100 damage and is slowed (save ends)"?Do you just throw normal combat rules out the window? Do you model it as a group of monsters that you can independently disable? ("I just bloodied its left knee!")When I wrote War of the Burning Sky, we had a climactic encounter with a huge monster.[sblock]It was a 100-ft. tall statue of the dead emperor, who was animated by a swarm of ghost-like creatures. The emperor in life had a magic torch, and was near-immortal because he shared blood with a primordial entity. So the statue had a few weak points you could target, but ultimately in order to kill it you had to first destroy the Torch (which created a defensive shield), and then pierce its chest and destroy its 'heart.' The torch, of course, could shoot blasts of fire or thwack puny humans out of the air. The statue could also stomp and trample people, or grab and crush them.During all of this, a city-wide parade was attacked by more of the ghosts that possessed people and wrought havoc.You could smash its knees to make it trip, which would get its torch within range. Or you could goad it into smashing you and then jump onto its arm if it missed. Or you could fly up and attack the torch up in the sky. Or you could get the aid of a magical creature that would let one PC grow to match the height of the statue so they could grapple. Or you could just climb up the thing, and engage the leader of the spirit swarm in a duel on the statue's shoulders.[/sblock]What sorts of advice do you have for running battles with monsters that are too big to fit on a battle map?</blockquote>

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