Fire Giant Dreadnoughts in VOLO's GUIDE TO MONSTERS

WotC posted this image a couple of days ago, along with a brief note that that Volo's Guide to Monsters has "quite an extensive entry" on Fire Giant Dreadnoughts. Spiky! Also check out yesterday's Giant Lore preview, and the preface - there's a bit of a giant-based focus o the previews, which is likely because Storm King's Thunder is the current storyline. The book hits stores on November 15th (November 4th in preferred stores).
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Why is "magic" not a sufficient answer? It explains why dragons fly (even more ridiculous than this image), Thor can wield Mjolnir, and giants can stand, among a great many other things in D&D.

Because I find some fidelity to real-world physics enhances the fantastical nature of the game. The "it's magic" explanation doesn't always cut it for me, especially when it comes to things on the edge of plausibility (a humanoid in plate armor, for instance). I'm afraid I don't have a satisfactory answer as for why some things break my suspension of disbelief and others don't, but the more unique it is -Mjolnir - then the more likely I am to give it a pass whereas the more rank and file-fantasy - fire giant dreadnought #12 - needs to hew closer to my understanding of physics.

To be honest though, I've always found Giants in DnD conceptually awesome and mechanically boring because I don't think their size has been sufficiently factored into their mechanics.
 

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Because I find some fidelity to real-world physics enhances the fantastical nature of the game. The "it's magic" explanation doesn't always cut it for me, especially when it comes to things on the edge of plausibility (a humanoid in plate armor, for instance). I'm afraid I don't have a satisfactory answer as for why some things break my suspension of disbelief and others don't, but the more unique it is -Mjolnir - then the more likely I am to give it a pass whereas the more rank and file-fantasy - fire giant dreadnought #12 - needs to hew closer to my understanding of physics.

To be honest though, I've always found Giants in DnD conceptually awesome and mechanically boring because I don't think their size has been sufficiently factored into their mechanics.

Yes, everyone does have a different threshold. Maybe since I am an architect and I deal with the strength of materials regularly I see giants as incredible implausible. So I naturally assume there is magic involved. OF course D&D has never done size and strength very well. I think large, huge, & gargantuan creatures have really low strength scores so that their to hit bonus doesn't break bounded accuracy (and tradition). They should really just separate strength (damage) and accuracy/ to hit (dexterity?). Then you could have low to hit score and massive strength damage.
 

Because I find some fidelity to real-world physics enhances the fantastical nature of the game. The "it's magic" explanation doesn't always cut it for me...

The problem with not making some attempt at fidelity to reality is that it almost always results in creating things with less thought and less craftsmanship and less planning. The results aren't things that are cooler, as a result of your greater freedom from constraint, but pretty much invariably things that are dumber as a result of your greater freedom from thought. You invariably end up with variations on the adult dragon in the 30'x30' room with no exits big enough for the dragon to use. "It's magic" isn't a satisfactory answer to that, and moreover is probably a dishonest answer to that. The real honest answer is almost certainly, "I put no thought into it."

Trying to make things as plausible as you can before invoking, "It's magic.", results in a world that is more interesting and not less interesting. It results in a world were things have more meaning, and where things yield more meaning the more you investigate them. You can get away with less realism in literary mediums that are less interactive and involve less time spent by the audience in the setting. But the more interactive you are and the more time you expect the audience to spend in the setting, the more real your world-building needs to be.

Like, in the case of fire giants, I'm perfectly ok invoking that the giant is made of something fire proof and even that it has supernatural strength. But if it's supernatural strength is so much that I'm perfectly ok with it carrying around 10 tons of steel, while moving at its running speed, then my question is, "How mere mortals fight something that is basically a semi-tractor trailer truck?" It's one thing to say that a giant is a bit stronger than a bear, or a gorilla, or a rhinoceros or is equivalent in size and power to something our cave men ancestors had to face armed with nothing more than a flint spear. I can imagine a superheroic mortal facing that down with a magical brand and a shield. But eventually, if you make a giant too fantastically strong, I stop believing its a suitable foe even for an action hero.

Another way to look at this is that people who don't care about realism never notice if something is realistic. No one has ever said, "I found the costuming in Lord of the Rings too practical, and too well thought out. The weapons just looked too functional and effective for my taste. Why did everything have to look so real?" But people who do care, do notice these things and quickly.

To be honest though, I've always found Giants in DnD conceptually awesome and mechanically boring because I don't think their size has been sufficiently factored into their mechanics.

D&D, and indeed most RPGs, have done a poor job dealing with scale. 3e was the first version of D&D that really tried to make the scale of a creature matter, but I agree it could be cool to take that even further.
 

Yes, everyone does have a different threshold. Maybe since I am an architect and I deal with the strength of materials regularly I see giants as incredible implausible. So I naturally assume there is magic involved. OF course D&D has never done size and strength very well. I think large, huge, & gargantuan creatures have really low strength scores so that their to hit bonus doesn't break bounded accuracy (and tradition). They should really just separate strength (damage) and accuracy/ to hit (dexterity?). Then you could have low to hit score and massive strength damage.

I can see adding a size-based damage boost for Large+ creatures so that BA isn't broken.

One of this issues I have with giants and other Huge+ creatures is that I find it hard to see how mundane attacks from medium or smaller opponents can even hurt them. Superficial wounds, sure, but attacks deadly enough to kill them seem implausible, especially if the giant is wearing any kind of armor.
 

That was my immediate impression. Normally, when I hold a shield, I'm balancing the weight of it with my body behind it - one foot forward, the other back, in a fencing type posture. And normally shields are made of something that is relatively light weight. You don't make solid disks of steel and use them as a shield. Typically you are going to make a tower shield out of thin wood, covered with leather or strong cloth, and then edged in thin steel or bronze with a thin steel boss in the middle. This shield on the other hand is made like a modern snow plow. As I said, each looks to weigh about 8000 lbs. Even if you had magic to half the weight of the shields, it would still be too much. Imagine the posture these shields imply, with both shields out in front of you locked together, and you realize that it's just too awkward to carry any large fraction of your weight in front of you like that no matter how strong you are. You can't balance the weight by rotating your body. You'd have to have a splayed posture and take mincing little baby steps to move. You'd be continually on the verge of toppling forward, and the heavier the shield is relative to your own body weight the worse it would be. Even with magic reducing the weight by half, each of the shields weigh more than the giant does. Imagine carrying two 250 lb shields in front of you. Even if you are some super strong person that can carry 500 lbs, you can't move quickly in that posture.

Again, the take away I got immediately from this picture was pity. Crutches indeed.

Additionally, if you're planning to fight with shields locked together as some kind of ridiculous snow-plow, you should just have one snow-plow instead of two shields that you have to keep locked together by muscle power. And you'd probably want wheels too.
 

Now, I don't know what anyone else thinks, but that's never been the take I've had on fire giant smithcraft. I've always pictured fire giants as master smiths, they love their work, and produce fabulously superhumanly well crafted metal work. Why in the world would they go with this unpolished, unfinished, hasty looking, rough work? Why would fire giants use roughly casted slabs of pig iron to make their armor? Why would we go for fire giants as just bestial uncaring brutes wearing stuff that looks like it was made by orcs? Couldn't we be going for intelligent, skillful, and also cruel?

One thing I like to do with giants is to give them a sort of spontaneous magic: every giant, sometime during his lifetime, has the potential to be struck by inspiration for an idiosyncratic magic item. As you interact with giants, you may meet a Hill Giant who has a cauldron which is never empty of gruel (unless you empty it all at once, which ends the magic permanently) or a Fire Giant who has a magic harp that sings by itself or a Frost Giant with shoes that leave no tracks behind. Each item will be something that makes its specific creator happy or fulfilled in some way.

This makes even the most brutish Hill Giant a sort of idiot savant master smith/magician at least once in its life, which adds to the giant mystique.
 

Those shields aren't immovable, slap them side by side and plow forward with the full strength of a Fire Giant, watch as it scoops up enemies and crushes them into stuff. Think snow plow.

That is exactly what I'm imagining from that picture. Hell, I can imagine a fire giant fighting like that in a movie, and it looks pretty awesome.

Also, maybe it will have an ability that after making its charge attack it drops one shield and a AOE and in doing so loses part of its AC and then fights more or less normally.
 
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One of this issues I have with giants and other Huge+ creatures is that I find it hard to see how mundane attacks from medium or smaller opponents can even hurt them. Superficial wounds, sure, but attacks deadly enough to kill them seem implausible, especially if the giant is wearing any kind of armor.

Well if a giant is roughly 3x the size of a human that would make their chest approximately 3' deep. Still plenty shallow enough to hack and slash with most D&D weapons
 

Those shields aren't immovable, slap them side by side and plow forward with the full strength of a Fire Giant, watch as it scoops up enemies and crushes them into stuff. Think snow plow.
That is exactly what I'm imagining from that picture. Hell, I can imagine a fire giant fighting like that in a movie, and it looks pretty awesome.

Also, maybe it will have an ability that after making its charge attack it drops one shield and a AOE and in doing so loses part of its AC and then fights more or less normally.
What creatures are you imagining this giant charging through?
 

It looks like a dwarf in stature, but overall the shields are fairly large for my tastes and any attempt to be realistic. Just explaining things away with magic only makes sense if the race as a whole is considered magic users. I never assumed that with giants. It would be cool if they took the same concept and replaced it with sword-shields that could be dual wielded on each arm.
 

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