Giants: How big should they be in an a Fantasy RPG?

[Henry]

I mean seriously. Wrap the wand in bacon then leave it somewhere convienant and the situation will take care of itself!

The image of the Wand of Orcus blanketed in Hormel, sitting out in an open plain with a sign saying, "Free Food!" like a Road Runner Cartoon, just had me laughing till I cried a little bit.

 

[lukelightning]

Consider your words above. 11 feet is barely bigger than human sized, relatively? Dude, it's nearly twice the height of your average Joe. Double "barely bigger"?

Well 11 feet is just one foot more than 10 feet, which is virtually 9 feet, and 9 is close to 8, and 8 isn't much more than 7 relatively speaking and 7 and 6 are close neighbors. So they are pretty much the same size as humans.

 

[Henry]

Well 11 feet is just one foot more than 10 feet, which is virtually 9 feet, and 9 is close to 8, and 8 isn't much more than 7 relatively speaking and 7 and 6 are close neighbors. So they are pretty much the same size as humans.

That reminds me, I have to go pick up my stretch limo after work -- excuse me, I mean my Volkswagen.

 

[werk]

Well 11 feet is just one foot more than 10 feet, which is virtually 9 feet, and 9 is close to 8, and 8 isn't much more than 7 relatively speaking and 7 and 6 are close neighbors. So they are pretty much the same size as humans.

Everyone is so real world literal. Large is only one step bigger than medium, that's what I'm saying...game terms. Huge would be much bigger, and up, and up.

No, 6 feet taller is not much compared to 20 feet. That's where the 'relatively' comes in.

So, say you have your 6' human, which is also the high end of their height,
And you have a large hill giant, 10.5 feet.
So that one step in size won 3.5 feet.

Compare a medium to a huge.
Compare a small to a large.

Use your imagination rather than your tape measure

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I've always thought that giants should be... Gigantic.

They seem to fluctuate in size in folklore and myth, from "giants" of about 8 feet tall to redwood-tall and bigger. Ogres seem to fit the bill for the ones not too much bigger than man-size, and then they range up to the mountain giant (in Monster Manual II), which really seems to be about the size many seem to want. Toss titans into the mix, and you really have a pretty wide variety of giants to choose from.

 

[ruleslawyer]

My real problem is that giants (12 HD+ Giant-type beings) are the same size category as ogres (4 HD Giant-type beings) or trolls (6 HD Giant-type beings). This seems a bit wonky to me, since were one to think of hill giants as, say, advanced ogres, they certainly would NOT be Large-sized.

Here's a question. What would happen if you increased the hill giant's size to Huge, gave it +4 Str (essentially making the stats identical to those of an "advanced ogre," were there such a thing) and then scaled the other giants up from there?

Well, to answer my own question, you increase the thing's attack rolls by +1 and give it 3d8+12 damage (+6 damage overall) with a Huge greatclub. Hmm. Probably worth a +1 CR bump.

Or we could say that +14 Str (the hill giant's Str modifier) is okay for a Huge creature and leave the hill giant's ability scores as they are while still raising its size to Huge. That bumps the damage by +4.5 at the cost of a -1 to attack rolls, which is probably not a high enough net benefit to warrant a CR increase, especially with the -1 AC as well.

 

[elforcelf]

In lots of tales and in marvel comics giants are 100 feet tall.

 

[Conaill]

We actually had a discussion about this very topic over in General Monster Talk not too long ago. I think it got lost in The Great Wipe of 2006, but IIRC the general consensus was that, yeah, WotC should have made the Giants larger in the first place. These are definitely *not* your traditional giants from mythology or fairy tales.

Personally, I think Huge is a reasonable default size for Giants, with perhaps just as many Giant races smaller (i.e. Large - maybe call them half-giants?) or larger than that.

To at least partially rectify the situation, we've drawn up "traditional" Gargantuan Giant - one that might not be out of place in a "Jack and the Beanstalk" scenario, for example. It's essentially somewhere in between the Large Hill Giant and the Collosal Mountain Giant.

Note that we're also currently working on a Giant by Poll project - also Gargantuan, but that's pretty much where all similarity stops...

 

[Gez]

Traditionnal giants often have no fixed height. For example, Gargantua himself was at one point of his adventures able to enter a (normal human) courtroom to participate to a trial, and at another time, the narrator enter in his mouth and discover a whole nation of men living around Gargantua's teeth.

Sometimes, it's glossed over (as in the epic of Gargantua), the giant merely has whatever size is appropriate at this point of the story. Other times it's actually a plot device (like the Ogre in Puss-in-Boots who takes on the size and shape of a mouse on a dare from the devious cat).

 

[BryonD]

There have been other discussions about how the majority of D&D games seem to run at below Level 12 or so. Bumping the giants up to huge would move them out of many games.

That, combined with the apparent acceptance of the current sizes by a majority and the availability of much larger giants, makes me think the current design is the best option.

I personally like ogres and trolls in the 7 - 9 ft ranges and giants starting at around 10 and working up.