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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6025526" data-attributes="member: 4937">Personally, I'm quite happy with the classic MM giants both in size and flavor. In art, giants are often depicted as rising to heights heights of 400' or even 800'.  Even smallish giants are generally depicted as being 60' or more in height, although one thing is certain is that how big a giant is often changes from scene to scene as scale is seldom an important concept in such stories.  But its really hard to maintain a degree of grittiness when you have giants of that scale.  You are going to veer either from a faerie tale feel, where versimiltude means adherence entirely to literary convention only, or else to some sort of Dragonball-Z/God of War like epicness where versimiltude again means adherence solely to a set of literary conventions.  Neither produces a world that is particularly easy to believe in on inspection.Instead of focusing on the height of a giant, I think it is more important to focus on the weight of a giant.  A 24' high giant weighs about 16000 pounds, and a 30' high giant weighs nearly double that.  These are incredibly big creatures.  Even a 12' high giant is going to weigh 2000 pounds or more.   For those that think such creatures small, don't look at a painting, use your imagination to picture one in a room with you, stooping over, enormous and space filling.  Next time you are standing next to a seven foot tall man, imagine one as a center gaurding an NBA blackboard, his shaggy head extending to the top of it, the hand of his upraised arm a good 4-5' above the blackboard, and some atheletic 'giant of a man' like Lebron James flying up to try to dunk on him but only rising to the lane filling wall of his chest - a childlike figure next to this massive creature.  Giants are plenty big.  Pictures do not do them justice.Common giants - like the D&D Hill Giant - are of a good size to integrate into the ecology and social order of your fantasy world without blowing away belief.  The bigger giants, 16-24' range, are of a good size to represent the transition point between the mortal and the divine.  These are the huge scions of the gods from ancient days before men ruled.  Descendents of demigods with immortal blood from a time when the Gods first looked on the Genie and found them comely and desirable.  Anything bigger than that, and you are now in the world of the divine immortal challenges which man with his petty strength dare not face unless he is practically a demigod himself.I really don't like the impulse that leads people to think that Dragons need to be the size of Godzilla to be interesting.  I personally feel it is a failure of imagination.  It's an impulse that I think comes from always viewing the world of play in the third person, looking down at it rather than standing in it.  If players (and DM's) could truly view the world in the first person, I think that they'd realize that D&D monsters are plenty big enough</blockquote>

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