Mountian Giants in MM2

[bobstevens]

Too Tall!

But this is just way too silly. I mean Storm giants are 21' and
Titans are 25'! are'nt they supposed to be the most powerful
of giant-kind. In earlier editions the mountain giants at least
to me were created to be the slightly better back woods hicks
relations of Hill giants. This sounds like a change just to be
different form TSR. At 14' they sound much more reasonable
or at least as reasonable as you can get in a fantasy rpg and
also be in line with rest of the giants.

Bob

 

[phoamslinger]

then here's an easy solution to your campaign storyline.


swap mountain giants out with titans.


thus, in your campaign, mountain giants can still be really big, while titans now become truly immense god like creatures of legend.

does that work for you?

 

[Richard Baker]

So, why did we make the mountain giant so darned big?

The answer is simple: We wanted to give you guys a giant whose size was Colossal. It struck us as odd that giants weren't even close to being the biggest creatures in the game, and we wanted to put a high-HD giant in the game. Also, the game has a dearth of "basher" monster at high CRs--most critters of CR 15 or better come loaded with special abilities and spell-likes. Part of the 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition conversion process consists of evaluating old parts of the game and thinking about what their role in the new game ought to be, even if that means some serious changes.

(The CR 26 is probably out of line, by the way. Some of our "getting started" CR estimators overvalue sheer numbers of hit points, and since the mountain giant's got a pile of them, its CR stayed higher than it ought to be. I'd guess the mountain giant to be closer to CR 16-18).

 

[Great Umbrage]

With the re-introduction of the Mountain Giant, it is not unreasonable to introduce colossal or "epic" versions of current giants. Frankly, I saw little enough difference in 2nd Ed. to classify Mountain Giants as that much different from Hill Giants...just like Fog Giants were pretty close cousins to Cloud Giants, etc.

In addition, the Titan was already weaker than the Storm Giant, which was kind of odd, but I let it pass. In any case, there are already Elder Titans, and they completely outclass any other giants out there. Why not use the Mountain-Hill Giant mold to construct counterparts for Stone, Fire, Frost, Cloud, and Storm giants?

 

[dcollins]

This is just another example of game-expansion power inflation breaking the curve and making the campaign not make sense anymore. There's a long history of this sort of make-you-squint imbalancing as games introduce higher levels of power (i.e., more expansions for sale).

How anyone is supposed to mesh 40 ft. tall monster giants into a campaign world where apparently no one heard of them before, and they dwarf titans themselves, is beyond me.

 

[bobstevens]

Okay, but I do think this is a bit silly

Alright, but in the TSR days, giants as a species ranged over
a certain height and weight and the Titans being bigger and
powerful at the top. Now it just seems aesthetically unpleasing.
Obviously, this is a fantasy game and not biology but still it
was at least consistent.

Until now you had giant-kin ranging from ten feet to twenty
five feet. Now you have one without advanced character abilities
towering over them all at forty feet. I'm sorry, but this seems a
little cheap to me.

Bob

 

[Shard O'Glase]

Am I the only one then who thinks this is really cool. Sorry but a giants, giant something so big about the only logical resposnse is to stare slack jawed, saying hamana, hamana over and over agin while you pray that your legs finally start acting on that run away command you gave it a long time ago is just cool to me.

If it wasn't that way in 2ed all I have to way is wahy, pout, pout, cry, cry. Heck my preference is for them to say hey lets actually change things so we think they are better, instead of saying well lets just do some superficial modifications cause it was stuipid in 2ed, lets just make it a little less stupid in 3rd, don't want to piss off those 2ed people too much.

I mean geez how did you explain how clerics can suddely cast 9th level spells now, have domains, how haste now lets a wizard bust out 2 spells a round or thousands of other things are now different suddenly in your campaign world, and somehting as small as a giant race being drastically different throws you.

 

[Sir Edgar]

In general, the giants are too small. I like the big giants in EQ. They should make the giants anywhere from 15' to 50' tall. Even an ogre is what nine to 10' tall, so shouldn't giants be much bigger? Fire and frost giants should be at least 25' tall, for example. That's just my opinion. At the very least, they should have kept the mountain giants the same height as they were before. If they wanted a big badass giant, why not have called it something else like Colossal Giant to set it apart from all the others?

 

[Richards]

I was at the Monster Manual II seminar at Gen Con this year as well, and one of the things that was mentioned was that having a giant of Colossal size opens up a variety of new attack forms that aren't really possible for the "smaller" giants. For instance, the 3E mountain giants have a crush attack where they can jump 20 feet into the air and just squash you like a bug by landing on you. (Ed Stark said that this special attack was originally referred to - at least among the design team - as "the big hairy ass of doom" until Skip Williams changed it simply to "crush.") They also can pick someone up and fling them away. Imagine the look on the dwarf fighter's face when he finds himself hurtling through the air like a grumpy cannonball! Heh heh heh.

Johnathan

 

[Shard O'Glase]

I was at the Monster Manual II seminar at Gen Con this year as well, and one of the things that was mentioned was that having a giant of Colossal size opens up a variety of new attack forms that aren't really possible for the "smaller" giants. For instance, the 3E mountain giants have a crush attack where they can jump 20 feet into the air and just squash you like a bug by landing on you. (Ed Stark said that this special attack was originally referred to - at least among the design team - as "the big hairy ass of doom" until Skip Williams changed it simply to "crush.") They also can pick someone up and fling them away. Imagine the look on the dwarf fighter's face when he finds himself hurtling through the air like a grumpy cannonball! Heh heh heh.

Johnathan

See coolfactor. Now I'm actualy thinking of picking up the MM2 if it has cool things like this in it. I just heard complaints aboutt the hi i'm powerful because I'm immune to A-Y effects your class is useless when facing me, other wise known as bleh, boring un cool-factor stuff.