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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8675358" data-attributes="member: 82106">1e Hill Giant is 10.5' tall, and a Storm Giant is 21' tall. Titans are described as 18'+ in size, but they represent more a whole category of highly variable individuals than a uniform monster race, at least in 1e terms. In fact later books move them into a more god-like category, and even the 1e MM description is pretty open-ended. So, yeah, overall 1e giants are a couple feet shorter than 5e giants, but the difference isn't really much. Honestly though, in terms of REALISTIC ideas of combat, its hard to imagine a 6' human fighting a 12' 1e Fire Giant. It would be similar to a toddler fighting in a full-grown man, proportionately. You just shouldn't be able to get and STAY close enough to effectively attack without being subject to brutal reprisals that would be almost impossible to avoid. A 12' giant would weigh on the order of a ton, so imagine a 1000 pound foot stomp or kick. The strength, in absolute terms, of this giant would need to be 8x that of a human, so no force you could apply would even come close to matching what the giant could exert. Parrying a fire giant axe blow with your shield could only possibly end one way, with the axe embedded through the shield, your arm, and your breast plate, and sticking out your back! Sure, you might use agility to avoid SOME blows, but judging from real-world creatures of similar size, this giant would not be all that slow or awkward. After all it has to cope with the same 9.8m/s^2 gravity field we do, so its reaction speed can't be that much less than ours or it would not be able to stand on 2 legs. The best you would seemingly get here would be to dodge some attacks and maybe, at great risk, get inside the things reach now and then and poke at it, or slice at a leg or something. I don't think defeat is 100% guaranteed, but you better be so fast that you almost never get hit, and strong enough to make serious wounds on something a LOT bigger (and with proportionately thicker skin, etc.) than you. Giants are pretty mundane, and actually rather small compared to the more extreme monsters, so the whole idea of fighting the smaller types seems barely feasible. The idea of ANYONE of human size even thinking about fighting a Storm Giant? Forget it! The thing weighs 20 tons, at least, and is thus 100x your strength. He just steps on you, flat out, squish, you are dead, a pancake, roadkill. Sure, you might give him a nasty lower leg wound, just before he crushes you flat, but that's hardly going to win any fights... And I can certainly see how ways to defeat really large creatures could be developed, but they would be nothing like matching with them in battle. It would involve cliffs, traps, pits, huge deadfalls, lots and lots of missiles, and probably poison or magic. It would be a super dicey proposition too! If you ran into one of these types of things in an uncontrolled situation, abject flight would be the only viable option! Even then someone would probably buy the farm. Its just not an interesting genre-appropriate RP scenario, so its more reasonable to assume that fighters are actually TOTALLY SUPERHUMAN at the levels where they mess with things like big giants.</blockquote>

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