This thread seems to have devolved into a debate about CR... which who really cares, everyone is aware it is filled with inconsistencies and DMs really can only use it as a general barometer more than anything fine-tuned.
Probably my fault going off topic.
Back to the topic of "should giants be huge?" I'm going to be a little bit frank... I find
@Upper_Krust a little all of the place in this thread.
Well I have changed my mind on the topic of whether they should be Huge or not. I agree now it was a good idea.
At first it seemed like he finds giants an easy foe to fight that doesn't justify being huge.
I don't recall saying anything along those lines. Can you find a quote?
I did say if you make the giants bigger then you should try and make them more (rather than less) interesting because bigger/more powerful creatures get used less often.
Then it seems like he believes giants are too dangerous to fight,
I don't recall saying they were too dangerous to fight. But I did point out that 5E fire giants were tougher than most other monsters (for their CR) and that taking on more than 5 was likely a TPK for a party of four 12th-level PCs...and in Against the Giants the Fire Giant Stronghold has 105 giants, while the likelihood of encountering 5+ at a time is very high you would think.
and that it is unreasonable to fight more than a handful of them.
I think WotC lazily (as the maps attest to) converted over Against the Giants to 5E without thinking through the potential threat of 105 fire giants in a system with bounded accuracy. But I don't have the adventure so I am only going off the information other people post in this thread.
I'm still not sure if he wants giants to feel like a distinct monster, or to add them to the list of "generic large foes," like ogres or trolls.
This thread convinced me, early into it, that giants should be Huge and I'm happy with that change WotC made. I still think 4E Giants are more interesting, but that's another matter entirely.
Anyway, I'm going to restate my opinion, which is two-fold; giants are not a monolith (there are 6 types after all), and range from the not that frightening Hill Giant to the damn terrifying Storm Giant. I personally like how Giants are huge, as there really isn't any monster that takes up that niche in 5E (a humanoid-looking monster that takes up that much space).
Agreed.
And lastly, I don't really care that they really are just buckets of HP and damage; if I need an interesting giant, I'll grab some from Volo's or make my own, but sometimes its good to have simple statblocks if you want your combat to be speedy (or have one interesting boss, and a couple boring lackeys helping).
That's a fair point.
It would be good to have a succinct argument from
@Upper_Krust as to why he feels giants should be large... as reading the thread, it largely seems to boil down to "That's how the used to be, that's what I'm used to, I wish they went back to it."
I no longer think they should be large.
However, my initial reasoning as to why I didn't like the change from 4E to 5E giants was because they took away the (large) giant & (huge) titan dynamic (ie. Hill Giants & Earth Titans). 5E removed the titans and in so doing made the giants FAR less interesting. Of course the easy fix is to simply make the Titans Gargantuan in 5E - but that doesn't change the fact nothing like that exists in the 5E Monster Manual.
Additionally 4E usually had 2-3 giant types of the same giant that filled different roles (e.g. Fire Giant Icefist, etc.). They could easily get around this in 5E by having an extra mini-stat-block just for the attacks.
