How big is too big? giants, dragons, etc...

how big is too big? giants, dragons, etc. at what point do they simply become too big to be realistically taken down by 5 adventurers?

I usually don't make them any bigger than our current crop of land animals.

Well, it depends on how you handle the fights : if you go shadow of the colossus style, or adding description on how they hurt the creature, you can take on enormous foes (bashing its head, using whatever magic item available...) But going WoW style by hitting only foots will certainly not work realistically. It's also obvious that many classes, if they don't have specific power or magic items will struggle to justify their actions (like a thief hitting a dragon with a 1 foot dagger...)

Kind of setting dependent, idn't it? Exalted has that one scorpion that's bigger than the planet, for example. I couldn't bring myself to read Graceful Wicked Masques, but I'm guessing you can fight it.

Usually no taller than 5 meters for humanoids and no longer than 15 meters from nose to end of the tail (t-rex size) for dragons and shit. Anything bigger is just not defeatable by mortal martials without ridiculous superhero power lvls if the suspension of disbelief is to be upheld, and there is little point in having monsters that are utterly undefeatable, unless as "one of the kind" titanic plot device that need to be stopped indirectly, like by fulfilling some ritual.

Some of it depends on the body structure of the dragon, but I'd say that somewhere around 50 feet long is about the limit for a standard quadruped with a long neck and tail if you want people to be able to engage it at all normally with melee weapons. Too much bigger than that and you start to have real trouble reaching the dragon. As you move towards something that's more like a snake with legs, it can theoretically get bigger before it's out of reach, but realistically speaking, i'm not sure it's going to be that much easier to get at.

Personally, I think 30 feet long is a nice, big dragon size.

Supremely big. You're not a real adventurer if you can't physically throw a harpoon through a dragon's lower jaw and drag him down so you can kick him in the teeth.

Unlike most of Veeky Forums, I have a sense of imagination, so suspension of disbuzzlief is not a problem.

>the things I imagine are really big
>that means I have a bigger imagination than anyone else

you may have imagination but you still have no taste if you don't realize how silly and stupid it looks.
But no it's le "epic" and "awesome"
Go watch next Michael Bay movie, totally your level.

>But no it's le "epic" and "awesome"
>Impliying it is a bad thing

You must be fun at parties m8
Why don't you also tell SW and 40k fans about how "childish" they are and how badwrongfun that their stuff is.

When they could crush an entire city with a single step, they're too big.

Once you get starships, almost nothing is too big.
Even huge things could still be annihlated with powerful enough weapons.

"Adventurers" could be lvl 20 borderline demigods tho...

>you still have no taste
people can't have "no taste" they simply have a different taste to you.

You sound like a real boring millennial

You sound and act like an atheist in a christian forum, edgy, tryhard, and ignorant.

If your game has special rules for taking down giant monsters, then as big as you like. Otherwise, maybe 20' to 30' tall. It's hard to suspend disbelief when the players are trying to kill something taller than a house by hacking off its ankles.

And so what if it is? Is 'fun' a buzzword to you too?

Just means you have to employ bizarre tactics.

Ever seen Fantastic Voyage?

dice+2d6

Rolled 3, 5 = 8 (2d6)

>You must be fun at parties m8
I'd dare to say way more than typical 40k worshipping neckbeard
>Why don't you also tell SW and 40k fans about how "childish" they are and how badwrongfun that their stuff is.
Only when they act like their silly shit is making them superior because "muh imagination" or whatever other reason, like the faggot I replied to

>"Adventurers" could be lvl 20 borderline demigods tho...
Which is ultimately boring and lame from strytelling and aesthetic perspective

And you sound like typical nerd with tastes orbiting around over-the top silly shit, BIG THINGS and explosions, a part that causes that nice things can be only found at the very fringes of the hobby, among people you usually would not associate with this millieu by their looks, behaviour or other interests. The very fact that tabletop gaming was annexed by "nerd culture" is it's worst bane.

In this context it is.
It's shit argument that is used to shield shitty things, BECAUSE MUH FUN. Problem is, it implies that such things are for some reason fun while actual believable and emotionally compelling, well thought stories based on something better than cheap thrills are not. Which is BS.

> it implies that such things are for some reason fun while actual believable and emotionally compelling, well thought stories based on something better than cheap thrills are not
It implies no such thing. You inferred that, because you're a mindless parrot of other people's opinions (specifically, the 'your fun is badwrongfun' Veeky Forums crowd) on what fun should be.

The very fact that you tried to dispute that it might be fun proves you incapable of joining this conversation as anything but a troll.

As soon as you reach the point where the inverse-square-law starts acting up, that's where you get to things that are very difficult to kill.

The real reason why Godzilla is so hard to kill is because whatever the military can inflict against Godzilla is peanuts to what Godzilla's body inflicts on itself simply by existing. Since Godzilla completely ignores the inverse-square-law we can safely assume that its flesh, armour and bones are absurdly strong.

Honestly it depends on the tone of the setting. If you're going for realism, then the giant isn't gonna be too big. But if you're playing something like pathfinder past level 6, your party is well beyond the capabilities of 5 dudes on an adventure, and what they could "realistically do" sort of doesn't matter because they have ceased being realistic characters.

Isn't the inverse-square law moot with Godzilla since most of the time he's aquatic, where weight is dispersed evenly? It would only cause problems if he was out of water for significant periods of time.

Godzilla is so big, even living in water won't do him much good.

Hell, Godzilla is so big, his nerves need to be made of something completely alien and unknown because regular nerves are too slow to travel through his enormous body.

man his post was some real dumb fedora bait shit but you managed to get snug and cozy right there with him

>Unlike most of Veeky Forums, I have a sense of imagination, so suspension of disbuzzlief is not a problem.
you had a nice post and then you wrote this fucking stupid thing

When your strategy for trying to kill the giant flying fire-breathing lizard is to roll to disbelieve you're going to get yourself killed.

Bigger than this is too much.

Source on that pic?

Yeah, that's a good size ratio for BIG unless you start going into epic levels

>When your strategy for trying to kill the giant flying fire-breathing lizard is to roll to disbelieve you're going to get yourself killed.

The point is that if something is big enough to get killed by the inverse-square-law and doesn't die, there's not a lot short of cosmic destruction that can kill that big thing.

In all fairness, I probably would let a PC try to kill/hurt the giant monster via a dispell if it ever occurred to them it shouldn't be able to move without the use of magic and thought to ask if they could

As long as you can meaningfully engage the target size doesn't matter

I had a game of Mutants&Masterminds where the party faced a 100ft kaiju and everyone was capable of fighting it, the Brick could leap up and punch it in the face, the Energy Controller was blasting it, even the resident Crime Fighter was launching missiles from his jet, no one was left out of the encounter and everyone contributed

>not defeatable by mortal martials
>not swarming the local dragon tyrant with spears, clipping it's wings and finally subduing and slaying it, losing hundreds of men and women in the process

You still don't get the point.

Godzilla walking around in the films while people directly acknowledge the impossibility of Godzilla existing in front of them "inverse-square-law says it can't move" is a clear implication that Godzilla is a creature that has a completely unknown and superior biology. No magic required.

So Colossal+?

Almost

...

I think the point is to be unrealistically big, so taking them down as a group of normal human(oid)s is what makes it fantastic. No normal group of dipshits is going to stand a chance against a dragon.

Too big is when your more-powerful-than-the-average-bear existence means nothing to them anyway.

Never, the adventurers simply need to be stronger and have more assets. You can have dragons who until they awoke were literally mountain ranges and the adventurers need weapons of the gods to slay Arjuna the World Consumer. That being said I tend to prefer that pseudo giants (ogres, half giants, dire humans, whatever) be 8-15 feet tall, and true giants being 20-40 feet tall. Don't care for humanoids bigger than 40 feet unless they are a god or something making themselves 200 feet tall to wrestle with a gargantuan dragon.

>Oh my god that is so unrealistic, fuck these modern heroes who are too OP
DnD style fantasy is nothing compared to historical epics where heroes were capable of things far in excess of what DnD characters can do. Ekalavya for example stuffed a dog's mouth with arrows as it barked without hurting it, so he fired fast enough that all of the arrows (enough to force its jaw open) reached its open mouth at essentially the same time.

>women
Why are they on the field of battle? There are children to be raised, crops that need tending, clothes to be repatched...

yep that's too big

I usually save this for martial vs caster threads but I think it also fits your own brand of mental retardation as well
Mythological figures regularly performed feats far in excess of anything most RPG characters can do
If players want to shoot for that level and the system can handle it that is their prerogative

Have it occurred to anyone that life find a way to be that big without magical magic?

Yeah, that's basically the whole plot of the new Japanese Shin Godzilla film.

Shin Godzilla is basically a creature that is constantly evolving itself by rewriting its own genetic code.

First it changes its body to 'ignore' the inverse-square-law. It then evolves an internal nuclear reactor. And after that, it turns its entire body into a motherfucking particle cannon with built-in radar.

For starters the average male is 5'10". 5'6" pre-IR. Highlanders, nubians and macedonians were considered semi-giants in antiquity-early medieval times.

In my setting people range from 5'10" to 6'4", goblins range from 4'9"-5'3" and nephilim range from 7'4"-7'10". Human-Nephilim halfbreeds range from 6'6"-7'2", neither humans nor nephilim can breed with goblin since they're not hominids.

As for monsters no land animal is larger than Lagiacrus, no flying animal is larger than Quetzalcoatlus. But marine monsters can be ridiculously big.

This guy hurt these guys feelings.

>not stabbing the giant's foot in the most painful places until he falls over allowing you to stab more lethal places

I am gonna pit my players against a kaiju soon. I hope I can make even a stalling action(distracting it, protecting civilians, surviving) a dangerous and exciting one. If I pull this off, it will give my players even bigger fun when they take him down using either some cool new weapons or fantasy mecha. No, I came up with it before Power Rangers stream.

btw blue whales are as large as any curently discovered animal, living or extinct, and they are more massive but not longer than the longest land dinosaurs

The thing to keep in mind when dealing with something that large is the environmental destruction the monster causes
My group's main damage dealers plus the Masked Vigilante who wanted to try out his new plane were the ones taking on the beast, meanwhile the Speedster, Psychic Flying Brick and Magical Battlesuit were taking care of civilians and dodging debris for the first half of the battle.

>pre-IR

Imperial Rome, or?

>clear implication that Godzilla is a creature that has a completely unknown and superior biology.
Yeah no way someone could do something impossible with magic, it's a clear implication it's about his biology.

Industrial revolution.

...

The whole point of a giant is that it is big. So it should be really big, and fight in a way that emphasizes its size.

>many of those are literal deities so they don't count
>many of those are non-european so they also don't count

>in many cases events described are only a single version out of several, of which many are way more tame. This is especially true to arthurian romances which were spawned by fuckton of authors of extremely varying skill in a period of several hundred years

>many of those come from poetic verses, and poetry is and always was known to use shitton of hyperboles and it takes special kind of retard to take them LITERALLY no matter if he lives now or two thousand years ago

>many are not even facts, just interpretations tilted towards a thesis

>many of those aren't even actual heroes but plot devices for other heroes

>many are from side stories tangential to the main legend/myth, told by someone (possibly unrelated to original source) sometime but not that anyone cares about it when compared to main stuff and is basically ancient equivalent of shitty fanfiction

>some of those are completely tame and nowhere the league with the others

and after this little scrutiny so little remains, and what remains mostly irish stuff because the the irish were bonkers since forever and Tolkien did even write about it

You can't be serious. Here's your (You), I guess.

Nice image. 30' long 6' at shoulder doesn't look too unrealistic to beat, but 40'/8' is definitely outside the realm of possibility.

Enjoy it

when I was in college, one of my friends invited me to join his Rifts campaign, which was set in some weird dimension with a class called Wormspeakers (who are mages who have worms replace all the skin on their faces or something), and I create a thief type character (who apparently had a physical beauty so low that it made the party Wormspeaker look like Brad Pitt by comparison). To give me a feel of how the system worked, the GM gave me a motorcycle, and a short sword, and had me fight the SDF-1.
The mile long space battleship from the Robotech RPG.
Solo.
I won.
Against a ship that, with its main cannon can wipe out an enemy fleet.
yeah, I didn't go back.

This is how I run giants.
Cripple the legs and the rest is much easier.

It's fun to have giants fight in the same why the players do. TPK by the giant throwing stones the size of horses at them.

The bigger something is, the older it is, both in actual age and it's origins. Giants are a symbol of a previous age, as are dinosaurs. Size also can equate divinity or a force of nature. This allows for prehistoric Kaiju battles over the fate of the world.

Giants should never be Galactus big. They need to be able to Harryhausen over to you and speak down to you in a booming voice. They're big, but people aren't like ants to them.

Something massive like the Tarrasque or Purple Worm is hardly a monster, but more a force of nature because of it's size.

Now show me all the examples in literature of Wizards being living deities.

Ah, Wormwood. That's an interesting setting, I'm somewhat familiar with it. Your story is batshit insane even in comparison to a game system that's already batshit insane...

Sounds like the GM had the Palladium Robotech books, which of course, use the same system RIFTS does.

this calls for some Gurren Lagann-tier heresy removal, fueled by pure anger rather than determination

>enviromental destruction
I will first describe the situation at hand as an invasion of bloodsuckers (I rip off Cloverfield and his parasites, sue me), who at crucial moments cast some ultra heavy elemental magic. Tornadoes ripping the trees from the ground, earthquakes splitting the soil and so forth.
Only later will players realise that hidden in the darkness that's anveloped the realm is 300 meters high monster and all those tornadoes and earthquakes were simply the results of kaiju just walking.
I may give them some scorched earth without civilians etc. later, just so they can focus on kicking ass.

Depends on how powerful the adventurers are, but I'm fine with anything smaller than ~X100s the PC's height, though I prefer to keep things no bigger than X60

>people can't have "no taste" they simply have a different taste to you.

>played music so well the gods cried

more of a bard thing tho

>not slapping cars at them

It only takes one, the allfather.

>at what point do they simply become too big to be realistically taken down by 5 adventurers?

Really depends on the setting and how much prep time the team takes.
There really should be no upper limit to what a team can take on. It's just the difference between taking a session to make a short rest and prep spells vs. taking a whole campaign to recruit troops, learn key spells, accumulate favors of kingdoms, etc. But at the end of the day, a dragon the size of a plane of existence could be taken down with enough prep

>But at the end of the day, a dragon the size of a plane of existence could be taken down with enough prep

Honestly, this would be my dream campaign:

-DM makes you roll a lvl 1 "young" character with no information about what the campaign will be.
-You show up and it's just you and the DM.
DM sits you down and explains the situation.
Your character is at Wizard/fighter/whatever school and overhears the teachers. He learns a world consuming dragon plane of existence is coming in 10 years time and your character gets it in his head he's the only person who can stop it.
-DM says you can recruit as large of a party as you want, but you must find people IRL to play the characters and they all start at lvl 1.
-You have 10 years in game time to train up yourself, recruit and train up a party, forge alliances, learn lost magics, and stop a world destroyer or die trying.
-enjoy

>Nice image. 30' long 6' at shoulder doesn't look too unrealistic to beat, but 40'/8' is definitely outside the realm of possibility.

Put him on a horse with a long lance and that 40'/8' is still proper fucked if it gets hit, partially because it is low to the ground, keeping heart and other important internal organs where they can be destroyed by a single solid hit.

Why does it have teeth if it just sucks suns into its gut?

and thats my next campaign. Fuck.

To fight off rivals.

And predators.

>breathes fire
>humans get incinerated

>how big is too big?
Depends on tech level of setting.

A man can easily take down a 747 with a military grade shoulder launched missile.

to scratch it's ass. ofc.

If it's CR has three or more digits then you've fucked up somehow.

Yeah. Just because you can't get bigger than a whale with the bones that amphibians evolved a couple million years ago, doesn't mean that DNA-based life can't get bigger.

DNA-based life just needs to find a way to make stronger bones. Then we can get bigger than whales.

A giant needs to be a minimum of twice a normal man's height, and maximum a man should be the up to his ankle.

RE:ZERO KARA HAJIMERU ISEKAI SEIKATSU - DAISANSHOU - TRUTH OF ZERO manga

character named Felix Argyle

Huh, a thread about giants that didn't turn into a giantess thread? That's new.

Just do it old-fashioned human style, track it till it's tired and spam spears/arrows/rocks until it goes down.

>godzilla's fire/lighting/plasma breath is the exhaust system for their exotic nervous system

We must fix this

Pretty nice sizes to have for a Dragon Rider. Top pic would probably be limited to a Land Mount though.

Where do buy model?

>tfw you finally meet the dragon and it's less than two feet tall

40 and 50 could be done, people kill elephants and shit

just need like, enchanted or mechanically upgraded arrows, or require the PC's to trap the dragon somehow first, which of course foils the whole "just show up with some swords and maim the fucker" that normally happens, but its probably more interesting to force your PC's to trap or hinder the behemoth first before you just waltz up and stab it

What's this? A thread hinging on the squared cubed law?

This is my fetish

>Implying a herd of 2-foot-tall fire-breathing dragons wouldn't be massively destructive

I'm in ur base lightin ur d00ds on fire and eatin ur cats

Not normally. It was a Shinma. A law of physics for lack of a better term. It could be thwarted, ignored, placated or worked around but you could not "fight it".