We were in a place doing a thing. All of a sudden, 12 Giants attack. That’s a total of c.2700 HP. Teh fighters do 2x1d12+4 greataxe* damage per round, dice permitting**. Ranger and Assassin have 1d8+4 bows, ranger goes twice, assassin has sneak attack. Druid has some tasty damage dealing spells. Sorceror has very few.
After 2 hours of rolling, 4 giants are down. That was after I introduced a squad of dwarvish guards and a couple fo griffons, and the druid conjured up a polar bear. It’s really hard to kill giants!
What the party don’t know is that when the giants go 6 down, they will retreat. What the party won’t know after that is that after a few hours they’ll come back with reinforcements.
I am thinking that I have messed up equipment - people should have had better weapons. I have also messed up healing - they do have some potions but also, potions do very little! Compared to a giants 3d12+4 greataxe, it’s nothing.
This has “expeditious retreat” written all over it. Which is fine. But as fighting giants is kind of a theme here, we’re going to need to upgrade our average damage per round quite considerably.
*I know, but you show a teenage boy a weapons table and tell him to take a d10 over a d12
** The party can’t roll to literally save their lives. 2 hours and only one critical. There’s no helping some people.
Weapon damage in 5e isn’t really a function of getting better weapons. At the best, you’ll get +3 damage per hit but +3 weapons are the top of the heap. Increases in melee damage come from multiple attacks, feats like Great Weapon Mastery and class abilities. Likewise, combat healing is rarely worth it aside from getting people of the floor. As discussed before, people fight as effectively at 1% as they do at 100% and healing just won’t keep up with the damage being dished out. While there’s times to cast a Cure Wounds, it’s better to cast crowd control spells to incapacitate enemies then focus for them down one by one. Especially when the enemies outnumber the characters 2:1 (not counting the NPC allies) and are difficult to take down due to massive hit point reserves.
Give an ordinary human the exact same wound as Häyhä, to the exact same fraction of a degree, and they’ll die. Heck, shoot an ordinary human in the arm, and they’ll still probably die.
@Stanislaus, does your party include any spellcasters? Giants are, in fact, big honkin’ huge piles of HP, but they tend to have pretty poor Wis and Dex saves, and there are a number of spells that can very nearly take an enemy out of an encounter if they fail one of those saves.
Yes - Druid and Sorcerer. Sorcerer had a decent amount of success with Major Illusion and Suggestion as tools for distracting giants away from the fight, and used Sleet Storm very successfully to send the first two giants prone in an ambush. But otherwise does not have many damage dealing spells.* The Druid does have more combat options and used them to good effect** but that was the first four giants. There are at least two more to engage in phase 1, and 14 more in phase 2. Spell slots are running dry.
I think the conclusion is that this is a battle that can’t be won and there’s a lesson there about what can be taken on. But I don’t want to make the party think they’re too puny and useless or that they can’t take on the overarching challenge.
*We will revise the spell list shortly but we’re still mid-encounter now.
**Druid did hold off using subsequent rounds of call lightning when melee fighters engaged the giants targeted, which shows some tactical naivety in the party.
I could’ve sworn that wasn’t right, but I went and poked through my 2e Monster Manual a bit and - yeah - it generally talks about giving class levels to NPCs.
“How would I build ____________ as a D&D character?” has been around forever. I remember seeing a sidebar in an old 1e module or magazine or something statting out Bugs Bunny. But I don’t think “Albert Einstein as a 20th level physicist would have 50 hp and that’s silly” is much of an indictment, because the idea of Einstein as a 20th-level anything is silly by the standards of any system.
On the other hand, I hardly ever run pre-made campaigns and even when I do use assets from published materials I fudge and edit on the fly. So my knowledge of NPC design isn’t tip top.
I once played a game (one of the older Star Wars rpgs) with a GM who would bitterly complain that we were mowing through his Big Bad Guy NPCs way too easily. Eventually he told us that was spending hours building them out using normal character creation rules, and he refused to budge when we suggested that villains didn’t have to follow PC creation rules. He wasn’t a very good GM and the game folded not long after.
This is maybe the most glaring problem with 5e’s math. The system is designed so that most stuff doesn’t scale very much. It’s great because it keeps math reasonable even at high levels. But hit points do scale with each level, so you end up with bad guys that just become boring sacks of HP. Fights end up stretching to multi-hour affairs not because they’re exciting but because you’re just rolling rolling rolling to plink away.
How do you get around that? One way is for players to utilize the few methods allowing for bigtime damage. But not every class can do that. Not every player wants to do that. And if only one player at the table has gone down that path, they’ll waaaay outshine everyone else.
It sounds like nobody at your table has the ability to dish out extreme damage every round and that’s probably a good thing in terms of game balance. You just want to start thinking about limiting how many hitpoints worth of bad guys you want to have on the table at any given time. If your party consistently deals 50 damage a turn and you put 500 HP on the table, that’s a baseline 10 turns of combat modified downwards by critical hits, expenditures of resources, etc.
Yeah, but I think the point of this session is to have the party think about that too.
I’ve been doing some reading around and STK is not a campaign about going toe to toe with increasingly large groups of giants. Giants are meant to be scary - a major threat to not just the party but the world. If the party are going to defeat them, they’re going to need to be clever. They can take down a few giants when they’re fresh and have time to plan but this is not about reducing hit points.
Did Hayha have special military training that made his brain more bullet resistant, or was it something that happened spontaneously after he killed enough Germans?
A group in which I’m a player is nearing the end of Storm King’s Thunder, and I heartily agree with this. Giants hit for a metric crap-ton of damage, and a stand-up fight with a bunch of giants is unlikely to end well for many parties.
We’ve been generally successful in avoiding those kinds of combats, due to planning, stealth, and, in a few instances, my bard (with her cracked-out Persuasion and Deception scores) has been able to help the group bypass some fights entirely.
Ohhh, man…this, for sure. In the latter stages of SKT, it’s not been uncommon for combats to take us 2+ hours to complete, which makes me (who much prefers cinematic combat to D&D-style combat these days) cry.
Nitpick: Russians, not Germans. But I’m sure there’s no specific training on surviving bullets to the head, so if there’s any explanation at all, it would appear to be the second one. Which is more or less how D&D describes it.
Or maybe he was special right from the start, and that specialness also accounted for his exceptional ability to kill his enemies, and that if he had gotten shot right at the start of his Russian-killing career, he would still have survived it. But there’s no way to test that possibility.
This sounds bonkers to me. Brains is brains, and you either survive the injury or you don’t; it’s completely orthogonal to what you do with your brain. There’s absolutely no training that makes you likelier to survive a bullet to the brain, nor is someone who specializes in killing other people any more or less likely to survive a bullet under similar circumstances.
If you think otherwise, what on earth do you think the mechanism is?
From a glance at Wiki, he was shot in the jaw. Which is technically in the head but not the way most people would assume. That’s not too diminish his injuries; a large portion of his face was destroyed. Just that he wasn’t shot in the brain.
5E as a game system, in how it is built, tries to show players that when it is more than two to one against them, they should run. Especially with enemies of equal level. Unlike PF1, or 3.X, where AC will go up with level, most things in 5E (AC, bonus to hit, damage) don’t go up by more than three to eight points across all twenty levels. Hit points are one exception I know about. (My 5E mastery is not as high as it could be.) If an eighth level 5E group meets twelve fire or frost giants, they should think about running, not fighting. In theory, that same group should run from a tribe of orcs, let’s say six to one ratio. Attrition would wear them down.
Not having STK, I assume that’s a pre planned encounter? I’m curious, does it tell the DM to hint at running? Or help in that regard if they stay and fight?
I do agree that if you don’t have a group that likes combat, most DND/PF combats only get longer the higher level and it seems to be almost geometric growth. Mainly as characters have more options, depending on if the players try and optimize or make the “best” choice of what to do.
It’s pre-planned, and the numbers are fixed with no scaling to party size. It doesn’t tell the DM to hint at running but it does lay out what happens if the party choose to flee.
One thing I’ve been holding back: the book also says that one of the NPCs in town is a Mage. She’s been selfishly guarding her own stuff but could in theory come out and offer a lot of damage dealing. However, I think that at this point this would just draw out the combat without changing the ultimate outcome so I will probably leave her holed up or even have her flee, maybe (I realise right now) advising the party to follow her lead.
Seem to be! We need to get a bit slicker at rolling, calculating damage and remembering all our feats/abilities so that one round of combat doesn’t take forever, but the mood is still positive (if a little overwhelmed right now).
