Rules Musings - On Colossal Foes

Introduction

Something’s been a-tumble inside the brainbox right from when I thought about the particularities of hunting large game. When men set out to battle giants, what music should be stirred by the felling of tyrants? Being more prosaic, I don’t appreciate the lack of tactical variety arising from combat with foes drastically larger in size than player characters.

This is not about pushing an agenda that large creatures should by rights be tougher to beat, rather that, as a challenge, they should feel different and require a distinct approach rather than the mended old hat of getting the cudgels out and whacking away at the ankles of the Hp piñata until it keels.

Plucking right from the stories, monstrous creatures of legend are something that garden-variety folk heroes run away from and which only epic Heroes will tackle willingly, though even then more than likely through some use of cunning for tipping the scales.

In DnD all that is absent: the gameplay surrounding combat with large monstrous opponents mostly plays like Times New Roman twelve, wrong-headedly reduced to a slugging match with a large juicy bag of Hit-points saddled with a bad action economy, leading to the mechanical juncture of monstrous foes, due to being single targets, being actually easier to face than an equivalent challenge made of multiple smaller ones (the DMG’s guidelines on CR copping admission to this very fact). Occasional legendary and lair actions feel like just a tacked-on mitigation device. Being one to go looking for trouble where there is none, I’ve been thinking up ways to change this.

The aim is set on differentiating low from high-level play tiers in a shape that pays homage to the epics and brings up monstrous foes into more credible threats without resorting to the dreaded one-shot kills, since squashing player characters like so many rude cockroaches is probably what the wrong dosage of game-realism would bring about.

Artist's Rendition

To avoid sysiphean roadblocks such as messingly tampering with individual MM entries, here are some blanket-rules. These all presume that the PC protagonists are human or near-to-human sized. I am, of course, still grossly abstracting and not at all accounting for a wide range of variables, such as large sized but lightweight creatures, as I want to keep the system nimble. These rule proposals are intended for bulky, giant-like foes, such as Ogres and Cyclops, against whom adventurers ought to be required to employ specialized weaponry (reach, ranged), as well as different tactics.

The Crunchy Bits

Colossal Foes (creatures Large-sized and greater):

- Inflict incidental damage, as their shifting bulk makes them dangerous to stand around: At the beginning of the monster’s combat round, any normal or smaller sized character within 5’ suffers d4 points of Incidental Damage (bludgeoning), unless the character passes a [Dexterity save (DC 8 + Monster’s Dexterity modifier)]; the incidental damage die grows by 2 sizes for every size category above Large.

- Have greater odds of inflicting deadly wounds: Player Characters checking for Death and Dismemberment roll one less d6 on the table;

- Are fearsome and awe-inspiring: Characters wishing to face them in combat must pass Fear (PCs) or Morale (for NPCs) checks, unless they have significant experience overall (Character Level above creature’s CR) or have victoriously faced down such a creature before;

Heartbreaking Departures

Moving even further afield from the traditional rules basis, one can distill the quintessential failure of suspension of disbelief surrounding large foes: that their attacks somehow care about whatever armor a puny and minuscule target happens to be wearing at the time they smash into its skull with a tree trunk. It’s just such an oliphant in the parlour that, once noticed, it never then ceases to gnaw at you with its mocking tusks. Roger G-S’s sadly fallowed Roles, Rules and Rolls has an excellent post on the matter. 

It is known before cramming any wedge between DnD and abstraction that it'll turn into one of those “carefully pick your battles” type of thing: is it still even DnD once such changes are contemplated?

Seeing how the current ruleset would have a Dexterity 3 fighter in plate mail avoid attacks from giant kin better than a Dexterity 18 unarmoured combatant, I as gamerunner am decidedly not confortable with chalking this all up to abstraction, so I don’t see how it can be otherwise.

Tin-tanks ought to do good against hordes of smaller foes. Against creatures that can shade them from the sun? Not so much. After casting for alternatives (monstrous attacks resolved through DEX saves, for one), landed on this:

- Attacks from Huge and Gargantuan creatures upon normal-sized and smaller characters ignore any mundane armour worn and instead treat the target’s Dexterity attribute total as its Armor Class.

[Independent of, but relevant to the above: I don’t intend to have monsters – especially ponderous and lumbering ones – frequently boast a proficiency modifier on attack rolls as I’ve found 5E to have made the target numbers for hitting attacks exceedingly low and easy to obtain.]

To draw this to a close, my hope’s to remedy the disconnect imposed by the excessive abstractions of armour class and to allow the unarmored combatant a time and a place to shine, introducing a tactical situation where having armor will be, if not an outright liability, at least completely irrelevant. If on the one hand I feel pretty strongly about applying the above rule or some variation thereof to Huge-plus sized critters, I stop short as regards Large monsters, as they don’t fray the rope of credibility quite as much and – in more practical terms – as it could turn armour useless against too vast a portion of the playing field.