Are Giant clerics and wizards and so on a thing?

[Flyndaran]

For... the... HORDE!! Ha.

Pandaria is Asian (tm) with loads of late night Kung Fu movie tropes thrown in. Very similar to Kung Fu panda even though Pandas were in Warcraft lore long before those movies came out.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

For... the... HORDE!! Ha.

Pandaria is Asian (tm) with loads of late night Kung Fu movie tropes thrown in. Very similar to Kung Fu panda even though Pandas were in Warcraft lore long before those movies came out.

"Incompetently dubbed kung fu, our most valuable Chinese import." XD

To be fair, a lot of the Jamaican bits I caught from the WoW trolls probably came from Africa via slave ships anyway, so it's not as jarring to me.

I didn't catch much purely Japanese influence among starting Pandarans, though I did catch a bit of northern shaolin mixed with southern coastal and Korean influences.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

To be fair, a lot of the Jamaican bits I caught from the WoW trolls probably came from Africa via slave ships anyway, so it's not as jarring to me.

Yep - the African/Caribbean mashup is a bit redundant as Caribbean is essentially mashed up between assorted African and European cultures (exactly how much of what depends which island you're on). Not much native American culture in there as I understand it.

[Flyndaran]

To kind of pull this thread back on topic... WoW is full of giant users of magic. It's kind of a trope that the more powerful a foe is, the bigger they are.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

To kind of pull this thread back on topic... WoW is full of giant users of magic. It's kind of a trope that the more powerful a foe is, the bigger they are.

Part of that is MMO mechanics. If you use a normal sized target as a raid boss, it turns invisible under the pile of PCs, and that's usually not what you want (raid bosses are supposed to be visually interesting and often have visible tells).

[thastygliax]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Are giants who are wizards, clerics and other "classes" a thing in D&D and other games?

In v.3.0/v.3.5, any creature with a good enough key ability score can become a spellcaster. They just add character class levels to their racial HD. What kind of spellcaster a given giant race favors varies according to that race's culture and mental aptitude (good Wisdom = clerics or druids, good Cha = sorcerers, with wizards very rare except among the largest and smartest giants). Some giant races also have innate spell-like abilities, or their leaders do (for example, stone giant elders gain some elemental earth magic).

Pathfinder is derived from v.3.5, so follows its lead in allowing giantish (and other monstrous) spellcasters. If anything, they're even more common in Pathfinder, because of Paizo's love for crafting highly customized monsters for its adventures. There are also a lot more spellcasting classes available for the game, if you go outside the Core Rulebook.

I never played much 4E, but the entries for many intelligent races included alternate stat blocks for specialized individuals like shamans, war chiefs, etc.

5E is closer to 4E in how it treats variant monsters. Sometimes you get a whole new stat block tailored to a new role, like the magic-focused variant giants in Volo's Guide to Monsters. Sometimes an adventure just tells you to use the MM stat block, but adds spellcasting, different weapons or armor, and/or more HP, like many of the named NPCs in Tales from the Yawning Portal.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Bengt

In 5e DnD some giant flavours have innate spells. They don't have PC classes though.

The 5E DMG allows adding class levels to them.

The challenge rating needs to be reworked from scratch when you do so, but you just add the class features.