DF giants

[dripton]

Originally Posted by martinl

For awesomeness' sake, allow crushing "blowthrough" where the first HP damage apply as normal and the rest blow through but get double knockback in compensation. So if Bob gets hit for 30 crushing and only has 10 HP, he takes 10 HP of injury and 50 for purposes of knockback.

Fore!

This is my new favorite house rule. It's in play for my upcoming DFRPG campaign.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by corwyn

So has anyone used giants or similarly tough, hard hitting foes in their DF games? I'm currently looking at converting some old D&D adventures and weaving them into a campaign. I could replace them with something, but...

They seem too binary in a fight in gurps. Either the PCs get through without being hit or someone gets pasted/killed in one hit. D&D's giants convert well enough as 'weak' giants, 30 to 40 ST, but that's still 6 to 8d cr or cut.

What you're calling "binary" is commonly called "swingy" here on the forums. GURPS damage is pretty "swingy"—you're usually either perfectly fine, hurt badly, or dead.

I've game mastered sessions of Dungeon Fantasy weekly off and on for a little over two years during the colder months. I still consider myself very much a DF GM in training despite more than 20 years of GM'ing GURPS.

I commonly field a ST 30, Skill-18, SM +1 melee monster of my design that wields a two-handed maul. With ST 30, they do 7d+1 crushing damage. Sounds pretty harsh, doesn't it? It's not, really.

I just had one swing at a 250-point Cleric this past Sunday. The character had a mid-teen block and made his roll as expected. The Holy Warrior will likely step up to help. The nearby Wizard has Fumble and Tanglefoot. As such, the solo giant won't do much when squaring off against all three—it's more likely that he'll only hit a character if the dice are brutally-unkind.

In other words, if you're planning on pitting a giant against a Knight in a white room scenario, then yeah, the character with the best combat statistics is likely going to win. But that's probably not what you're planning to do and you'll find that a well-balanced DF party is highly capable of taking on high-ST melee monsters.

Sure, someone might get clipped and take a truckload of dice worth of damage, but the monster will have to roll well, the character will have to roll poorly, and after that, make a bad HT roll(s) before he actually dies. If all that goes wrong and it does happen, then it happens. It's a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. It happens. No biggie.

[Kazander]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Is there a Technique anywhere to offset size penalties to hit? Seems to me that a giant who regularly fights humans might be able to buy some of that off.

Just make a custom technique based on the design rules. It seems likely Giants would have this given their greatest enemies are SM 0 Murder Hobos.

Also, don't forget the "Combat Writ Large" rules from Pyramid 3/77. Giants have Reach and may also have extra large Step maneuvers (depending on how you make them), and this can be devastating. They also get bonuses to their defenses for having a height advantage, and PCs suffer from penalties for height disadvantage.

This makes giants much more effective. Or, in the case of my players, it gives the giants a slightly better chance of survival...but not much. We just did G2-G3 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl/Hall of the Fire Giant King, and there were no giant survivors. Only 1 PC casualty, and that was because of two successive Critical Hits from a giant. My PCs are 650 points though.

The only real threat were from Critical Hits. Otherwise it was a slog through mountains of HP and DR.

[Bruno]

Generally I want to echo what everyone else has said: "It all works out surprisingly well except it's a slow fight to whittle away a giant bag of hitpoints" but with a caveat:

Whether your party has a good healer or not is going to dramatically change results - perhaps not during the fight itself, but definitely afterwards.

If you end the fight with half the party at -2 x HP and with crippled limbs but alive, you're looking at most a day to patch everyone up for the average DF healer. They may not be able to do Instant Restoration, but it's a lot easier to limp back to Town to get the local shrine to do it if everyone's got their HP back.

If you end the fight in that state and no fantasy healer, suddenly things are more dire.

[sir_pudding]

The PCs fought giants (including a minor wannabe demigod giant liche and his lieutenants) as well as similar foes like giant animals, siege beasts and so on in my DF game. I used the rules in Fantasy to get the giant's stats. These fights were fun but no more (or less) swingy than other foes.

Besides as I said eariler, even with the height and reach advantage, relative SM helps the PCs and if the giants have eyes (and skull), the scout will nearly drop two of them every turn. Additionally giant minions are still minions and a smart wizard can do really effective crowd control.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Is there a Technique anywhere to offset size penalties to hit? Seems to me that a giant who regularly fights humans might be able to buy some of that off.

I really don't see the point in this for monsters.

For starters if you are statting out monsters in DF, why? Just write down their abilities and skill levels.

If you give them +1 skill they get that for everything.

If that makes them too powerful I'd consider whether you think +1 to hit the PCs is the sweet spot you want or not.

Then just give them +1 to hit the PCs and done.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The PCs fought giants (including a minor wannabe demigod giant liche and his lieutenants) as well as similar foes like giant animals, siege beasts and so on in my DF game. I used the rules in Fantasy to get the giant's stats. These fights were fun but no more (or less) swingy than other foes.

It's a pretty general thing about GURPS combat: in a game system with low hit probability and low numbers of hits required to remove a combatant from a fight, the results are going to be highly random. In the case of giants specifically, that typically results in high randomness for giant attacks vs PCs, but low randomness for PC attacks vs giants, so overall it's not clear that it will be swingier than other GURPS fights.

[weby]

Single/few 6d to 8d damage hits are fully survivable for the heavy frontline types in DF if they have even slightly upgraded gear and such. The light front line combatants will fare less well if hit.

One on one: yeah they would not like it, but given a bit of support from the rest of the party the heavies will do fine. If there is a mage they can reduce the hit probability a lot, a cleric can heal them, a scout will make the fight much shorter making for less hits and so on.

I regularly use heavy hitters as one of the threat types in my current fantasy campaign. In a regular DF power level campaign the threats will of course have to be a lot lower powered than I use, but a creature of the indicated damage potential and fairly low skill likely makes for a challenging but not overwhelming encounter.