Giant monsters and fighting them

[ThiagoMartell]

DO you guys know any system that allows players to fight big, giant monsters in interesting ways that make sense regarding the creature's size? Something like Shadow of the Colossus or Legolas killing the oliphant in the movie.

[awa]

iron heroes makes an attempt at this allowing you to use climb checks on certain giant monsters to get at weak spots

[ThiagoMartell]

The best I've seen is how True d20 and Iron Heroes seem to handle it, but it's still rather sucky. I wanted some pointers for my very own set of rules for this, but I guess I'll have to start from zero.

In my mind, it should work somewhat like a Megaman boss battle. You simply can't damage the guy significantly, until he does X, then you can.

[Craft (Cheese)]

How big are we talking here?

For something like the Oliphant, the best way to me would be to treat the entire creature as a separate structure and battlefield all its own, using some variant of base-destroying rules to take it down. Like how Legolas in the movie climbs it, knocks off the archers on top, shoots it in the back of the neck a few times for the kill, then finally slides down the trunk to get down safely as the elephant falls. A pretty good analogy for that would be rules on how to sneak into an enemy base, take out the defenses, trigger the self-destruct sequence from the inside, then make a daring escape. Unless they were sufficiently abstract such rules wouldn't carry over perfectly, but they seem to be a good place to start.

However it's also conceivable to have a creature that's too large for conventional fighting used against other humans to work, but too small for the climb/cripple/kill/escape paradigm to make any sense.

[awa]

When I do it as a dm I build the monster and the encounter at the same time like take a kraken fight.
First it grabs the boat and the tentacles come on board each tentacle is treated as a separate creature attacking and constricting after say enough time has passed the kraken cracks the boat open and the battle continues but now footing is lousy and the boat is slowly sinking maybe once enough tentacles are destroyed the kraken surfaces and starts taking bites out of the ship now the pcs need to protect the explosive ballista bolt as their preparing to shoot it down the krakens throat. The kraken can be stunned by targeting its eyes but those are small so get a big ac boost. For a longer fight minions climb on board the ship in waves during the battle.

How many hp does the krakens main body have? Enough. If the party was aquatic fighting the kraken in the open water the monster would be design drastically different.

My point is this kind of encounter works best when the game does not try and run monsters and pcs the same.

[locutus]

I seem to remember playing in a game where Monsters two size categories larger could do trample damage proportional to thier HD on everything adjacent.

I bet you could add facing and a climb DC and you could have a decent oliphaunt fight. Maybe a little 10ftx20ft board off to the side, representing the platform on top, with everyone on it having to make a balance check. DC15 if it's just moving, DC20 if it charges and DC25 if it hits something. +10 to the check if you sit down or grab something.

Now I'm imagining a cardboard Ancient Wyrm with little slots on it's sides and belly for miniatures, and five foot squares on top. Or maybe magnetic minis. That would be a fun encounter, especially if the dragon is not the main point of the encounter. Maybe you chased someone onto it, and then it took off, or it snatched you in it's claws and you win the grapple check to get unpinned, but don't fancy the mile drop.

[Acanous]

City of Heroes has skyscraper-tall giant monsters that you can hit with tactical nuclear strikes.

(Both in the P&P and in the vidyagame)

[RandomLunatic]

Complete Warrior has the Giantbane tactical feat, which gives two very meh abilites and then Climb Aboard, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Races of the Wild introduces Underfoot Combat, which in turn serves as the pre-req for Confound the Bigfolk, which sadly does not give the ability to jump on foes, but it makes up for it by upping your lethality a bunch. Both require small or smaller sizes, though.

Otherwise, you are stuck stabbing its toes like everybody else.

[tbok1992]

Well, I'd say treat the whole monster as more a structure than a creature and treat each individual part as an attacking creature, like 4e does with the walking tower and the silt horror.

Of course, now I'm thinking of the "Fin Fang Foom put you in his pants!" scene from Nextwave and how in the hell you'd represent that in D&D.

[ThiagoMartell]

D&D does that really bad, we all know that. I was checking to see if some system out there did it well.