Rules for a Young Fire Giant

[JovaZ]

Hi there, everyone!

So, my group just released a bunch of slaves from somo Efreeti and one of the prisoners was a Fire Giant, but a Young one (If he had the age of a human he would be like 16 years old) and the cleric convinved the Young Giant to join them. I like the idea, but I'm having trouble finding the proper rules to make statistics for this very different character.
Any advice? :)

Thanks for the help!

[Joe Kondrak]

There's a young creature template. Does that help?

[JovaZ]

Joe Kondrak wrote:

There's a young creature template. Does that help?

Yeah I saw that earlier, but it seems weird that a 16 year old Fire Giant has almost the same HD of a fully grown one (I believe a giant reaches maturity with 50 years or so)...

I'm thinking, maybe I should do a totally new giant but with less HD using the Bestiary rules? :(

[Joe Kondrak]

...or you could use the rebuild stats, but increase the penalties (Natural armor, Str, Con) as you see fit.

[Milo v3]

JovaZ wrote:

(If he had the age of a human he would be like 16 years old)

That's adult age in Pathfinder, so it should have normal stats for a fire-giant.

[Lost In Limbo]

Remember, your players are unlikely to ever see the actual stat block of this creature. As long as the front-end mechanics seem right it doesn't really matter what you did to get there.

[wraithstrike]

JovaZ wrote:

Joe Kondrak wrote:

There's a young creature template. Does that help?

Yeah I saw that earlier, but it seems weird that a 16 year old Fire Giant has almost the same HD of a fully grown one (I believe a giant reaches maturity with 50 years or so)...

I'm thinking, maybe I should do a totally new giant but with less HD using the Bestiary rules? :(

The giant equivalent of a 16 year old might actually be 40 years old. In that way the 16 year old is comparable to a 20 year old human. You have to pro-rate the years to be accurate.

[CrystalSeas]

JovaZ wrote:

If he had the age of a human he would be like 16 years old

In Pathfinder, humans are "adult" when they are 15 years old.

So, what was his actual age in years when you found him?

Fire giants can live to be 350 years old, so in human terms a 62 year old Fire Giant would be about the same age developmentally as a 16 year old human

Middle age for humans in Pathfinder is 35, which is about a 135 years old Fire Giant. At that point you start applying aging affects to scores.

If your Fire giant was 16 years old in human terms, he would be considered an adult, and thus use the standard fire giant stats.

[Outlaw Corwin]

It may be best to guesstimate the CR that you want the creature to have and work from there. This is almost guaranteed to not have a simple Young Template slapped on. More likely it will require a complete rebuild. But rather than either, perhaps find a giant subtype creature that does have the CR you would want the young fire giant to have, and simply use those stats. Switch out any important abilities.

If a CR 6 creature seems like a reasonable addition to the party, maybe something like a Cave Giant's stats would do. Add on fire immunity, cold vulnerability, heated rocks, etc. It wouldn't be a perfect translation, but it'd be close.

[Kalindlara]

If you can get access to the 3.5 D&D book Savage Species, there was a fire giant monster class in there.

That might work for what you want. ^_^

[JovaZ]

Sorry, I made a mistake with the age of the Giant. He actually IS 16 years old xD
So yeah, he is not human age equivalent, he is 16 years old for a race that lives up to 350 year LoL

[CrystalSeas]

JovaZ wrote:

Sorry, I made a mistake with the age of the Giant. He actually IS 16 years old xD

So yeah, he is not human age equivalent, he is 16 years old for a race that lives up to 350 year LoL

That makes him roughly equivalent to a human 4 year old. With all the emotional maturity that implies. And four year old humans may have fair gross motor skills, but their fine motor skills are barely starting to be developed.

Most of them can't ride a two-wheeled bike, or use scissors to cut things or tie their shoes or

Four Year Old Milestones

[JovaZ]

CrystalSeas wrote:

JovaZ wrote:

Sorry, I made a mistake with the age of the Giant. He actually IS 16 years old xD

So yeah, he is not human age equivalent, he is 16 years old for a race that lives up to 350 year LoL

That makes him roughly equivalent to a human 4 year old. With all the emotional maturity that implies. And four year old humans may have fair gross motor skills, but their fine motor skills are barely starting to be developed.

Most of them can't ride a two-wheeled bike, or use scissors to cut things or tie their shoes or

Four Year Old Milestones

But we're talking about another race> I've always thought that, if a race takes 16 year to become what a human becomes in 4... thay have a serious development problem :(

And, reading about fire Giants, it says that they begin manipulating crude clubs with 5 years of age. Their age, not ours LoL

[CrystalSeas]

You've never seen a two year old swing her truck at a stack of blocks, have you? ;-) I wonder what other animals would think
"Those humans! Even at age 5 they can't do the things a 2 year old adult (dog, deer, bear, cougar) can do"

It's your game, your NPC and you can do whatever you like. There are Piazo stat blocks for adult fire giants; there are templates for creating a younger or older fire giant. Or you can make it up entirely, starting with the CR you think is appropriate and filling in from there.

[JovaZ]

Thanks for the help, everyone! :D

[Kazaan]

Ok, there are a couple of considerations here. First and foremost, aging isn't proportional among the different races. A Human's adulthood is 15 years and their average natural lifespan is 91. So, on average, their childhood is about 16.5% of their natural lifespan. But for an Elf, their childhood is about 19.9% of their lifespan. For a Half-Elf, it's about 12.8%. So you can't just say, "Oh, this fire giant is 16 and their lifespan is 350 so he's equivalent to a 4 year old Human."

Secondly, you need to consider that physical age (aka reproductive age), mental age, and age of majority are all different things. Humans reach their full physical maturity at about 13-15 but don't reach full mental maturity until somewhere around 23-25. And age of majority is a sociopolitical matter so it will depend on your culture and society. In modern-day US, age of majority is 18. In an anachronistic time period like what Pathfinder is trying to emulate, age of majority would be closer to 14-15. In some cases, age of majority is determined by ability or quality (a "trial of adulthood") rather than strictly by age. So, while a 16 year old Fire Giant has achieved only 4.57% of his maximum lifespan, it's hard to say exactly how "young" that makes him because we don't know the physical maturity threshold. But, we can make some good guesses.

First off, we can look at the differences between animal and human aging. A one year old dog or cat that's 90 lb or less is roughly equivalent to a 14-15 year old Human. But that 1 year is only about 5% of their average lifespan whereas 15 year childhood is 16.5%. But the next year is only about 8-10 human years. The third year is only about 5-7 human years. So non-human animals tend to spend a far smaller proportion of their lifespan as children, but the proportional age equivalent tends to "balance out" the older they get. This is likely due to brain development. All humans are, technically, born premature. That's why our skulls aren't fully fused and we can't walk when we're born like many animals can. Because our craniums are so big, we need to be born premature in order to exit the birth canal. If you line up primates in order of gestation time, you'll see a general trend upwards correlating longer gestation with longer lifespan as well as longer lifespan intervals (infancy, sub-adult, adult stages). So, as a general rule of thumb, most "sentient" races will tend towards 5 years + 10% average lifespan as their age of adulthood and to take the "age of adulthood" listed in the books as the age of majority. This places most of the races right in line, reaching legal adulthood at nearly the same time as physical adulthood, with notable exceptions among the core races being Half-Orcs and Elves. Half-Orcs actually reach legal adulthood about 2 years after their estimated physical adulthood and Elves are a whopping 50+ years behind (almost 2x their physical adulthood, in fact). If all else is equal, this implies that an Elf reaches physical maturity at only around 60, but they aren't considered an adult in Elf society until about 50 years later. However, since Elves have an innate racial bonus to Intelligence which no other core race has (not counting human floating bonuses), their ratio is probably different. So, using this, we can estimate that a Fire Giant's physical adulthood is about 40 years, the same as that of a Dwarf or Gnome. So a 16 year old Fire Giant has done "most" of his growing in the first 5 years, and has an additional 11 years of lesser growth rate on top of that. That would solidly put him even before the Youth category of the "young characters" ruleset (which sets "youth" age category starting at half the race's adult age). He's more on par with a Human aged 5-7 or a Gnome/Dwarf aged 16.

Now, taking into consideration all that, we can cobble together some rules for how to address this. First off, this juvenile fire giant is an outright child in the first half of elementary school by modern standards. Second, since he is even less than the Youth age category, we can presume that he's likely two size categories smaller than his adult size. This would make him Small, about the size of an adult Halfling or Gnome. We can judge a size difference penalty of -4 Str, -4 Con, and +4 Dex so his stats would go from Str 31, Dex 9, Con 21 to Str 27, Dex 13, Con 17. He's still far stronger than your run-of-the-mill Human and top-tier for toughness (though, it's feasible for a lvl 1 Human to have even higher starting Con). I'd also apply a -4 penalty to Wis to represent inexperience dropping it from 14 to 10. Lastly, I'd cut the HD from 15 down to about 4. This gives him an average HP of 30 (half again the starting HP of a Barbarian with 20 Con and Toughness feat). I'm almost tempted to take away all the feats to represent the fact that he isn't old enough to even be considered equivalent to an NPC class, but that might not be fair. His BAB would be +3 and his functional level would be 4 so maybe leave him with 2 feats and none can have a prereq of higher than +3 BAB and one would need to have no BAB prereq (since he'd take it at HD 1 when he has +0 BAB). Maybe Iron Will and either Power Attack or MWP(Greatsword). Alternatively, since he was captured and being raised as a slave, pick more suitable feats he would have learned as a slave.

[KainPen]

Kalindlara wrote:

If you can get access to the 3.5 D&D book Savage Species, there was a fire giant monster class in there.

That might work for what you want. ^_^

I would use this, someone did a pathfinder conversion of this book in these boards and update it frequently there is a pretty nice job of it done. I would search for that and use that as a guide.