Handwraps of mighty blows on Giants

[smyttis]

I was curious on how Handwraps would work on these creatures. (Essentially any creatures that rolls damage with more than 1 die)

Lets take a Cloud giant for instance.

Cloud giant winds up and punches you once.

Melee Single Action fist +24 , Damage 2d8+13 bludgeoning

If this Cloud giant is wearing Handwraps of mighty blows (+1 Striking) What would the new damage be?

What if the giant is wearing +2 Greater striking?

[NielsenE]

Simple answer you don't attempt to adjust pre-built creature with magic items that way.

Slightly more complex answer, you can work backwards from the listed damage to assume they have a striking rune and firstwraps already. (If you want to add that much treasure to the campaign, I would typically not recommend it though.)

[HammerJack]

Lsaving aside the ways that this question may not really come up, if you have 2D8 and you add a damage die from any kind of ability, spell or item, that comes to 3D8. If you instead add 2 dice, it comes to 4D8.

A damage die is always a single die.

[thenobledrake]

What Hammerjack said.

The designers deliberately got rid of weapons using more than one die as their base value - no more 2d4 scythes or 2d6 greatswords - so that all the various rules which interact with increasing how many dice are rolled for damage remain simple and straight-forward that "one damage die" means a single die of the size used in the weapon's damage.

[Deadmanwalking]

Yup.

Additionally, if you increase the stats of a creature made with the Monster Creation Rules with magic items, you should increase its level as well (assuming they increase the stats enough for that to be appropriate). Magic items can help explain a creature's stats, but those made as PCs aside, should not increase them. Level is intended to encompass things like that.

[Claxon]

The way I see it, you don't use items to increase stats of NPCs.

If this is something the PCs will fight look at the creature building rules if you want to increase the damage. A cloud giant is a CR 11 creature. If you want to make it a CR15 I'd look at the difference between a CR11 creture and a CR15 creature and increase the cloud giants stats by that much. You might have figure out which category (extreme, high, moderate, low) a creature should fall into if the increase isn't consistent across all of them.

You can add additional loot to the creature to explain why it deals more damage narratively, but the biggest thing about NPCs in PF2 is that they don't follow the same rules as PCs and you shouldn't try to make them do so either.

[smyttis]

I was more thinking of a BBG. A little flavour of a cloud giant with handwraps. Or a fire giant with a rune etched sword.

This is not your everyday creature, nor is it your everyday encounter.

What I see though is that the Damage for the NPC is already taking runes and what not into considerations.

Using my above example the cloud Giant is effectively already using Handwraps.

Where as if the giant increases to 3d8+15 It would now be considered a Level 15 creature (give or take) and the other stats would also increase.

Thank you all.

[SuperBidi]

"A striking rune stores destructive magic in the weapon, increasing the weapon damage dice it deals to two instead of one."

Adding a Striking Rune doesn't add damage dice, it adds a damage dice up to. So, giving a Striking Rune to the Giant won't increase it's number of damage dice. Giving a Greater Striking Rune would, but only to 3 dice.