MitD XII: This Space Intentionally Left Dark

[Keltest]

Why would that make one of them a clue to keep and the other something to ignore?

Because one of them is something he thinks it could be/is, and treating them equally means a stroke against it.

[thelivingmonkey]

It's almost like one of them is enabling possibilities while the other is denying them.

If the goal is to figure out the singular best guess, I think it's better to "deny" possibilities as you say. If consensus is that 50 creatures are equally viable, guessing is just generating a random number at that point.

Besides, in one instance, redcloak, who has been established as careful and untrusting as well as dedicated and studied, claims that a super powerful (more powerful than he is probably) monster that he has been traveling with for a long time does not have a specific ability. Sure, it technically is not fact that MitD does not have this ability. However, using the characterization of redcloak, I (and other people here) find it very likely that he has figured out everything the MitD can do at this point. So, for the purposes of this guessing game and until we have evidence that disputes this, we can assume MitD does not have this ability.

The other instance is redcloak saying that one of the most powerful mortals to have ever lived, who he happens to literally worship and has never met, had better than average stats. There is no reason in this case to assume he is wrong. But, for the purposes of this guessing game, there is no need to even look at this evidence as it has nothing to do with MitD, except by the proxy that MitD knows redcloak I guess? It's like saying "Roy has a sword, so we know swords exist in this world, so if we give MitD a sword he does enough damage to explain the tower scene". Technically no logical fallacy there, but unnecessary mental gymnastics for little to no gain.

I, for one, has no reason to doubt that the elite array does exist in OOTS. I also, however, have no reason to believe that MitD has the elite array, and that we should add that to every monster that almost fits because it convolutes the guessing pool and makes it much, much harder to discern what the MitD actually is.

[Crusher]

It's almost like one of them is enabling possibilities while the other is denying them.

Why does that matter?

RC is broadly knowledgeable about monsters. He knew force attacks worked better than elemental damage against the ghost paladins, he summoned the cesium elemental (or whatever exactly it was), and he seemed pretty confident he knew what MitD was.

However, I think its possible RC won’t know EVERYTHING about any particular monster. For example, per another thread, Black Dragons apparently are supposed to bathe their eggs in strong acid to help along the maturation process and its debated whether they’re very good parents. Force dragons, I think, gain plane shift as an ability when they hit Ancient. These are things I could totally see RC not knowing.

But he’d certainly know that a black dragon has an acid-base breath attack. He’ll know it can fly and that it might be able to use magic, with the odds going up as its gets older.

The relevance of this depends on the monster in question. He’ll know a Glabrezu can cast a variety of things as SLAs, but he might not remember that Confusion is one of them. He’s certainly going to assume that an epic-grade naga is going to be an extremely powerful spell-caster, because that’s a really fundamental trait for naga. I mean, I their preference for using their magic is written in their racial fluff.

[Kish]

It's almost like one of them is enabling possibilities while the other is denying them.

That's quite a revelatory statement. Do you apply it consistently--that is, should literally all criteria be removed, such that the thread-starting post consists of "the creature in the darkness is some creature, could be literally anything, since Rich could handwave anything he chose"? And then perhaps an alphabetical list of everything that's ever been proposed, with no sections for pros or cons because those only deny possibilities?

If not, why not?

[Vulkos]

Hello! New here (to both D&D and the forum, not the comic.) I know I might not fit in with all the professionals here, or maybe somebody has had this idea, but in think about MitD...so the gods don’t know about the planet in the rift, right? So that means they aren’t all-knowing.

So what if MitD has some sort of relation to the Greek Gods? I think the Western Pantheon? I dunno. It’s generally assumed that he is extremely powerful, maybe god-tier.

So just tossing the idea out. Maybe it can find ground, maybe not. And yes, I know there are a lot of holes in the theory, like him having parents or the lack of followers that a God would need to survive the destruction of a world, but it’s just a thought.

Definitely not a God, as said and explained, but I find the idea of MitD being a Greek mithology beast very fascinating if someone could think of one that fit the criteria.

[Crusher]

Definitely not a God, as said and explained, but I find the idea of MitD being a Greek mithology beast very fascinating if someone could think of one that fit the criteria.

Yeah. The concept of a Thematic Relevance Score is silly, but I suspect everyone has at least a vague notion in their head of how well each race would fit into the story as MitD. Of course, it'll never be quantified because none of us actually know how the story is going to turn out (which will strongly impact what turns out to be relevant) and as a result we mostly disagree with each other because we all have slightly different assumptions about what will turn out to be relevant.

However, no matter how you slice it, having MitD turn out to be a long-lost minion of the Eastern Gods would score incredibly high on that hypothetical scale. The issue, as you note, is making it work. Lots of folks have looked into Greek mythology monsters and zero good fits have been found. They do tend to be big and strong and weird looking, but they tend to be short on magic especially teleportation.

[Quebbster]

Another indicator that Redcloak knows a thing or two about the MitD's capabilities is that he was removed from the scene Before the Escape happened. He probably would have been able to piece together what happened if he witnessed it himself instead of just being told that they escaped. Speculative admittedly, but still.

[lio45]

Is there a real risk of the MitD being blown out of the crate through the windows?
Anyway, I don't have a physics degree or anything, but as I understand it the physics of flight are pretty simple: In order to stay aloft, you need to apply enough force to counteract the pull of gravity. Thus, to push yourself up (or at least not go downwards), you will exert a downward force equal to or greater than the force of gravity.
TL;DR - it doesn't really matter if the MitD is touching the bottom of the crate or not, Redcloak will still need to carry his weight, whatever that may be.

In GW's example (sealed plane with a billion mosquitoes in it), the lifter has to lift all the weight including the entirety of the flying stuff; BUT that's only because the flying things are flying under real world physics (i.e. flapping their wings to do that, transferring the force of their weighting mass to the air and eventually the carcass of the plane).

If the mosquitoes were instead magically hovering, they'd be weightless.



Edit - somehow I managed to miss the second part of your post:

Magical flight is the obvious loophole for this, but it depends on how detailed you want to be. It might be the magic that generates the force that keeps you aloft, in which case the problem remains. Or I suppose the magic could just say "screw gravity" or something...

Exactly. If "Flying MitD" is a giant snake without wings, then it's basically guaranteed to be weightless as it's flying magically.

[Crusher]

Ok, I've got some thoughts I'm trying to sort through so I figured I'd post in an effort to clarify things a bit for myself. This will be long, but I'll probably post a follow-up TL;DR with a proposal or two afterwards.

1) I think MitD *itself* is Large (possibly the very top of Medium or the very bottom of Huge, but probably Large), but we've had numerous hints that an average member of its race is bigger. Minimum of Large, probably Huge, but possibly bigger than that. We don't know *why* he's small. He seems immature and still developing, so him not yet being an adult seems plausible, but there are many other possibilities like dungeon-bred, cursed, malnourished (not necessarily food, possibly in a magical or other obscure fashion).

This causes some issues for clue-finding, because the different ways of making MitD smaller have different implications. In the range we're looking at, each range of size reduction comes with a -8 STR but beyond that it gets very nebulous. Being Dungeonbred has very specific stat changes, Cursed could be an incredibly wide range of possible effects, and being young for a non-dragon has totally undefined changes making it really hard to analyze.

As an aside, we know that Rich decided around strip #100 what race he wanted the MitD to be. However, I suspect he knew the reveal wouldn't be for a LONG time so he didn't think a ton about it other than dropping the occasional hints which gradually defined it more. My suspicion (based on nothing) is that after a few hundred strips, he suddenly realized that the art had implied the MitD was roughly a Large-size creature, when the creature type itself was more like Huge. He then worked in the MitD being smaller than normal as a plot-point as a way of basically fixing the sizing problem.

2) I think the MitD's species will end up being extremely important for the story, will carry a ton of symbolic weight, and will make sense with the clues we've been given. However, since we haven't been given all the clues yet, we don't yet know *why* or *how* it will be symbolic. Bashing each other over the head with candidate X or Y being more thematically consistent with the story is ridiculous at this stage because we don't know where the story is going to go and what would be consistent with it.

3) Similarly, I suspect RC knows a LOT more about MitD than has been shared with us. RC is a smart, thorough guy. When he first saw MitD, he recognized him as a very powerful creature and probably did a ton of research to find out as much as he could. However, the two have been together with Xykon for *decades* now, and RC has long since given up on trying to get much mileage out of MitD though he still acknowledges MitD's enormous potential power. As noted a few pages back, Tarquin would point out that RC and Xykon being so circumspect in discussing MitD's capabilities suggests they know some potentially plot-important information Rich intentionally doesn't want us to know yet.

The assumption is that MitD is useless because of his personality, and that certainly seems likely, but its possible he has other issues (which could end up being plot-important). For example, maybe he's a Ha-Naga who, despite years of prodding by RC, appears totally incapable of casting spells for some reason (which ends up tying into the plot).

The problem is that we don't *know* any of this to be the case. It *could* be a spell-less Ha-Naga (setting aside other issues), but if we allow every supposition we can't prove *isn't* the case, then we'll have an FBS list 100+ monsters long and it'll be chaos. We have to stick to things we actually have evidence for.

4) Finally, I've been thinking about Nerdanel's analysis on STR required to break the walls in the Tower Scene (which, alarmingly enough, was done 8+ years ago). I think she (I think Nerdanel was a "she" for some reason) did solid work, but I think some of our assumptions may have changed since then. For example, we're more firmly anti-template now (though she did not include templates in that final post) and we've more settled on proving things via maximum or minimum possible rolls rather than average rolls.

Anyway, revisiting her analysis, there are a few things I want to revisit.

First, I think its extremely unlikely MitD used Power Throw on Miko. The game was to hit as softly as possible, and while MitD failed badly at this, his sadness afterwards suggests he didn't *mean* to fail. Someone who genuinely intends to hit softly isn't going to trade their attack bonus for bonus damage via Power Throw.

Second, the Epic Sunder feat doesn't grow on trees. In fact, none of the monsters in the Epic book even have the feat. Doesn't mean MitD *couldn't* have it, but it would have to be explained. A few monsters (like the Black Slaad) have Great Sunder which allows you to halve the Hardness on a structure you hit.

Third, I think the Complete Warrior improvised weapon table is reasonable (basically, Miko is a 101-200 pound improvised weapon and therefore does 4d6 damage to the wall), and we should assume she does maximum damage (24).

Fourth and finally, I know the art has changed, but from the panel itself (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0374.html), it really doesn't look like that wall is 12 inches thick. I'd say it looks more like 2-3" thick.

Stone has a hardness of 8 and 15 hp per 1" of thickness. A 2" thick stone wall would take 38 damage to break on a single hit (34 if you have Greater Sunder). A thrown Miko could do up to 24 damage + MITD's STR bonus excluding bonus damage from Feats or special abilities (and as I mentioned before, I think its reasonable to exclude Power Throw and Epic Sunder).

So, 24 + X = 38 to break the wall, with X = MitD's STR bonus. That means MitD needs a STR bonus of +14, implying a STR of at least 38 (or 30, if its a monster with Greater Sunder). With this in mind, I think its worth discussing whether we should raise the MitD's minimum STR a bit to 38, or somewhere in the 35-40 range for artistic license.

[Vendanna]

Well, my reasoning for why I think its half dragon its for multiple reasons:

a) before strip 100 there was no Real dragon creature on a comic based on D&D.
b) the Red dragon is the most iconic creature on the entire D&D universe and usually appeared at the end of the campaings/dungeons.
c) Why making a "troll that is part dragon" on durkon's pa's history if it ain't to tell us that "template" is on play? he could have used any other monsters for the tragic history of durkon's family?

d) the red dragon is usually depicted with yellow eyes.

not trying to convince anybody just showing why I thought the MitD could be half dragon. may you have a nice day! :)

[Keltest]

Shall we start a long debate about the probable thickness of a medieval tower wall from various Asian cultures? I don't like the idea of just eyeballing the tower wall at 2-3 inches thick. That's like the thickness of my house, and even I could probably tear a hole in a brick wall of that thickness with a sledgehammer. 12 inches might be on the thick side, but I'm not sure a 2 inch thick wall of bricks could even support the weight of a tower, much less withstand any sort of siege equipment. Heck, a regular person with slightly above average strength could tear down that wall with a sledgehammer if they had the time and patience, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a fortification to begin with.

Given that castles would have walls several feet think, 2-3 inches is practically paper, art aside.


Upon further examination, the wall at the base of the tower seems to be somewhere between one and two feet in thickness.

[Jasdoif]

Fourth and finally, I know the art has changed, but from the panel itself (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0374.html), it really doesn't look like that wall is 12 inches thick. I'd say it looks more like 2-3" thick.

Stone has a hardness of 8 and 15 hp per 1" of thickness. A 2" thick stone wall would take 38 damage to break on a single hit (34 if you have Greater Sunder). A thrown Miko could do up to 24 damage + MITD's STR bonus excluding bonus damage from Feats or special abilities (and as I mentioned before, I think its reasonable to exclude Power Throw and Epic Sunder).

So, 24 + X = 38 to break the wall, with X = MitD's STR bonus. That means MitD needs a STR bonus of +14, implying a STR of at least 38 (or 30, if its a monster with Greater Sunder). With this in mind, I think its worth discussing whether we should raise the MitD's minimum STR a bit to 38, or somewhere in the 35-40 range for artistic license.

Since you bring up the art....Are we sure it's stone? Masonry would be much more typical for an above-ground structure...and the slits and crenellations would make more sense too.

[Crusher]

So, TL;DR follow-up post:

1) I've given it a lot of thought, and I do think we should do away with the size maximum for MitD's *race* and in fact I think we should put in a racial size minimum of Large. We know *he* is around Large in size but we also know he's small for his race but we don't know *how* small. Maybe his race is typically bigger, but not a lot bigger (10' instead of 8' or whatever), so Large is possible. On the other hand, we don't really have any evidence for his race typically being 15' tall (huge) instead of 65' tall (colossal).

2) As a reminder, lets not put too much weight on answers that seem good because they're appropriate for the story or something that "Rich would want". We don't know where the story is going, what he would want, or what's important.

3) As a reminder, we need to base our analysis on building from the clues we *know*. If we try to prove negatives ("We don't know the MitD can't do that!") we'll all fall down a rabbit-hole of crazy.

4) I think we should raise MitD's minimum STR to... lets say 38 (I'm open to discussion on this). When looking at a race that's larger than Large (or maybe Huge, I'm flexible), you need to subtract 8 from its STR per size step-reduction. So, a Colossal creature gets a -24 (or -16) STR penalty BEFORE HITTING THE TARGET. So, a Colossal creature would need a STR of ~60, Gargantuan would be 50-something, etc. However, monsters with Greater (or Epic, if anyone finds one) Sunder as a feat can lower that a bit, as can any monsters that have special racial along those lines (I think a couple versions of the Goristro have stuff, and I'm sure there are others).

[lio45]

Shall we start a long debate about the probable thickness of a medieval tower wall from various Asian cultures? I don't like the idea of just eyeballing the tower wall at 2-3 inches thick.

Are we sure it's stone? Masonry would be much more typical for an above-ground structure...and the slits and crenellations would make more sense too.

We can cut to the conclusion in both cases:

Carpentry debate -> the empty box alone would be far too heavy for RC to carry, let alone with MitD in it; so we have to invoke Rich taking liberties, and can't really draw conclusions.

Masonry debate -> the strength needed to blast people through such a wall (with appropriately-shaped holes to boot) would be insane; also, it would turn them into a pulp, so again, all things considered, there's no way around Rich obviously taking liberties, and can't draw conclusions beyond "MitD is crazy strong and whatever lower limit we set is probably low enough that it's going to be somewhat unsatisfying but otherwise we'd be out of FBS candidates".

[Doug Lampert]

and being young for a non-dragon has totally undefined changes making it really hard to analyze.

Look in your actual print 3.5 MM, I believe you'll find that there are rules for two younger age categories of giant with size reductions for each.

I may be off and that have been the 3.0 MM. But at least one of them had it. So we do have rules for younger and smaller for a non-draconic type.

IIRC Rich objects to the existence of such rules.

[Ruck]

It's almost like one of them is enabling possibilities while the other is denying them.

Why is that a good thing? For most of us, the goal of this thread is to get to an accurate estimation of what MitD could be, not to provide a place where everyone's guesses are considered equally valid no matter how far-fetched.

That's quite a revelatory statement. Do you apply it consistently--that is, should literally all criteria be removed, such that the thread-starting post consists of "the creature in the darkness is some creature, could be literally anything, since Rich could handwave anything he chose"? And then perhaps an alphabetical list of everything that's ever been proposed, with no sections for pros or cons because those only deny possibilities?

If not, why not?

Ooh, I can't wait to hear this answer.

[Crusher]

Shall we start a long debate about the probable thickness of a medieval tower wall from various Asian cultures? I don't like the idea of just eyeballing the tower wall at 2-3 inches thick. That's like the thickness of my house, and even I could probably tear a hole in a brick wall of that thickness with a sledgehammer. 12 inches might be on the thick side, but I'm not sure a 2 inch thick wall of bricks could even support the weight of a tower, much less withstand any sort of siege equipment. Heck, a regular person with slightly above average strength could tear down that wall with a sledgehammer if they had the time and patience, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a fortification to begin with.

Given that castles would have walls several feet think, 2-3 inches is practically paper, art aside.


Upon further examination, the wall at the base of the tower seems to be somewhere between one and two feet in thickness.

Ooh! Look out medieval carpentry! We're coming for you!

I agree that the doorway (with the door blasted out) looks like about a foot thick. To be honest, I'd always thought Miko ran into the MitD on a higher floor (maybe going for the signaling gem) where the walls would probably be thinner, but looking at the strip again it looks like she's on the ground floor.

Having the walls be breakable by a normal person and a sledgehammer isn't really a problem. I mean, the walls aren't intended to be indestructible on their own forever. The idea is that they slow down the enemy (by a lot), giving the defenders time to pepper the attackers with arrows and signal for help.

In game mechanics, a normal person with a sledgehammer could knock down a 3' stone wall just like a 2" thick masonry wall, it would just take them a lot longer. Both materials have a Hardness of 8, so the person would do 2d6 - 8 damage per swing. The stone wall would have 540 hp while the masonry wall would have 15 hp. If I was DMing it, I'd say the person, if unimpeded, could bash through the masonry wall in a few minutes while the stone wall, after allowing for rest, could be done in a work-day.

The art from those days doesn't really give us a lot of clues. There are almost no details on the walls or construction to hint at thickness or even material used. Its clearly about a foot thick around the door (both from when the guards initially let Miko through and when RC steps through the shattered door), but around the Miko and Windstriker-shaped holes it really does look paper-thin. Its possible that the wall is particularly reinforced in front around the door (where an attack is most likely to happen), but since we know the tower is at least 5 stories high (Signal Gem is on floor 4, the archers are on a floor above that, and it could be higher for all we know though the art on #369 makes it look like the tower has 4 enclosed floors and then the archers are on top of the tower), a 2" thick wall on the ground floor does seem improbably fragile.

[Crusher]

Look in your actual print 3.5 MM, I believe you'll find that there are rules for two younger age categories of giant with size reductions for each.

I may be off and that have been the 3.0 MM. But at least one of them had it. So we do have rules for younger and smaller for a non-draconic type.

IIRC Rich objects to the existence of such rules.

Huh, so it is. Thanks for noting them. Yeah, I vaguely thought there were a few races that had stats for younger members other than dragons, but I had no idea which ones.

With the giants, its a straight-up penalty to size, STR, CON and skill ranks with nothing else changed.

...can't draw conclusions beyond "MitD is crazy strong and whatever lower limit we set is probably low enough that it's going to be somewhat unsatisfying but otherwise we'd be out of FBS candidates".

Yeah, I concede this is probably ultimately the case. However, its worth at least taking a stab to get a ballpark range. Without really disagreeing with your point, the problem is we have to put a marker down somewhere, otherwise we get a slippery slope.

Lets say we say the minimum is 30, but we're flexible on that. Someone comes along with a candidate with a STR of 27 and we say "Ok, its low, but its close enough so it passes." On its own, that's fine, but then a year later everyone kinda forgets about it until someone else comes along with a candidate with a STR of 25. They note how a 27 STR candidate did fine, and 25 is really close to 27, so shouldn't 25 also be ok? And then a year later we're down to 23, etc.

You need to pick a point and defend it based on *something*, because a Centaur with the elite array could have a STR of 23 and we shouldn't be struggling to find reasons to reject it (based on STR, anyway).

[Grey_Wolf_c]

With this in mind, I think its worth discussing whether we should raise the MitD's minimum STR a bit to 38, or somewhere in the 35-40 range for artistic license.

Reminder that the strength requirement for FBS is 30 to reflect that it's a guesstimate, and indeed obtained purposely as FLOOR(guesstimate, -1)

Grey Wolf

[Crusher]

Reminder that the strength requirement for FBS is 30 to reflect that it's a guesstimate, and indeed obtained purposely as FLOOR(guesstimate, -1)

Grey Wolf

Oh, right, good point. I should be referring to it as an FBS requirement rather than a MitD trait. But, yeah, I am aiming to at least get some discussion going on two points:

1) Replace racial size maximum with a racial size minimum (specifically, Large).
2) Raise the minimum STR a bit, which needs to be reached after penalizing anything bigger than Large (or maybe Huge) for being shrunk down.

I'm curious to see what people think.

[lio45]

Reminder that the strength requirement for FBS is 30 to reflect that it's a guesstimate, and indeed obtained purposely as FLOOR(guesstimate, -1)

Grey Wolf

Exactly. It makes a lot of sense to set that strict floor (the floor that automatically weeds out anything) to the lowest level we can tolerate.

Let's all keep in mind that any FBS creature that passes this criterion barely will have as a strong con "is not powerful enough to meet the Tower Scene requirements satisfactorily" (it just isn't SO weak that we don't even want to hear about that creature).

I'm 100% for removing the Size criterion entirely, on the grounds that "we have good reasons to believe MitD is a child of his species, and that he is smaller than his dad, and there are no firm rules on how small kids are compared to fully grown adults, so whatever the official adult size is, we can always justify MitD being Large from MitD being a child"

Actually, as Crusher kind of points out, if there's any size requirement, to me, it's that the official creature can't be SMALLER than "Huge". (MitD is at least one size category smaller than his dad, and in the comic, MitD is visibly Large.)




ETA:

Yeah, I concede this is probably ultimately the case. However, its worth at least taking a stab to get a ballpark range. Without really disagreeing with your point, the problem is we have to put a marker down somewhere, otherwise we get a slippery slope.

Lets say we say the minimum is 30, but we're flexible on that. Someone comes along with a candidate with a STR of 27 and we say "Ok, its low, but its close enough so it passes." On its own, that's fine, but then a year later everyone kinda forgets about it until someone else comes along with a candidate with a STR of 25. They note how a 27 STR candidate did fine, and 25 is really close to 27, so shouldn't 25 also be ok? And then a year later we're down to 23, etc.

You need to pick a point and defend it based on *something*, because a Centaur with the elite array could have a STR of 23 and we shouldn't be struggling to find reasons to reject it (based on STR, anyway).

That's actually exactly my point. We need to treat whatever number we pick as binding otherwise it's a slippery slope...... which is why the floor should be really as low as possible, so that we all feel confident that anything not even meeting that pathetically low bar can be weeded out without any further reviewing.

Basically, the only defensible way to fend off the semi-fictional scenario where one FBS creature has 31 STR and a participant's pet contender has 29 STR and that participant inevitably whines that it's unfair that the line is set there instead of somewhere else is to remind that person that the FBS contender with 31 STR has "is really far from strong enough" listed as one of its big drawbacks.

[monomer]

Ok, I've got some thoughts I'm trying to sort through so I figured I'd post in an effort to clarify things a bit for myself. This will be long, but I'll probably post a follow-up TL;DR with a proposal or two afterwards.

1) I think MitD *itself* is Large (possibly the very top of Medium or the very bottom of Huge, but probably Large), but we've had numerous hints that an average member of its race is bigger. Minimum of Large, probably Huge, but possibly bigger than that. We don't know *why* he's small. He seems immature and still developing, so him not yet being an adult seems plausible, but there are many other possibilities like dungeon-bred, cursed, malnourished (not necessarily food, possibly in a magical or other obscure fashion).

This causes some issues for clue-finding, because the different ways of making MitD smaller have different implications. In the range we're looking at, each range of size reduction comes with a -8 STR but beyond that it gets very nebulous. Being Dungeonbred has very specific stat changes, Cursed could be an incredibly wide range of possible effects, and being young for a non-dragon has totally undefined changes making it really hard to analyze.

Regarding the Dungeonbred Template, the author of Dungeonscape (whoever that was) does mention penalties due to size scaling:

Abilities: Increase from the base creature as follows: Str +4, Con +4. Since a dungeonbred monster is reduced in size from the base creature, remember to adjust its ability scores appropriately (MM 291).

The referenced Page 291 of the Monster Manual is likely referring to Table 4-2 which is basically the same as the Size Advancement table from the SRD. So in the case of say a Colossal creature, applying the Dungeonbred Template would increase the creature's Strength by +4, but going to the Gargantuan size-category would change its strength by -8, for a net change of -4 STR. Dungeonscape was published in February 2007, while Strip 374 (Tower Scene) was published on Nov 11, 2006, so The Giant would have known the penalties of decreasing a creature's size at this time (and in fact it should probably have been near the forefront of his thinking at the time).

4) Finally, I've been thinking about Nerdanel's analysis on STR required to break the walls in the Tower Scene (which, alarmingly enough, was done 8+ years ago). ...
Fourth and finally, I know the art has changed, but from the panel itself (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0374.html), it really doesn't look like that wall is 12 inches thick. I'd say it looks more like 2-3" thick.

I would say that it is very hard to judge thickness in what is essentially a 2D panel. The 3D panel of the tower door, showing a thickness of about 1-1.5 Redcloak Feet would be a better gauge. I also assumed that they were higher up in the tower where the walls would be thinner, but as you pointed out, the sequence of events shows that they are very likely on the first floor.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Oh, right, good point. I should be referring to it as an FBS requirement rather than a MitD trait. But, yeah, I am aiming to at least get some discussion going on two points:

1) Replace racial size maximum with a racial size minimum (specifically, Large).
2) Raise the minimum STR a bit, which needs to be reached after penalizing anything bigger than Large (or maybe Huge) for being shrunk down.

I'm curious to see what people think.

I think the current size limit is a better idea, because I do not believe Rich would have missed that his pick for MitD was gargantuan.

ETA: And I find adding a lower limit to the size of "bigger than Normal" is just complication for complication's sake, since I can't recall the last time we had a serious contender for FBS that small. If we start seeing dozens of them, maybe. Until then, not worth it.

I think increasing the precision of the strength requirement to two digits is a bad idea because it makes it sound like we have narrowed it down to a certainty degree far greater than we have. If that means that some creatures with strength 31 make it in that some participants think they should not, I am fine with that.

As always, my objective for the FBS conditions is to generate a subgroup of the full suggested list with a count of 6-12 creatures. Since we are currently in the window, I don't think we should change them.

Grey Wolf

[lio45]

I think the current size limit is a better idea, because I do not believe Rich would have missed that his pick for MitD was gargantuan.

Sure, but again, I don't believe that when Rich decided that MitD would be a child, he failed to notice that that fact would make MitD's father (as well as all other adults of the species) quite a bit larger than MitD.

[b_jonas]

Fourth and finally, I know the art has changed, but from the panel itself (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0374.html), it really doesn't look like that wall is 12 inches thick. I'd say it looks more like 2-3" thick.

We see the tower exterior in #368. It's about 10 meters tall. It can't be just a 3 inch thick stone wall, because that couldn't hold the weight of the tower. I think 12 inches is a more reasonable approximation. (It looks like Keltest and Crusher say the same.)

a) before strip 100 there was no Real dragon creature on a comic based on D&D.
c) Why making a "troll that is part dragon" on durkon's pa's history if it ain't to tell us that "template" is on play? he could have used any other monsters for the tragic history of durkon's family?

There was no dragon because the Order was too weak. Back at #100, the Order was running away from orcs. They leveled up a few times after that, and in #181, they met a juvenile black dragon, which I think is a difficulty 17 encounter. Update: Nope, they met a young adult black dragon, so the difficulty is more like 20.

Thank you for reminding me of that the foe Durkon's father fought was a half-dragon. (Can we call that troll "Tenrin's bane"?) It might be worth to mention that in the first post, as yet another occurance of half-dragons. Those are currently collected under the "Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Young Adult Green Dragon" entry in section 3d.

Grey_Wolf_c: in section 3d, under "Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Half-Green-Dragon Young Adult Green Dragon", can you change "Girard is half-dragon, Enor is half-dragon ogre." to "Girard is half-dragon, Enor is half-dragon ogre, Tenrin fought a half-dragon troll."?

1) I've given it a lot of thought, and I do think we should do away with the size maximum for MitD's *race* and in fact I think we should put in a racial size minimum of Large. We know *he* is around Large in size but we also know he's small for his race but we don't know *how* small.

No, he looks around medium size if he's walking on two legs, or large if he's walking on four. And even that isn't too certain, because the art doesn't show too much of him, and we have medium sized fairies and halflings on stilts in this comic.

Huh, so it is. Thanks for noting them. Yeah, I vaguely thought there were a few races that had stats for younger members other than dragons, but I had no idea which ones.

Elementals. Not necessarily different ages, but different sizes at least, which is what we need here. Also Viper snakes, and they go to unreasonably large sizes. I know that one because it came up in a discussion about the magical snake in Harry Potter.

[Crusher]

Um, crap. Someone wanted to change their MitD guess in the last few pages, eliminating one of their guesses, but I can't remember who it was and I can't find the post.

Anyone remember?

[Jasdoif]

Um, crap. Someone wanted to change their MitD guess in the last few pages, eliminating one of their guesses, but I can't remember who it was and I can't find the post.

Anyone remember?

Are you talking about halfeye?

Halfeye - Boojum 6/1/16, Black Hole > Boojum 7/24/18

Given the behaviour of the ?Nightcrawler? in strip 1159, I think it's one of those. The lack of eyes is puzzling though.

[Crusher]

Are you talking about halfeye?

No, it was someone who had 3 ordered guesses, and I believe the last one was Glabrezu which they wanted to remove.

The Halfeye one I completely missed, so thank you for that.

[Jasdoif]

No, it was someone who had 3 ordered guesses, and I believe the last one was Glabrezu which they wanted to remove.

Sounds like thelivingmonkey's; but that one's already reflected.

thelivingmonkey - Glabrezu 10/25/18, Protean > Glabrezu > Snorlax 3/13/19

CRUSHER! I'd like to change my vote to Protean > Glabrezu > Snorlax.

SO IT SHALL BE.

[Crusher]

Sounds like thelivingmonkey's; but that one's already reflected.

No, wasn't that one either. Thanks for hunting, though!

Edit - I might be thinking of thelivingmonkey's post in 729 (I think) in which s/he said they'd vote to remove it (from the FBS list) even though it was one of their guesses...

If its not that, I can't find it.