BADD- evaluate my dragon DM'ing? (KotSQ, Glacier Season module SPOILERS)

Dr Midnight · Feb 26, 2002

I don't want any of my players reading this. Especially Doug. You hear me, you system-exploiting goateed bastard?

So, last night, my players (at the beginning of the module) decide to scry on the dragon at the end of the module, and then to teleport straight to him. Just forego all that needless adventure crap and kill the bad guy. Now- this dragon is a Great White Wyrm. The zenith of what a white dragon can be. 11th level party.

After cramming a pencil in my eye socket, I gave in. What could I do?

Here's the jist of what happened:

While scrying, they saw him scrying back. They made a Spellcraft check to see that he cast Antimagic Field and the scry ended. They decided to wait until it out.

Eventually they teleport in, having only given the dragon enough time to cast haste, stoneskin, and endurance on itself. Combat begins.

The dragon's placed himself in a dragon-sized nook in his cavern, to avoid flanking. Breath weapon takes them down a bit.

PCs can't seem to get a spell past his SR, and I only need to not roll a 1 on any attack the dragon makes to hit.

PCs hit the area with silence, which turned out to be a good move. The dragon attempts to bull rush past them, but they actually made the strength check to keep it from getting out. They keep on a-hacking, only doing maybe 6 points at a time considering stoneskin and DR. Dragon does 30 points damage, average, with each bite/claw/wing/whatever.

One character was improved invisibified and a lich, so the cold didn't bother him. He was tricky.

The battle took two hours. At the end, they'd only taken the dragon down by maybe 160 REAL points (just over one third of its total). Only one character death, and one familiar death. The PCs retreated, jumping into a bag of holding and being teleported out.

So... BADD comments? There WILL be a round 2, and I want this dragon to be absolutely unstoppable. Advise!

Jezrael · Feb 26, 2002

Bull Rush

I know rules is rules and all, but...they stopped a Great Wyrm from bull rushing? Unless they all have massive strength buffing items this shouldn't even be possible, I'm assuming the characters are medium sized here. If so the sheer momentum of the dragon (GW are gargantuan are they not? or at least huge?), just a minor nitpick, but I feel the dragon should have rushed all over them.

The dragon buffing itself with spells was a good thing...not bad for such a short notice prep (from the Dragon's point of view), though he should have at least had a couple of traps waiting for them.

Edit: All in all kudos for having a tough dragon enemy on such short (game time, that is) notice.

Dr Midnight · Feb 26, 2002

I couldn't believe the bull rush thing either. They made a collective strength check and rolled a natural twenty, getting a forty-two as their check.

The dragon is gargantuan (+12 size) and has 27 str (+8), and rolled poorly. Poorly +20 did not beat 42.

Tell me if I did that wrong, but I don't believe I did.

Wolfspider · Feb 26, 2002

Sounds like a pretty epic battle.

I have a few suggestions on preparing the dragon for the rematch.

It will, of course, take steps to make sure that the party can't scry its lair any more. There are certain spells that will facilitate this, I believe. The dragon should also add some ice stalagtites and columns to its lair to foil any attempts to teleport into it again using the previous image. If you really want to be nasty, have the entire lair set to collapse when the party appears--one big, nasty booby-trap.

Since the dragon realized that the lich was shrugging off its cold breath weapon, have the dragon use a spell that was mentioned in a previous B.A.D.D. thread to change the nature of its breath weapon to fire. It should try to use the lich's overconfidence to lure the undead wizard into a trap using this new breath weapon. (Try to be tricky here; don't be too obvious.)

Could you give some more information about the party, including levels and classes and magic items (at least ones the dragon would know about)?

I'll take a closer look at the adventure when I get home.

So they stopped the dragon from bullrushing. That seems pretty incredible. Details, please.

Jezrael · Feb 26, 2002

Dr Midnight said:
I couldn't believe the bull rush thing either. They made a collective strength check and rolled a natural twenty, getting a forty-two as their check.

The dragon is gargantuan (+12 size) and has 27 str (+8), and rolled poorly. Poorly +20 did not beat 42.

Tell me if I did that wrong, but I don't believe I did.

You didn't do it wrong or anything, it's just one of those nitpicks I have where I believe that the 3E rules try to override common sense and I respond accordingly.

Wolfspider · Feb 26, 2002

Well, wouldn't the dragon be bullrushing the characters individually? Where does it say that the characters get to pool their strength bonuses and add this to the roll? If they do, then there's no way that that a dragon could push its way through any large group of humanoids, when logically it would seem that it would be able to push them aside with impunity. Also, I figure the dragon's lair is covered in ice and show. The characters would naturally receive a penalty to their roll to resist the bull rush since they wouldn't be very stable on the ice. The dragon would be unaffected by the ice, of course.

In any case this doesn't seem like a realistic outcome to the dragon's bullrush.

By the way, I'm not very familiar with this rule and I'm just going off of what the SRD says.

Dr Midnight · Feb 26, 2002

Party facts of note:
1 wiz 11
2 ftr 12
1 clr lich (wee jas) 11
1 sor

Only real magic items that did anything were weapons... mostly +3, which gets around the DR.

Fighters blocked access to attacking the wizards, and the silence spell kept it from casting on them. All it could do was breath weapon every 2 rounds.

The dragon DIDN'T know the invisible guy was a lich, therefore immune to cold. With +44 to its listen, however, it could almost always tell where he was, even in the fog of war.

MasterOfHeaven · Feb 26, 2002

Out of curiosity, are you planning on having the Dragon go after them, or are the PCs going to be the aggressors once again? I would think the Dragon would take the initiative at this point.

Wolfspider · Feb 26, 2002

Out of curiosity, are you planning on having the Dragon go after them, or are the PCs going to be the aggressors once again? I would think the Dragon would take the initiative at this point.

Yes, indeed, since it wasn't that badly hurt, it should just heal up real quick (using potions or whatnot), scry the party to find them when their sleeping and trying to recover their spells, and just teleport right into the middle of them while they're basically unarmed, unarmored, and helpless.

Dr Midnight · Feb 26, 2002

Wolfspider said:
Well, wouldn't the dragon be bullrushing the characters individually? Where does it say that the characters get to pool their strength bonuses and add this to the roll? If they do, then there's no way that that a dragon could push its way through any large group of humanoids, when logically it would seem that it would be able to push them aside with impunity. Also, I figure the dragon's lair is covered in ice and show. The characters would naturally receive a penalty to their roll to resist the bull rush since they wouldn't be very stable on the ice. The dragon would be unaffected by the ice, of course.

The only way out of the nook was through four PCs. It couldn't just focus on any one of them... it had to get out through all four. I know it wouldn't seem like it would make sense, but by 3rd edition rules, they kept a dragon from pushing out... Oh well.

They were all flying, so the ice beneath them didn't really come into play.