How many age categories should dragons have?

Celebrim said:

I'm fairly sure this or something quite like it was actually done.

But I also think you need to back up and look at someone else's complaints in this thread to understand why I think that is not necessarily a solution. In fact, I'd guess that the holes in 4e only really exist because 4e didn't last long enough as an economically viable product to make publishing dragon stat blocks to fill the gaps worthwhile.

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Well, in the case of 4e, you can comfortably adjust the dragons' CR (or levels, more specifically) by up to 4 in either direction without any mechanical hindrances. Thus there are no gaps in the monster levels -- everything between 1-30 is covered, and even above.

But that obviously assumes that the system supports easy CR adjustments. I suppose with a system like 3.5 it makes sense, mechanically at least, to have more age categories.

Teemu said:

Well, in the case of 4e, you can comfortably adjust the dragons' CR (or levels, more specifically) by up to 4 in either direction without any mechanical hindrances. Thus there are no gaps in the monster levels -- everything between 1-30 is covered, and even above.

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If you have that ability to cross reference, you have a big portion of what I'm going for, except that for 1e or 3e, you have to specifically spell out what those levels look like for a given dragon since you don't have a unified system.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that this is as smooth in 4e as you suggest since IMO, 4e never 'fixed the math' nearly as well as it claimed to. Merely adjusting HD, AC, and implied attack bonus alone doesn't really cover it, as over that 8 level gap you also need to adjust damage per attack and adjust the monsters capabilities to take into account newly unlocked abilities/capabilities of the PC's. I'm not familiar enough with 4e to call out this scaling specifically, but I do know that 4e didn't scale up correctly particularly in terms of monsters abilities to both dish out damage spikes and deal with PC's having synergized action granting/stealing abilities.

Nonetheless, if we assume you are right and you can scale a dragon entry up or down to cover the gaps easily, then I'd suggest what you have is a bunch of 'hidden' age categories that the DM now has access to, and that although those age categories might not have specific stat blocks, this is fundamentally little different from the fact that in 1e each dragon had 24 varieties without the need to explicitly spell out 24 different stat blocks.

The 4e monster math as of MM3 is to adjust all defenses, attack bonuses and damage by 1 per level, either up or down. One reason why you shouldn't go more than 4 levels in either direction is just the one you mentioned -- different PC capabilities between level bands. It's very simple, and the only real math you have to do is when you adjust hit points since those vary between monster roles. The MM3 math works very well without major issues.

I'd also say that the relatively low amount of age categories in 4e make more sense in that edition than, say 3e, because the rules assume that an individual stat block is not the exhaustive representation of a creature but rather one context-specific example (the same individual could have a different level or role depending on when featured in the game). Not really the assumption in most other editions.

For me:
Newborn
Kid/Teen
Young also known as Young Adult
Full Adult or Middle Age
Ancient or Old

.

Think about what dragons actually appear in play over the course of a long campaign.

IME you get at most 1 wyrmling at the start, 1 gargantuan ancient wyrm at the end, and potentially a lot of adult & old dragons in the middle.

So in terms of dragon CRs I would go for a bell curve, not linear distribution. I don't need 6-12 CR 30 ancient dragon stat blocks, and I probably don't need a bunch of CR 1-3 wyrmlings either.

4e Monster Vault did a terrible job on the CR distribution by giving Young CR 3-8 and Elder CR 15-22 dragons, but no adult dragons in-between.

For a typical campaign I am probably going to want the weakest dragons at around CR 6 (because I still want them scary to low level PCs), mid-heroic, a lot of dragons around CR 10-15, a good number 16-20 and a few 21-25. So I would suggest demi-tiers:

Young CR 6-10
Adult CR 11-15
Old CR 16-20
Ancient CR 21-25

If I'm playing 4e at high epic I want the PCs to feel more powerful than any dragons except for rare Dragotha type uniques. Eg I used a 4e CR 30 Ancient Black as Phalazure, exarch of Orcus, IMC.

Celebrim said:

I confess to being a bit surprised about the outcome of the polling thus far. The majority appear to want 5 categories, roughly speaking: small, medium, large, huge and gargantuan.

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I have a gargantuan mini (the 3e Black) and a collossal mini (Reaper's Kaladrax). It takes years of play before the PCs can get to fight these. They make good unique end bosses but I don't need lots of generic gargantuan & collossal dragon stats.

Likewise I have a couple horse-sized dragons (Reaper's young white/red, and the WoTC 3e baby black) that just about fit a medium base, but I have little need for medium dragon stats - these are really all closer to Large.

Conversely I have tons & tons of Large & Huge dragon minis, that's definitely where the action is. So I suggest probably 2 tiers of Large stats & 2 tiers of Huge stats might be most useful. Add a tier of small/medium wyrmling stats if desired.

S'mon said:

I have a gargantuan mini (the 3e Black) and a collossal mini (Reaper's Kaladrax). It takes years of play before the PCs can get to fight these. They make good unique end bosses but I don't need lots of generic gargantuan & collossal dragon stats.

Likewise I have a couple horse-sized dragons (Reaper's young white/red, and the WoTC 3e baby black) that just about fit a medium base, but I have little need for medium dragon stats - these are really all closer to Large.

Conversely I have tons & tons of Large & Huge dragon minis, that's definitely where the action is. So I suggest probably 2 tiers of Large stats & 2 tiers of Huge stats might be most useful. Add a tier of small/medium wyrmling stats if desired.

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Sizing dragons (or really any serpentine creature) has always been difficult for me.

If you look at typical dragon images, a dragon can be divided into three sections: neck, body, and tail. The neck of a dragon is usually either as long as the body or slightly shorter. The tail of the dragon is usually either as long as the body or slightly longer.

Measurements given for a dragon are usually from the snout to tip of tail. So a 30' long dragon can be thought of as roughly 10' of neck, 10' of body, and 10' of tail. That's a big creature, but how big is this creature?

The horse is generally thought of as an iconic large creature, while the elephant is generally considered an iconic huge creature. A typical male elephant is about 18' long. The dragon, while longer, is mostly serpentine. If you line the dragon up against the elephant, the first 10' are mostly thin neck, then you have some body, and then the part that sticks out past the elephant is mostly thin tail. If the elephant sticks it's trunk out, it's nearly as long as the dragon. Perhaps more surprisingly, the shoulders of this 30' long dragon are actually only 4-5' high, with another couple of feet rising above that to anchor the long neck. Although the neck allows the dragon to rear up to a great height, it's body isn't really much taller than a person. The elephant is thicker, taller, and more heavily built. The bull elephant (about 12000 lb) weighs much more than the 30' long dragon (about 5000 lb).

That's more than twice the size of a Clydesdale, so ok, this 30' long dragon is Huge. But it's also clear that it can get a lot bigger before we ever need to consider Gargantuan. If you look at the size table though, 30' is near the top end for a huge creature. But 5000lb is near the bottom end. The top end on weight is 16 tons, which a dragon won't reach until it's about 55' feat long.

The top end on gargantuan is an astounding 125 tons. A dragon doesn't reach that until its 110' long! So Colossal dragons are BIG! Right now, none of the dragons on my table come remotely close to Colossal Size - nor do any of the dragons in the 1e Monster Manual. Similar serpentine creatures like a Brontosaurus, often treated as the iconic Colossal creature, are also not Colossal by these estimates. Indeed, the Brontosaurus is more serpentine than a typical dragon, with a thinner body, neck, and tail. Despite hitting 72' long, they only top out at about 16 tones - barely into the Gargantuan range. To get to Colossal scale, a sauropod has to hit like 140' long, with a body scale of 4x10 squares and a reach of 40'.

Snakes are even more extreme. A 170' long snake, even one with a heavy body plan, is only solidly in the Gargantuan range (77 tons) in terms of weight. It can curl up in that 20'x20' gargantuan space (assuming you use 3.5 bases), but it's reach is over 50'.

All that is mostly just musing, except to note that the biggest dragon currently on my 1e table scales in 3e only to Gargantuan, and only reds, blues, and a rare green hit that size. Likewise, while the top end of 3e reds is a colossal dragon that is like CR 26 (and they deliberately understated dragon CR to make them 'scarier'), where as the top end 1e dragon (huge red) only scales to about CR 16 on my table assuming a faithful conversion to 3e. (And if I cared about 4e, presumably scales to about 24th level in 4e.)

So to get back to where this thread came from, to fill out anything above those sizes involves going from the 10 size categories of late 1e (based on innovations in dragon articles) to the 12 size categories of 2e, and even then probably wouldn't involve anything with as many as 40HD.

So another way to look at this is, do we need those very high end colossal scale epic dragons? I don't feel like I do, and I'd rather get 'worse than the worst' by way of templates and unique dragons, but what do others think?

I don't think any elephant body is anything like 20 feet long though.

I would peg a 10' torso dragon as a smallish Huge.

S'mon said:

I don't think any elephant body is anything like 20 feet long though.

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Getting exact length numbers on an elephant were (and are) proving tricky, because some times the author records tail and trunk length and some times not, and sometimes length of the skull is included and sometimes not. And generally, the author doesn't say exactly what is meant by length. As best as I can tell, in a male African bush elephant, body length including skull is 16'-20', with a tail length of ~4' and a trunk length (projecting beyond the head) of ~7'.

I would peg a 10' torso dragon as a smallish Huge.

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Well, so did I.

What I think might be more controversial is that I pegged a 54' dragon as 'largeish Huge'. The biggest red on my table is 72' long, which using the same logic that a 10' torso dragon is smallish Huge, comes out as only Gargantuan rather than Colossal.

Note sizes in the 1e Monster Manual. Scaling in the 3e game suggests the biggest reds are assumed to be about 90' (about the same size as my biggest red if I add two more age categories, but with more HD) which would make them long enough for the 3e colossal size but a bit lighter than is suggested for weight. Note though the extended reach of the neck, suggesting the designer is thinking about the same problems.