First of all, let me make it very clear that I'm not offended or angry or anything of the sort. Indeed, I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm a person who is often offensive and difficult and am generally just happy when I'm not making everyone else angry. I am extremely difficult to arouse to anger, and even when I'm giving offense it's not really anger behind that (most of the time).
However, different groups play different ways and the game, by that very nature has some subjectivity that needs to be understood. So again, what makes the game better for one group, even if that thing is excellent game design, doesn't make it better for all groups.
I'm not really sure what you are talking about here. The most subjective part of my rewrite are the ones that are the least mechanical, the slight alterations I've made in draconic culture, ecology, and behavior and the expansions I've made to flavor not found in the 1e entries. All of that I concede is entirely subjective and ought to be ignored or altered as suits the setting the DM desires.
The mechanical stuff is much less subjective. here are probably several viable approaches to solving the same problem that the mechanics try to solve, but ultimately as they are rules, then only per table variation is differences between the rules and processes of play the various tables use. As such, this moves discussion of that impact into a fairly objective area of, "how will this dragon impact the balance of my game given the assumptions prevalent at my table". And broadly, those problems can be addressed around expectations of challenge based on the capabilities PC's of a given level tend to have at your table, which is set by how you assign ability scores, how many players you have, how much you encourage henchmen, how many rules you apply or ignore, whether you've adopted UA rules, rules from Dragon magazine, various homebrew rules, and so forth. And my general response to that is that mostly that just changes which dragons are appropriate challenges at your table, and not whether these dragons are a better choice for you than the 1e RAW or even the 2e rewrite. In my opinion, they are better than both for all tables. And to the extent that they aren't, if for example the 2e RAW rewrite is better for your group, then its likely you have broad dysfunction at your table elsewhere based on inability of the game as a whole to cope with the choices you've made to make the 2e RAW dragons more attractive.
Now, personally what I was talking about was me as DM and how I like my dragons
Yes, I know. And I find that horribly irrelevant, and its the sort of mindset that - back when EnWorld had official House Rule sub-forums - I tended to try to dissuade DMs from having. So many DMs go with some gut instinct because they think it is cool and adopt rules with no real understanding of what they are trying to achieve, much less what the rules that they are adopting because they think they are cool will actually achieve. Quite often in the House Rule forums I'd see proud as punch novice DMs sharing house rules with the expectation of getting approval, when in fact the rules that they thought so cool didn't even do what they thought they would do.
Interesting approach. I have never thought to go back in fix 1e as a means to fixing whatever edition I am currently playing.
As a guy that believes he's been playing the same game over 30 odd years across editions, it's a pretty natural approach for me. After all, I had to 'port' my game to 3e, from a set of rules that was already an attempt at fixing 1e. I moved it to 3e because I believed the designers of 3e had recognized the same problems I was trying to fix and had found cleaner and more elegant solutions to the same problems. As I gained experience with 3e, one of the things I ended up discovering though is that they had gotten the math wrong in some subtle but important ways regarding high level 3e play (something widely acknowledged). So what I play now is a homebrew 3e based on what I learned about 3e, but which hasn't yet gone through the fire of rigorous play testing at high level.
Balanced against who then?
Ideally, against a theoretical high level party in a 1e system that bears a close resemblance to 1e but has been similar adjusted based on lessons learned. More likely, against a theoretical high level party that is more or less balanced and representative of what is likely given 'normal' play in 1e AD&D probably not too dissimilar from the sort of pre-generated characters Gygax presented in 'Isle of the Ape'. More broadly, against the range of power actually present at say 10th to 15th level, and 15th to 20th level, depending on how diligently the DM put his thumb on the scale to keep power creep down and high level play balanced against normal unmodified 1e AD&D monsters. This is a fairly broad range, and I would think you can over most of that range adjust it the way that you are already doing if you are somewhere in that range and it 'works for you' to adjust against the default assumptions of the RAW. So, for example, if you are on the end of the range where a Pit Fiend is a serious challenge to the party at 7th-9th level, then a dragon of the stated challenge rating is also a serious challenge to you and you can use the dragons strictly as suggested (or intended if you prefer). On the other hand, if you are at the end of the range where a pit fiend is a serious challenge to a
character of 8th-10th level, and so a party to be seriously challenged needs to be challenged with basically one pit fiend per party member, then obviously you will also need to face off against higher than intended level dragons. Maybe your 10th level party needs to face dragons of level XIV or level XVI to be suitably challenged. But, and here is the big difference between what I wrote and 1e dragons and what I wrote and 2e dragons and what I wrote and what you want me to write, and that is that if you do that, then the dragon will still be well balanced and work for you. The reason for that is that the higher level dragons presented here mostly scales up its defenses hit points linearly (or faster), while scaling up its damage sub-linearly and capping its per attack damage at a particular point. And the reason for that is regardless of which table we are talking about here, they all will implicitly share the same rules regarding how many hit points a PC may have and that in 1e AD&D that is very nearly hard capped by level. What is really varying between groups is mostly offensive punch and only to a lesser extent core defensive capabilities, and so the dragons are designed to scale around that - regardless of how much offensive punch the PC's at a specific table have.
You just said she could be cut to ribbons in one round.
Against a fully optimized post Unearthed Arcana party - absolutely. At which point, you will need to go looking for bigger challenges, as Tiamat alone simply isn't a big enough challenge for your party. The Tiamat I wrote was meant to face a slightly less optimized party (as described above) in single combat probably somewhere around the point the party is 16th-20th level (and she's likely not a hard fight by 23rd level). But my rules fully accommodate even more extreme play precisely because Tiamat is far from the biggest baddest dragon you can design with these open ended rules. She's merely the biggest baddest dragon you are expected to need if you've done your job as a DM more or less like the rules encourage you to. If she's not big enough, then facing Tiamat together with five huge great wrym consorts might well be big enough (and at that point, do you understand why the white and black great wryms shouldn't be too far off the power levels of the red?). And if that's not big enough, then nothing really prevents you from introducing a 10-headed venomous huge red dragon great wrym deity that is Tiamat's inspiration or mother, and is the Ur-dragon across all time and space, or applying these same ideas to some of the other mythic dragons that appear in the Deities and Demigods to create other uber-potent unique dragons, or applying these ideas to dragon species I haven't yet talked about that might be an even more potent starting point than the ones I've yet talked about.
Regarding offensive damgage, I really hadn't thought about damage being to high in a long time. That is definitely not a concern with 4e and 5e where monsters hit very softly compared to PCs.
These ideas are not unrelated! The 4e designers took the game in the direction I'm here talking about precisely because the realized the very things I'm here talking about. The only problem was they took the too far in that direction, swung the pendulum too far the other way, and over compensated precisely because the 3e designers starting from a place where they wanted to go back to 1e and redo it, did not sufficiently take into account this problem so that 3e in many ways only made this glass cannon problem worse. I'm not that familiar with 5e but from what I could see they tried to assimilate the lessons of both 3e and 4e to create something with some of the strengths of both.
The only scheming I mentioned was dragon vs. dragon, not player vs. dragon, so I am not sure what this rant is about.
So why should dragon vs. dragon conflicts, as implied in my write up, be uninteresting in theory. Sure, those off stage conflicts aren't particularly relevant to play, but there is no reason that there shouldn't be theoretical basis of balanced conflict between the 5 chromatic dragon species. Are did you notice that I'd considered the balance between whites fighting other dragons, or blues fighting reds, and so forth?
Why 200? Again, who is the audience for this beast (what level of PC is she balanced for). Ultimately that is the reason for 200, or 300, or 400.
Because much more than 200 implies that even if all saves are passed, the PC still dies with specific defenses against such attacks. This is because the maximum effective hit points a 1e character is likely to have even with extreme abilities is just above 100 hit points regardless of the level of the PC. A 20th level character will only have very slightly more hit points than a 10th level character.
Your loosing me here. This seems off-topic to me. Again the only clever scheming I talked about was dragon vs. dragon.
It's entirely relevant to both on-stage and off-stage conflicts.
However, when I say: "works for me" What I am talking about is what works for me as the DM/ creator of my game world. I am quite confident I know what works for me in that context in any edition.
Well, you may well be, but I don't know what that is.
Your approach is very gamist, my approach is more about fantasy world logic (not sure what to call that).
Gamist? You likely won't find purer simulationist in all your wanderings. I'm a pure process as play sort of DM. I'm a 'rules are physics' sort of guy. What you think is gamist is simply the recognition that ultimately regardless of your intention, the rules will determine the game that is played and the simulated world will evolve to represent the game as it is played, not the game as it is imagined. All of this, everything I designed and everything I've said, is entirely to create a fantasy world that is logical and internally consistent both as it is conceived and as it is actually played. Although I'm not insensitive to balance issues because I want everyone to enjoy themselves even if and particularly if the player brings a gamist aesthetic to play, ultimately the reason I care about balance is that if you don't have it, it implies that if your world has a long history, that (for example) either dragons or humans ought to be extinct and unique dragons like Tiamat should have been permanently killed long before the present PCs came into existence. That is to say, whatever your rules imply, ought to long ago be what your setting evolved to be.
