Swimming Contest: Dragon Turtle vs. White Dragon

[DarkMaster]

I put it down to edition power creep for dragons. "Hrmm, what weaknesses do dragons have left ... they can't swim fast? Oh yes, we must fix that."

Back in basic edition, there was a probability dragons were sleeping when you found them. They had plenty of achilles' heels. And the ancient ones didn't all have massive intelligence and buckets of skill points. Those were the days when adventurers could aspire to killing dragons and going for their horde. These days, only in munchkin and epic land do the dragons fear to tread.

Just my melancholic thoughts for the good old days ...

I actually like it better, in the old days at high level, great Wyrms were a joke. Now even at epic level some of them are quite a match for any party. Plus the rules allow you to easily improve them.

Still wonder why they had all those weakness, they were already quite weak. Also adventurer don't have to go for the great wyrm all the time like before.

 

[DarkMaster]

I put it down to edition power creep for dragons. "Hrmm, what weaknesses do dragons have left ... they can't swim fast? Oh yes, we must fix that."

...

Also notice that most dragon don't swim, only the one for which it makes sense. A dragon living in a march and swamps obviously needs to swim.

 

[Dark Dragon]

Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns has rules for running races. Rather than simply saying "Swim speed 60 ft is faster than swim speed 30 ft", there are actual contested rolls to make to determine how the race goes. Makes for more interesting chase scenes!

-blarg

ps - There's also the additional bonus of drinking rules in there.

Ah, I remember that, I have TFT somewhere at home (some PCs had fun with that halfling tree game).

@DarkMaster: The dragons of the old AD&D days were more XP handouts and treasure chests than real challenges. So I maximized the HP of each encountered dragon and gave them a d12 as HD At least some PCs died when a red great wyrm used the party's refuge (an old wizard's tower) as a smoking pipe before crushing into the whole building like some kamikaze pilot some rounds later...

Hm, perhaps one could adjust the marching, swimming, climbing,... whatsoever speeds of a dragon proportionally to its fly speed. If the fly speed improves, the swim speed does as well.