D&D 1E Revised and rebalanced dragons for 1e AD&D

[GreyLord]

I don't think the dragons were broken, but that MANY don't understand the purpose of the Dragon in AD&D.

The Dragons were to present a very deadly threat, but at the same time were supposed to actually be slayable by mid-level adventurers (4-8th level). Hence, you have to have a creature which, with skill, stealth, and a little bit of luck they might be able to kill while it sleeps or by a trap or otherwise, but at the same time a creature that if roused stands a chance of doing a TPK.

The players are supposed to be the Heroes of the game, the knights in shining armor that slay the dragon terrorizing the village. At the same time, they can't just get lazy and charge head first towards a flying dragon typically.

Hence why Dragons can do high damage with their breath weapon, but have a lower HP potential. They are built to destroy 1st and 2nd level NPCs (and 0 lvl NPCs) very easily, but at the same time, their normal attacks won't threaten a party of adventurers as much. Their Breath weapon will though, and a flying dragon may be able to take out a party of PC's if they rouse it or foolishly think to attack it head on. At the very least they will lose one or two or more.

A carefully planned attack on the otherhand may make it so that they can slay the dragon before it is fully roused and be the Dragonslayer heroes of the game.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't think the dragons were broken, but that MANY don't understand the purpose of the Dragon in AD&D.

The Dragons were to present a very deadly threat, but at the same time were supposed to actually be slayable by mid-level adventurers (4-8th level). Hence, you have to have a creature which, with skill, stealth, and a little bit of luck they might be able to kill while it sleeps or by a trap or otherwise, but at the same time a creature that if roused stands a chance of doing a TPK.

The players are supposed to be the Heroes of the game, the knights in shining armor that slay the dragon terrorizing the village. At the same time, they can't just get lazy and charge head first towards a flying dragon typically.

Hence why Dragons can do high damage with their breath weapon, but have a lower HP potential. They are built to destroy 1st and 2nd level NPCs (and 0 lvl NPCs) very easily, but at the same time, their normal attacks won't threaten a party of adventurers as much. Their Breath weapon will though, and a flying dragon may be able to take out a party of PC's if they rouse it or foolishly think to attack it head on. At the very least they will lose one or two or more.

A carefully planned attack on the otherhand may make it so that they can slay the dragon before it is fully roused and be the Dragonslayer heroes of the game.

So if they're taking out major dragons at 4th-8th level what do they take on at 10th level? 12th? 15th?

I don't want them going around killing deities - giving deities stats so they can be killed as was done in Deities and Demigods is a flat-out dumb idea - and going into the evil planes and slaying demons and devils only holds appeal for so long.

If the dragon is to be the iconic monster of the game then it needs to be just that: iconic. And, at the high end, badder-ass than all the other monsters out there...and glass cannons don't qualify.

Sure a party can kill little dragons or even medium dragons here and there throughout their adventuring careers, but the really big ones kinda want to be the thing you spend the whole campaign working up to; where a carefully planned attack is likely to only weaken it quickly and you still have to finish it off only it's very angry and wants to (and can) kill you dead.

Divorce breath-weapon damage from the dragon's hit point total (dumb idea to lock them together in the first place!), give the dragon a boatload more hit points - at least double - and give it its strength bonuses to melee hit and damage. Then let 'er rip against the best PCs your game can produce.

 

[GreyLord]

So if they're taking out major dragons at 4th-8th level what do they take on at 10th level? 12th? 15th?

I don't want them going around killing deities - giving deities stats so they can be killed as was done in Deities and Demigods is a flat-out dumb idea - and going into the evil planes and slaying demons and devils only holds appeal for so long.

If the dragon is to be the iconic monster of the game then it needs to be just that: iconic. And, at the high end, badder-ass than all the other monsters out there...and glass cannons don't qualify.

Sure a party can kill little dragons or even medium dragons here and there throughout their adventuring careers, but the really big ones kinda want to be the thing you spend the whole campaign working up to; where a carefully planned attack is likely to only weaken it quickly and you still have to finish it off only it's very angry and wants to (and can) kill you dead.

Divorce breath-weapon damage from the dragon's hit point total (dumb idea to lock them together in the first place!), give the dragon a boatload more hit points - at least double - and give it its strength bonuses to melee hit and damage. Then let 'er rip against the best PCs your game can produce.

AD&D was meant to end FAR earlier than what people later took it to. 5e going to 20th level is actually rather crazily high in comparison to the end game for AD&D.

AD&D had HIGH level as around 9th-11th level. Above that and you were ULTRA High and into the Epic levels...where yes...you were dealing with extra-planar threats.

Originally OD&D only went up to 6th level spells. Casters were meeting the ultimate limits of magic.

At 9th level it was expected that characters would start getting accolades of the world. Their feats and accomplishments would be so well known they would be able to be given titles and lands, responsibilities...which led to...

Retirement.

That's right, character retirement as a Lord or Master Wizard with their own tower and students, or the chief of the Thieves guild happens somewhere around 9th to 11th level. That is the END GAME.

If one wanted to continue, of course they could...but then there are things FAR more deadly than dragons beyond the Dungeons and Dragons game.

After the End Game, you no longer are really going through the Dungeons or fighting Dragons...your greatest enemies will either be extra-planar things beyond the scope of the prime material plane most normally...OR...creatures of your own making...other Humans who were opposed to you.

This is also why level limits were NOT as bad a penalty as some think they were in AD&D. They weren't supposed to be horrible penalties, as they normally just meant the Demi-humans were a level or two behind what the Humans would reach eventually.

In BECMI, this of course was different. That game didn't have the expectation that the campaign may end around 9th - 11th level with the PC's retiring, and if you wanted to continue you would make new PC's to adventure in that same world...instead the campaign could go up to 36th level or even to the Immortal status.

Which is why in the Companion rules (levels 15-25) you have larger dragons that have 2x to 3x the power of the smaller dragons you dealt with originally.

But...BECMI is NOT AD&D. Understanding that the game of AD&D basically went from 1-10th level (11th level for Magic-Users) is key to understanding a LOT of the decisions that went into it from level limits on races, to why certain monsters were designed the way they were.

Sure, the game is open ended and you could progress far beyond what was originally intended (and thus why you have higher level spells where Magic-Users can literally get power beyond what even many deities could do with the Wish spell, and other things), but overall the game was designed for gamers going from 1st to around 9th-11th level.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't think the dragons were broken, but that MANY don't understand the purpose of the Dragon in AD&D.

So the whole, "You are supposed to take out dragons by stealth" is a line of argument that I have mentioned and anticipated. And the problem that I have with that argument is threefold. First, it strikes me as so much retroactive justification BS. You are supposed to take out dragons by stealth, because you need to take out dragons by stealth. It's finding high levels of intentionality in the design that I don't think is actually there. The 1e AD&D is a design that mostly works for average dragons 4-5 h.p. per HD. It's when you want to do something that significantly departs from that framework that it falls apart. Second, even if that is the intention, the question that needs to be asked is, "Is it fun?" Ultimately you are rendering 'taking out a dragon' a non-interactive experience that makes rolls like 'chance of sleeping', 'surprise', and 'initiative' the most important aspects of the scenario. And thirdly, the problem with that interpretation that dragons were created as this narrowly designed glass cannon intentionally to force a certain style of play on the game is that it is a whole lot of onewayism that precludes using dragons in various roles and diverse encounters, which in actual practice the DMs of both homebrew games and published modules tried to do both because no one wrote down in all caps this intended single usage intentional design you are claiming, and because in literature and the imagination dragons do so much more and are involved in so many more scenarios than the murder hobo one you envision as the one true way.

Again, if you imagine that the dragons are meant to have 4-5 hit points per HD, then a totally different interpretation of the design becomes possible - the dragons are well-balanced and available for diverse play. A dragon that has 30-40 hit points has a sweet spot which about hits my '3-5 rounds of combat is about ideal' point and is fairly well balanced in terms of how hit points, AC, and breath weapon compare with each other. The innovation that ultimately does not work is the idea that all 8 given age categories can use the same stat block while only varying hit points. You can actually from the text draw evidence that Gygax knew that this wouldn't work straight up, as he gives a complex formula for determining effective HD of the creature so as to give the dragon a balanced saving throw array. But that quite obviously doesn't go far enough, since 10 HD is still 10HD on the attack matrix whether the dragon needs more or less. And the breath weapon mechanic, well balanced for mid-levels versus mid-level dragon threats, breaks at higher levels because AD&D PC hit points is soft capped, that is AD&D PCs max out their HD at name level and only gain relatively low amounts of hit points after that. The result is there is never a point where an 80 damage or 112 damage breath weapon is well balanced.

Most of the rest of the problem can be correctly attributed to the power creep that AD&D began to suffer, both because players eventually had characters that were a higher level Gygax had ever really gamed with prior to publishing the rules, and expansions to the rules almost invariably result in power creep, and a Unearthed Arcana certainly did. The result was that not only had Gygax never hard considered what gaming would be like after the 10th-12th level his most powerful characters had attained, but characters were effectively a couple levels more powerful than he had envisioned especially when it came to damage dealing. And dealing more damage unfortunately intersected with the one area that most published monsters were most deficient in with respect to providing interesting challenges - hit points.

 

[Lanefan]

AD&D was meant to end FAR earlier than what people later took it to. 5e going to 20th level is actually rather crazily high in comparison to the end game for AD&D.

1e AD&D, yes. 2e levels could go into the lower stratosphere, as could BECMI (the 'I' part doesn't even start until 36th level, if memory serves; and can go to 100th or beyond).

AD&D had HIGH level as around 9th-11th level. Above that and you were ULTRA High and into the Epic levels...where yes...you were dealing with extra-planar threats.

Originally OD&D only went up to 6th level spells. Casters were meeting the ultimate limits of magic.

At 9th level it was expected that characters would start getting accolades of the world. Their feats and accomplishments would be so well known they would be able to be given titles and lands, responsibilities...which led to...

Retirement.

That's right, character retirement as a Lord or Master Wizard with their own tower and students, or the chief of the Thieves guild happens somewhere around 9th to 11th level. That is the END GAME.

Here I somewhat disagree.

While name level certainly has the possibility of bringing added responsibility and retirement, it remains up to the player/PC as to whether to follow that path or to keep on adventuring.

Put another way, just because the rules allow a Fighter to build a stronghold at 9th level doesn't mean she has to. It just means that any effort to do so before 9th level is more or less likely to fail.

If one wanted to continue, of course they could...but then there are things FAR more deadly than dragons beyond the Dungeons and Dragons game.

After the End Game, you no longer are really going through the Dungeons or fighting Dragons...your greatest enemies will either be extra-planar things beyond the scope of the prime material plane most normally...OR...creatures of your own making...other Humans who were opposed to you.

As written, this is true. My point is that this is a problem with the as-written version, and that Dragons (and Giants, for all that) simply aren't tough enough, when looked at in hindsight. Fortunately, this is a trivially easy thing for a DM to fix.

This is also why level limits were NOT as bad a penalty as some think they were in AD&D. They weren't supposed to be horrible penalties, as they normally just meant the Demi-humans were a level or two behind what the Humans would reach eventually.

The biggest problem with level limits, when looked at from a purely design angle, was that for far too many race-class combinations they meant non-Human PCs could simply never reach name level. In-game, this flat-out doesn't make sense.

Another issue with level limits comes with Clerics. Non-Human races are quite limited on how far they can go as Clerics, which implies either a) that only Humans can be religious enough to advance to high-level in Cleric or b) that the non-Human deities aren't strong enough to support high-level Clerics. Either of these is hogwash.

In BECMI, this of course was different. That game didn't have the expectation that the campaign may end around 9th - 11th level with the PC's retiring, and if you wanted to continue you would make new PC's to adventure in that same world...instead the campaign could go up to 36th level or even to the Immortal status.

Which is why in the Companion rules (levels 15-25) you have larger dragons that have 2x to 3x the power of the smaller dragons you dealt with originally.

Which are easy to port over to 1e if desired...

But...BECMI is NOT AD&D. Understanding that the game of AD&D basically went from 1-10th level (11th level for Magic-Users) is key to understanding a LOT of the decisions that went into it from level limits on races, to why certain monsters were designed the way they were.

Except that if the game went to 11th level for MUs then it went to 12th or 13th for various other classes, assuming each PC ended up with vaguely the same number of xp over its career; as MU (along with Ranger and Paladin) was among the slowest-advancing classes.

I agree that 1e kinda tops out at about 9th-11th as written. I've been playing and DMing it for 35+ years and have - as of now - seen but 5 PCs (out of about a thousand!) get to 12th level. But we've also been tweaking the game over that time, with one of the goals specifically being to try and keep the system on the rails into the low-teens level-wise. Jury's still out on success on this.

Sure, the game is open ended and you could progress far beyond what was originally intended (and thus why you have higher level spells where Magic-Users can literally get power beyond what even many deities could do with the Wish spell, and other things), but overall the game was designed for gamers going from 1st to around 9th-11th level.

You don't give your deities Wish-like powers at will?

Deities, in 1e, are something else that really seriously need a massive jump-up in their powers. The way I see it, any deity should be nigh-unassailable by mere mortals except in the rarest of circumstances.

Lan-"10th level and counting"-efan

 

[Cleon]

Sure, the game is open ended and you could progress far beyond what was originally intended (and thus why you have higher level spells where Magic-Users can literally get power beyond what even many deities could do with the Wish spell, and other things), but overall the game was designed for gamers going from 1st to around 9th-11th level.

While I certainly agree that AD&D works a lot better at lower levels, if TSR intended players to retire their characters at name level they did a very poor job imparting that information.

Just consider how many of the early game modules where for 9th+ level PCs, including the famous G1-G3 Giants and D1-D3 Drow series.

Going by Gygax's accounts he had a lot of name-level player characters running around dungeons in his own Greyhawk campaign back in the day, although I don't recall him specifying what level they were beyond "fighter lord", "wizard" or the like.

 

[Cleon]

Anyhow, going back to the original purpose of the post overall I am very impressed by the proposed 1E stat reforms for dragons. Can we expect descriptive entries for "Metallic Dragon Species" and Bahamut any time soon?

Your stats for Tiamat make an interesting comparison to the BECMI stats for the Master Set's Dragon Rulers. Their general AC, HD and attacks are in the same general ballpark - did you use them for inspiration?

As for suggestions/criticisms/feedback, I'm not enamoured of the White Dragon's 8% per age category magic resistance. Using 5% graduations seems preferable, since very few AD&D monsters don't have magic resistances that are not neatly divisible by 5.

I'd suggest 5% for hatchlings, then 10% less than standard for older ages (i.e. 70% at age category 8 instead of the usual 80%).

Just out of personal preferences, I'd have put the Adult age category at rank 6 rather than 5, since the 1E original was just above the mid-number (being 5 out of 8). That way the "Young Adult" and "Adult" lie either side of the average just as they did in the original. I'd squeeze in a "Juvenile" and delete the "Venerable" to make up the difference. Oh, and I have a soft spot for 3E's "Wyrmling" for a baby dragon. Fighting "Hatchlings" suggests your heroes are crushing some helpless thing that's just crawled out of an egg.

So my preferred 10-step age category titles would be:

1 Wyrmling
2 Very Young
3 Young
4 Juvenile
5 Young Adult
6 Adult
7 Old
8 Ancient
9 Wyrm
10 Great Wyrm

 

[Cleon]

Just out of personal preferences, I'd have put the Adult age category at rank 6 rather than 5, since the 1E original was just above the mid-number (being 5 out of 8). That way the "Young Adult" and "Adult" lie either side of the average just as they did in the original. I'd squeeze in a "Juvenile" and delete the "Venerable" to make up the difference. Oh, and I have a soft spot for 3E's "Wyrmling" for a baby dragon. Fighting "Hatchlings" suggests your heroes are crushing some helpless thing that's just crawled out of an egg.

Upon reflection, I might use "Venerable" and "Great Wyrm" to reflect those dragon age categories appearing in the late 1E Forgotten Realms Campaign Set:

1 Wyrmling
2 Very Young
3 Young
4 Juvenile
5 Young Adult
6 Adult
7 Old
8 Ancient
9 Venerable
10 Great Wyrm

I just don't much care for "Venerable", since we've already got Old and Ancient in there.

Speaking of age categories I don't much care for, "very young" and "juvenile" don't really do that much for me. I'd consider reviving the original Monster Manual category of "Sub-Adult" and getting rid of one of them. Maybe "juvenile" since its meaning is synonymous with "Young"?

1 Wyrmling
2 Very Young
3 Young
4 Sub-Adult
5 Young Adult
6 Adult
7 Old
8 Ancient
9 Wyrm
10 Great Wyrm

 

[Celebrim]

Anyhow, going back to the original purpose of the post overall I am very impressed by the proposed 1E stat reforms for dragons. Can we expect descriptive entries for "Metallic Dragon Species" and Bahamut any time soon?

If you want them, I might work them up.

Your stats for Tiamat make an interesting comparison to the BECMI stats for the Master Set's Dragon Rulers. Their general AC, HD and attacks are in the same general ballpark - did you use them for inspiration?

No. I have very little experience with BECMI, and really only passing familiarity with anything above C level.

As for suggestions/criticisms/feedback, I'm not enamoured of the White Dragon's 8% per age category magic resistance. Using 5% graduations seems preferable, since very few AD&D monsters don't have magic resistances that are not neatly divisible by 5.

True, but there are important exceptions like for example the Drow. I'm not particular worried about the lost elegance as I am about whether the magic resistance is appropriately tuned. There is a really fine balance between completely vulnerable to save or die effects and so invulnerable that being a M-U sucks.

I'm not completely sold on the current naming conventions for the age categories, but they do strike me as terribly subjective. To the extent that I move in any direction, it will likely be towards the 1e FR conventions as this is supposed to evoke old school nostalgia. However, I also feel that the current naming conventions work better as an ecology, in as much as they suggest sexual maturity is arrived at in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[Cleon]

If you want them, I might work them up.

I would definitely like to see your take on the Metallics some time.

No. I have very little experience with BECMI, and really only passing familiarity with anything above C level.

I'm hardly a BECMI afficionado myself. I mostly just collected the Gazzetteers and cannibalized some of the adventures for my AD&D campaign.

I probably wouldn't have thought of the Dragon Rulers comparison if we weren't doing a 3E conversion of them in General Monsters.

True, but there are important exceptions like for example the Drow. I'm not particular worried about the lost elegance as I am about whether the magic resistance is appropriately tuned. There is a really fine balance between completely vulnerable to save or die effects and so invulnerable that being a M-U sucks.

If that's what's concerning you I guess the only way to figure it is to decide on the preferred level of characters the dragon of that age category is supposed to fight and then reverse-calculating what MR is required to give the desired caster success percentage.

Judging by the XP table, at Great Wyrm stage a White/Black/Green/Blue/Red Dragon is expected to be encountered by a 10th/11th/12th/15th/16th level party while as age category 6 Adult stage its 8th/8th/9th/9th/10th.

That gives a MR success chances of 85%/90%/95%/80%/75% Great Wyrm and 63%/69%/70%/70%/65% for Adults.

If my level assumptions are correct, that means the Adult Dragons have MRs that are all fairly close to blocking 70% of spells of the expected CL, while the Great Wyrms range from blocking 75% to 95%. That's a 20% variance, and the 3-point drop from XV to XII from the Blue Great Wyrm to the Green Great Wyrm Dragon also seems off - Blue Dragon's aren't that much stronger than Green ones.

Hmm… I guess the question to ask is that a bug or feature?

If you want all the Great Wyrms to have enough MR to block, say, 90% of spells at the CL implied by their XP tables you'd have to tweak the MR of each Dragon. Heck, if you wanted the same for each age category (i.e. Old Dragons block roughly X% of spells at their expected encounter level) then a whole matrix of colour/age vs MR might be necessary - although one based on some % per HD might work. I kind of prefer the simplicity of just having it age-category based.

That said, I would be inclined to make the Green Great Wyrm an XIII rather than an XII.

I'm not completely sold on the current naming conventions for the age categories, but they do strike me as terribly subjective. To the extent that I move in any direction, it will likely be towards the 1e FR conventions as this is supposed to evoke old school nostalgia. However, I also feel that the current naming conventions work better as an ecology, in as much as they suggest sexual maturity is arrived at in a reasonable amount of time.

They're definitely subjective since a lot of the age category titles are pretty much synonyms (i.e. Old/Ancient/Venerable and Young/Juvenile). The ecology issue is one reason I like the original MM's "Sub-Adult", since it has an implication of "almost grown to adult size but not sexually mature", while "Juvenile" doesn't tell you anything about how young the young creature is.

At least the table doesn't have "Mature Adult".