PHB p148
Net. A Large or smaller creature hit by a net is restrained until it is freed. A net has no effect on creatures that are formless, or creatures that are Huge or larger. A creature can use its action to make a DC 10 Strength check, freeing itself or another creature within its reach on a success. Dealing 5 slashing damage to the net (AC 10) also frees the creature without harming it, ending the effect and destroying the net. When you use an action, bonus action, or reaction to attack with a net, you can make only one attack regardless of the number of attacks you can normally make.
Thank you, exactly - there are no rules for a net suitable for a dragon, you need DM fiat.
I am not saying you specificly are complaining. I mean "you" as in the meteorically you.
Okay, but it seemed directed at me. I'll ignore it I guess. I think your auto-correct or auto-translate is on the blink though, because it's hard to work out what "meteorically" would be meant to mean in this context? Metaphorically? But it's not a metaphorical use of "you", it's just the "impersonal" or "generic" you.
That is not what I have seen in my games. These are sound tactics. It is not because you fail at something that it was not worth trying. IRL, any tactics has risks. Auto success would mean that the choices would be pretty boring in a game context. Of course if you want to be better at something, you better put chances on your side. But contrary to 3.xed you don't need to specialized. The Help action will give the best character for the job advantage on the roll.
I've heard this argument before, and it's one which I feel completely fails to either understand or account for opportunity cost. Anyone touting the Help action as a good idea above about level 5, in combat, using your main Action, is definitely not understanding opportunity cost outside the more niche of a niche situations. It's the True Strike of Actions.
Completely disagree with you on that.
An ancient dragon survives by being devious, ruthless and experimented. It has made its mistakes and survived to mate. It is as simple as that. Just like in the real world, the best dragon predators are... Dragons! They fight each other for treasure, mates and territory. If a dragon survives this, in addition to fighting puny humans, elves and other humanoids for treasures (for rights to mate) then that dragon as experience, knowledge and a cunning that is a testament to its ability to survive by planning and having contingencies for extreme cases.
Evertything you bring below just proves my point. Only the best and fittest dragons survive to the Ancient age. This also means that some of the adult dragons are of the stuff an Ancient dragon is made of. So some dragons will have a better tactical appreciations of the puny little 2 legged primates and the power they can wield.
This is Nietzschean nonsense. I studied archaeology, and was interested in paleontology, and the idea that only the fittest creatures survive to the oldest ages is absolute gibberish. It's especially not true for intelligent creatures like humans. Dragons don't have a society, but their sheer size and power means they can and will have other creatures do their bidding.
We're not just talking about "ancient" dragons, either. There's a whole spectrum of dragons, and the general prescriptive advice is to play them all like they're tactical geniuses. Which is just ridiculous. They're people with personalities, flaws, dumb fixed ideas even though they're smart, and so on. Some ancient dragons will be war-scarred veterans you describe. Some will be fat, lazy, and even fading, their best days long past them, even if they're still getting larger like a crocodile. No-one but top-rank adventurers can even challenge an ancient dragon, pretty much. No army can. No single Wizard. Other dragons are unlikely to mess with most dragons, just like most top predators don't fight each other, particularly not to the death - why? Because they might kill/injure themselves in the attack. It's potentially lose/lose. Smaller dragons will simply flee larger ones, because they don't stand a chance. Only extreme circumstances or the Good/Evil thing are ever likely to lead to dragons fighting each other, cool as it may conceptually be. It's even less likely with dragons being intelligent and able to communicate. If some elder wyrm descends on some young dragon and says "give me your stuff", the young one may puff and hiss but unless he's real dumb he's not going to fight. I admit that in some cases time would weed out dragons who were really, really dumb, but not those who were kind of just sorta-dumb.
The dragons you'll have a real problem with are those who actively attack human cities, who hit hard targets, who study those targets, and take them down. They would be an incredible menace. You could build an entire campaign around fighting one of those (and its minions, and dealing with the results of its attacks - they might cause unconnected raiders or unscrupulous nations to war on half-burned cities and so on, or necromancers might be having a field day).
But you can't make me believe that's most dragons. It's not most dragons in fiction (Smaug uses no tactics, for example, simply assuming he is so tough he is unstoppable, despite clearly being very intelligent), and it's not most dragons in D&D lore, who are typically slightly cowardly creatures, who hang out in some backwater, and raid lightly-defended or defenceless farmsteads, caravans, and so on.
On this part I agree. Up to a point. An Ancient dragon has seen it all. It will take a lot to surprise him. Would you play a lich stupidly? Not I and neither should you. An ancient dragon will not be prone to panic and instead will flee, take a long rest, heal up and try to fight the thieves to get back its treasure. Being pursued by an ancient dragon is not something players like a lot.
So you think some Lich which has literally been locked in a tomb for 4000 years, going slowly completely and totally insane, is going to be a rational and cunning opponent? I very much doubt it. Older isn't better. Older can mean outdated and stupid. I notice some fantasy authors have some fun with this (Steven Erikson does with Malazan - some ancient stuff is terrifying - but some of it just thinks it's terrifying and is actually a joke). An ancient tomb-lich may well be extremely powerful, but he's also extremely likely to walk face-first into a trap, or fail to understand what a cannon is and why it's a problem that it's pointed at him.
Liches are in fact particularly likely to be smart-but-morons. The trouble is they're so powerful and they have a backup which can be hard/impossible to find - they only had to be clever/sane when they did the phylactery and became a Lich, not after thousands of years of wandering around a tomb mumbling to themselves.
Ancient dragons will run the gamut too. Some will be basically terrifying gods-on-earth. Some will be Smaug - i.e. foolish, tactic-less, and prone to walk face-first into something which might kill them without even thinking about it.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned though is that ancient dragons and liches will typically be staggeringly familiar with their surroundings (even without magic), and so if met on home terrain, will have some huge advantages even if they don't have a lot of traps (and some bonkers lich probably does have a lot of traps). Hundreds of years will give you something beyond familiarity.