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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6636964" data-attributes="member: 2011">I find these "prepare to kill a dragon" ideas make a lot of assumptions about how a DM runs dragons. What adult or older dragon in its right mind doesn't have henchmen, spies, guardians, traps, difficult to find entrances, multiple chambers, (and in my game, all dragons have spells), etc., etc., etc.?How is it that the PCs can get anywhere near the dragon without it knowing that they are in its territory?How do the PCs know the range of the Dragon's blindsight, darkvision, etc. in order to make such detailed plans?How many legendary dragons have the PCs faced before in order to know so much about them and have such good plans?How come the dragon doesn't have its valuables hidden and protected? Where do these plans of "I'll steal a valuable item from the Dragon hoard" come from? They don't make sense for an Int 14 to 20 Dragon.The last dragon that my 6th level party of 7 faced was an adult black dragon with four large caverns in his lair, each with a large body of water in them, each body of water separated by underwater tunnels. Each caverns and the tunnels had traps and rooms 1 and 2 had other hidden guardians. The party conversed with it by shouting over an underground lake in the first room and had no idea ahead of time that a dragon even lived there (they assumed when talking with it that it was a dragon by its "reptilian hiss" which I did by slurring its words, but they didn't exactly know what type).It's primary mode of attack would have been come out of the water, attack, go back into the water.The players were smart and did not try to get close and attack. They would have lost, several of them would have minimally drowned or got turned back in the trapped collapsing tunnels.The only dragon the party (level 5) faced and won against was a trapped red dragon half way between young and adult (the dragon was trapped in undermountain where size-wise, it could only fit through a few corridors and hence was limited to a half dozen caverns that it could be in, it couldn't escape from undermountain). They only won there because they had already defeated its guardians (ogres that it had intimidated into serving it) and they managed to fight it in its large lair (and they managed to roll super lucky with bow shots into the dark where they could not see when the dragon decided to flee). The dragon was at a specific disadvantage because it was trapped and did not actually choose its own lair (taking the best available cavern, but far from ideal).Course, there is no way that I can send a party of 7 against a solo dragon. Action economy alone would crush a dragon. I'm practically required to give the dragon henchmen (shy of making it an extremely powerful dragon).</blockquote>

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