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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 2347414" data-attributes="member: 726">First, if you play in my game, please don’t read this.  It contains (minor) spoilers in addition to requests for tactical advice...............Forgive me if I ramble.  I have one general question, and one specific one, regarding dragons.  I’ll admit up front that I’m a lousy tactician.  My monsters are seldom as tough as I intend them to be, dragons included. Last session I attacked my party with a pair of monsters: -    an Adult dragon that’s a slightly modified version of the MM’s Bronze Dragon-    a creature loosely based on, and about as powerful as, that sneak-attacking rakshasa variant in the MM3Now, admittedly, that’s not a very difficult encounter for the party, which consists of 6 PCs and 3 NPC’s all in the 14th-16th level range.   (In other words that’s two CR 15-ish critters against a party of NINE PC’s of equivalent level.)Even so, the dragon was particularly ineffectual.   When the combat started, the party was already spread out, and a few of them were flying.  I decided that the dragon’s primary goal was to find a cluster of ground-based PC’s and breath on them.   (While the dragon can be a damage-dealing machine with a full attack, it would have to land to do that, and once on the ground, I figured the party would surround it and hack it to pieces.)The dragon admittedly wasted one round casting dispel magic, just to knock down some of the flyers.  And it spent another round escaping from a maze spell cast by the newly-15th-level wizard.   It got hammered by a round of attack spells on the turn it finally came in for its “bombing run,” and the final insult-plus-injury was a surprise wall of force placed directly in its path.   Thus knocked to the ground, the fighter-types did, in fact, surround it and chop it to pieces.  My specific question is:  is there anything a swooping about-to-breath dragon can do about a wall of force placed suddenly in its path?  It can’t see the wall, and can’t detect it, as far as I can tell.  The dragon’s maneuverability is poor enough that, even if it sees that its breath is getting deflected, it can’t turn aside fast enough to get out of the way.  And the cone-length of the breath itself (50’ in this case) is shorter than the range of wall of force,  so it couldn’t have flown high enough to be safe.  My general question is:  faced with a scattered group of adventurers out of doors, how would a dragon best fight?  I thought about having it grab a PC at random and fly away, but it was reluctant (for fictional reasons) to leave the rakshasa character behind.  Maybe the answer in this case is:  get a bigger dragon.  JThanks!-Sagiro</blockquote>

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