Best Dragon Battle you've ever experienced.

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I think the white dragon - used to fly around freezing villagers and other draco related nastiness... a brave party of heros buffs and readies themselves to slaughter it - racking up on fire magic and cold immunities.

They were a little put out when they discovered it was a red with alter self and cone of cold...

It's not original but it is funny.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think the most memorable one so far was when I was running a juvenile white dragon against a party of about 6th-7th level.

First they found a frozen horse in a snowdrift.

Then that foggy winters night terrible roars in the fog spooked the horses, and a cold blast hurt a few of the PCs. One of those horses was never recovered.

A little later the party heard that their old village was being terrorised by a young adult white dragon on the cusp of making it to adulthood. Better deal with it quick!

After a couple of interesting and nearly successful attempts to lure the dragon into an outside combat without getting killed, they manage to track it to its lair. Surviving an avalanche started by the dragon, they finally get it backed into its cave. The cave is covered in ice on every surface, so everyone is making balance checks every turn (the priest spent almost the entire melee slipping over in place). At the end of the fight the dragon is severely wounded, but both paladins, the rogue and the cleric are all down, only the sorcerer is left. The dragon lunges forward and bites the sorcerer, trusting to his spell resistance to protect him from those stupid wispy little flames surrounding it. The white dragon takes 2d6+14 damage and dies (double damage from the fire shield), the sorcerer is reduced to disabled (0 hit points) and he crawls from PC to PC, stabilising each of them before they actually died.

Great build up, brilliant final fight and everything came right down to the wire. Thank goodness White dragons are pretty thick

(so far in my campaign the PC's have fought 1 wyrmling white dragon, 2 wyrmling black dragons, 1 young adult white dragon, 1 young blue dragon, 1 young adult green dragon. The party are now average level ~11th and are heading off to tackle another dragon. I wonder what colour it is? I wonder how old it is? )

Cheers

 

[diaglo]

as a referee i never had a party survive or complete a battle with a dragon. it was either a TPK or they turned tail and ran.

as a player my most memorable encounter with a dragon was in 1981. i was playing a 5th lvl magic-user. the rest of the party included my henchman... a 3rd lvl elf (playing fighting man for that adventure)..., a 4th lvl dwarf, 4th lvl fighting man, a 5th lvl thief, and a 6th lvl cleric... plus 2 halfling linkboys. we had just killed a gas spore. and so we were desperately looking for some means to cure/heal ourselves...well just the elf, thief, and fighting man... the dwarf found a sleeping dragon with a huge hoard... well to us it was huge. anyway we decided we couldn't find the items we needed in time without the dragon's help. plus to carry it all we thot we should use the dragon. so we attacked to subdue. no one knew the rules on subdual we just thot up the idea. and low and behold they actually existed.

it worked. but only due to some lucky rolls. so we got lucky... cured the crew with some of the hoard items. and then we head back to town....

the town nearly lynched us. the dragon was Brass. and the town's protector of sorts.

 

[Leopold]

As a DM there is no reasonable way that a party should ever kill a dragon unless they have overwhelming firepower, protection from it's breath weapon, or a tank of unhittable AC and unthinkable damage. I can handle 2 of the 3 but all 3 make a dragon die.


BUT my PC's have faced 3 dragons and killed one and ran from the other 2 so I count myself lucky. My favorite encounter so far was when the PC's went down to the final level in the Tower of War (i think or was that Zagyg) and was trying to hunt down the Red Dragon down there.

Now the module was 2E Castle Greyhwak Ruins, so the dragon has 88 HP in 2E. I saw that he was ancient so that changed his HP's to over 500 or so. I tacked on some levels of Sorcerer to buff him up some more and when the PC's decided to go and locate him in his volcanic crater I already had him protected from the mages electrical blasts and improved invisible. He won initiative and teleported behind them and used a quickened breath weapon on them.

Needless to say I fried the Half-Dragon Paladin and the Psion good, since he was improved invisible the only person to see him was the cleric who had true seeing up and all he saw was this big pissed off red death machine flying around swatting at them and breathing fire. By round 3 half the party was dying and decided to flee back to the surface. The last thing they heard as they were teleporting out was the sound of the dragon roaring in frustration at being denied a meal after being awakened. Since I used a laptop I played the sound of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park when it's in the main visitor center to simulate the dragons roar.
You can find it here:

http://www.petesmoviepage.com/Jurassic/roar.wav


They all fear fire now...

 

[just__al]

The last campaign I ran the party was in a swamp looking for Swamplight Lynx claws so they could mitigate some of the XP cost for creating a headband of intellect.

They find out there's a dragon in the swamp and they decide they want to go after it even after they find it's killed the hydra they chose not to fight.

The dragon is holed up in a cave at the end of the swamp and they send in the party's pixie to see if the dragon is really there. Sure enough it is and it's not exactly fooled by the pixie's invisibility. The dragon looses initiative to the pixie and her 9 hitpoints and the pixie quickly gets out of reach of the dragon's breath weapon.

The pixie makes it back to the party and the dragon hasn't followed. They are waiting in ambush for the dragon at the cave mouth and the dragon buzzes the whole party (it had a back way out)

With the party sufficiently freaked (and suffering from the frightful presence)and the dragon's mage armor and 3.0 shield up the dragon circles around and blasts the party with acid and lands to clean up.

That's where the fun starts...

The party cannot touch the dragon, it's AC is way too high and he's having fun tearing apart the Paladin. Then the pixie, cleric and wizards all target the dragon with a dispell magic. The last wizard could have saved her's because all the dragon's spells were down but now the party is actually hitting the dragon with some kind of frequency.

The battle rages on and the pixie who isn't able to do anything with her tiny bow and non-magical arrows tries to sneak her Otto's irrestible dance past the dragon's SR. And it works!

I brought the table to hysterics by standing up and showing the players how the dragon was dancing (think the dirty bird) and now the dragon is in serious trouble.

The Ranger sends in his wolf companion and it not only hits the dragon but manages to trip it. Now the dragon is doing the worm (no, I didn't do the worm for my players, I can't do it...)

and the next round the dragon is dead....

The dance saved 2 players who would have been dead the next round when the dragon spat on them and flew away, even if they saved...

 

[MerricB]

Probably everything involving Onyx in Dragons of Despair. That initial rising from the well really spooked my players - great fun.

Cheers!

 

[Evilhalfling]

My best dragon experience was in the aftermath, instead of the battle.
2nd ed. 9th lvl plavers braced a red in its layer, with a hasted, flying ranger, fighter/thief and paladin. They made short work of it, it was down to 4 hp, and I wanted it to end well so I suggested to the ranger that she was near its ear....
she shot an arrow, rolling a crit and did 30ish damage, but it looked good

Then the fighter/thief steps up. He bargins with a local stone gaint clan, and they agree to bring him the hide, for all the dragons bulk treasure.

One a month later there is a country wide panic about the invasion of gaints led by a red dragon sitting on a charriot. Mass evacuations of villagers and small towns, mostly just from the rumors. No one had been brave enough to notice the dragon was dead.

The players were sent out to stop the invasion, of course.

 

[Plane Sailing]

As a DM there is no reasonable way that a party should ever kill a dragon unless they have overwhelming firepower, protection from it's breath weapon, or a tank of unhittable AC and unthinkable damage. I can handle 2 of the 3 but all 3 make a dragon die.

Excuse me, but haven't you noticed? There are dragons of all kinds of CR now!

A 10th level party doesn't have overwhelming firepower, unhittable AC or unthinkable damage but they won't be seriously challenged by a wyrmling white dragon, now will they?

I also hope that you don't cheat.. you know, play dragons as if they've got more intelligence than they have. An Adult white dragon (CR 10) only has an INT of 10 for instance... his tactics can be good but not insanely great.

Now if you specifically meant Great Wyrm dragons, I'd be more inclined to agree with you

 

[SoulsFury]

Not the most epic, but the most memorable from 2nd edition...

I was the DM, and the PCs were a 14th Thief and 14th Wizard. They met up with a decent size dragon, but quickly over powered it, and it surrendered and agreed to take them to its lair, which they stupidly agreed (it had its mate and two kids waiting at home). Well, while walking behind the dragon, the thief gets the idea that is a trap so he flies up to the dragons back and attempts a backstab. He rolls a 1, fumbles his dagger and slams into the back of the dragon. The dragon turned its head, breathed his breath weapon, grabbed the thief with his claw, and squashed him. The wizard looked up at the dragon and teleported away.

Nik

 

[WizarDru]

We've had several dragon combats, and all of them were memorable.


The two most notable have both been documented in my Story Hour. They include the party's encounter with Nightscale in Forge of Fury, which still stands as the high-water mark for epic combats for us, in some ways. I'd advanced Nightscale, and she took them by suprise as they were sneaking up on her. It was an awesome battle, and took about 8 HOURS to play the full thing out.

The other one was a battle against an ancient blue Dragon acting as a guard for the party's patron (an ancient Gold) on a fiery demi-plane under the control of the red dragons. It was a to-the-wall battle, with no quarter asked or given. The party was firing on all cylinders, and it was one of the best sessions we've ever ran, I think. Featuring pyrohydras, golems, friendly solars and bronze dragons.

Good times. Good times.