Best Dragon Battle you've ever experienced.

[Ovinomancer]

Green Dragon 2ed

We were tracking a large group of giants that had been terroizing the countryside. After finding their base and decimating the giants (a rod of lordly might goes a long way), the green that had gathered the giants to do its bidding showed up pissed as hell. After strafing the party with its breath weapon a few times, it landed to engage in melee. At this point, it looked hopeless, we were mostly down to teens hitpoints, and short our best spells.

In comes our glorious cavalier! The proud owner of a dragon slaying greatsword (was +5 vs dragons) he charged. We were using a variant crit rule that allowed one additional attack for each crit. The Cav rolled up and rolled: 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 18!!!! Saw it myself, it was incredible! Needless to say, 18d6+72 (3d6+5sword+5strength+2specialization x 6) was enough to slay the beast. The look on the DM's face was priceless!

 

[Orryn Emrys]

The final battle of the four-year campaign I completed early last year was against a Great Red Wyrm. Though the scene was everything I had hoped, a desparate conflict against a horrifying beast of mammoth proportions (with an incredible flight speed, I might add), it was a little anti-climactic because it ended so quickly. The villain in question, a tyrant of the Old World named Taimen, frequently referred to simply as "The Great Dragon", had long since incited a general sense of terror in the heroes, and they had spent months planning for the battle they knew would eventually occur. I timed the end of the campaign to bring the dragon and the heroes together as they achieved 20th level.

The killing blow against the beast was made by a heroic scythe-wielding warrior just as the dragon crushed him with its powerful jaws. Hero and dragon alike then plunged to a watery grave below the cliffs of the Imperial City.

The session was certainly one of the grandest of my career. I do, however, have some concerns regarding general applications of the slime wave spell.... :\

 

[Ovinomancer]

Red Dragon RttToEE 3ed -- Spoiler

I dm'ed this one... and it was going sooo well.

There is a nifty red dragon somewher in the Temple. The party was using its halfing thief to scout ahead and discover trouble for them to whomp. This had worked well for them in the past, but came to a crashing halt in this encounter.
The dragon was laying inwait, and, having cast invisibility on itself, was doing a darn good job. The thief wanders in, gets snatched, and the the dragon moves to cover the hallway the party in coming up. Thier first view of the dragon was its head, clutching a wriggling halfling, peeking around the corner and breathing a gout of fire. The thief incinerated in the blast (no save if your snatched), and the party took a good smack. The dragon then engaged the party, and a brutal melee erupted. The dragon was doing very well against the party, they were caught unprepared. All looked good for rampant character death until the party's archer let loose with 3, count 'em 3, crits in a row. At a x3 crit with everything but the kitchen sink stacked on for damage, my dragon was pincushioned.
You should have seen the look on the DM's face.

 

[Leopold]

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

I don't throw anything smaller than OLD at the party, the reason being is that I come from Old School and am firmly in belief that you won't wander around and find a juvy dragon just wandering the countryside. I use dragons as the end all be all ultimate POWER Badazz that are where they are due to the fact that they've taken a long time to be what they are and the weaker ones are all hidden away or dead.

That would prolly make my world very old then, but I do have an island of wyrms similar to the Council of Wyrms (2E product) but the PC's have never gone there yet so it's safe for me to use and abuse.

 

[Ozmar]

Two memorable dragon encounters

Both of these are from my epic campaign.

In a demiplane, the party encountered a fairly powerful dragon in its underwater lair, and in the course of the battle, the gnomish archmage (about 27th level?) got cornered and swallowed. She cast a wall of force to create a dome within the stomache and thereby protected herself from crushing and anchored the dragon in place. She then let loose two maximized sonic delayed-blast fireballs from within the beast's belly and miraculously (thanks to her evasion and the dome of force) took no damage as the dragon exploded.

In a separate encounter, on the plane of Acheron, the party invaded the canyon lair of three rust dragons. As four of the PCs cornered the younger dragon in the caves, the cleric (a 26th-level cleric of Pelor/risen martyr with a vow of poverty) faced the remaining two dragons. The cleric stood at the bottom end of the canyon. One of the dragons was clinging to the canyon walls about halfway down the canyon near the top of the walls, and the other dragon was perched at the far end of the canyon at the top. The far dragon swooped down into the canyon to strafe the cleric, and the cleric (who had readied an action) cast earthquake on the canyon as the dragon was about in the center. The earthquake collapsed the entire canyon, burying both dragons and producing a rock-slide that swept the cleric out of the canyon and nearly crushed her.

I think it was amusing that the dragons, although buried beneath rock and metal, took no damage from the avalanche. It took them one round to dig/blast their way out. Then they descended on the cleric, who managed to hold them off for a couple rounds until the other PCs climbed their way out of the rubble. Only one dragon escaped the battle, once it became clear that the PCs were too much for it.

Later!
Ozmar the Dragon Wrangler

 

[Salad Shooter]

Greatest Dragon Battle of All Time: Very Young Red vs. Badger

We were beating a quick escape out, using a rod of teleportation keyed to "home" that our boss had give us, all of us being very very very injured, and about fairly low level, our druid summoned a badger to attack the dragon while we made good our escape. The badger actually survived the first attack...

 

[Dogbrain]

Best dragon fight I ever saw was when I was running a game as gamemaster.

The PCs had come across a village that was having a problem with a small dream dragon rooting through its potato fields and ruining them. Unfortunately, since the clan was an old Dragonfriend clan from the days of EWF, they couldn't kill the creature and wouldn't let anyone they hired do so, either. The PCs took on the challenge. They decided that the best thing to do would be to incapacitate the dream dragon and deposit it at the local clan temple. Then, if they wanted to honor a dragon, they had one ready and available. Keeping it safe at that point would be the clan's problem, not the wandering PCs'.

Realizing that they had a very primal urge dream dragon on their hands, they got hold of a great deal of sweet ale and soaked some potato fields with it. Come nightfall, down swoops the dragon to start eatin' taters. Dragon gets soused, party leaps up from ditch with a big net or ten and ties up the dragon with only a broken arm or so to show for their troubles. At that point, <<CHANG>>! Puddles Sternbill's sword shatters. The silly Duck had forgotten that her Geas to Humakt was to never use poison in battle, and in this particular context, using alcohol to weaken an opponent for capture would qualify as a type of "poison" (Humakt is a major hardass when it comes to Geasa). So, they got their dragon, but at the cost of divine disfavor.

Puddles later got back in good with Humakt by performing an on-the-battlefield blood-and-soul sacrifice of a Death Lord.