D&D (2024) Check Out The New Monster Manual’s Ancient Gold Dragon

Wizards of the Coast has previewed (part of) the stat block for one of its iconic monsters on social media. Take a look!

 

[dave2008]

I really liked the idea of those lair actions. I am said that they are gone. But maybe they were often missed by people when they gauged the danger of a dragon.

I posted this somewhere else but in one video, I think maybe the first one (could be the dragon one), they mentioned how lair action power ups have moved to the stat block (increased uses of Legendary Resistance & Actions) and they added mechanical impacts to their regional effects. So the water in the area of a black dragon's lair might inflict the poisoned condition if you drink it. So it seems there is still lair and region effects, they are just reimagined somewhat.

Though I did like the lair actions as an off turn action. I will probably still use them.

 

[Nadan]

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www.dndbeyond.com

DNDB post the full stat block now

 

[dave2008]

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DNDB post the full stat block now
View attachment 392984

OK, this grades out to about 27 (26.5) with the 2014 Monster creation rules. FYI, the 2014 gold graded to a flat CR 26 with the 2014 Monster creation rules, so not much of a bump for this dragon

 

[Sulicius]

Hold up. That banish.

DC24 Cha save or deal damage, incapacitate someone, take them out of the fight and PLACE THEM BACK ANYWHERE WITHIN 120FT OF THE DRAGON!?

There's gonna be a lot of characters dropped from 120ft or higher into lava.

Also: no attack bonus on the stat block for guiding bolt. Dude. Why take spell attack bonuses away from the spellcasting description when you want it to be part of it's multiattack AND legendary actions?

 

[TravDoc42]

Hold up. That banish.

DC24 Cha save or deal damage, incapacitate someone, take them out of the fight and PLACE THEM BACK ANYWHERE WITHIN 120FT OF THE DRAGON!?

There's gonna be a lot of characters dropped from 120ft or higher into lava.

Also: no attack bonus on the stat block for guiding bolt. Dude. Why take spell attack bonuses away from the spellcasting description when you want it to be part of it's multiattack AND legendary actions?

That lack of attack bonus is a bit of an issue...

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Also: no attack bonus on the stat block for guiding bolt. Dude. Why take spell attack bonuses away from the spellcasting description when you want it to be part of it's multiattack AND legendary actions?

It's easy enough to math out (16) but it's one of the few misses on this statblock in my opinion. The bonus to hit should have been on there. It was likely an oversight.

 

[dave2008]

Also: no attack bonus on the stat block for guiding bolt. Dude. Why take spell attack bonuses away from the spellcasting description when you want it to be part of it's multiattack AND legendary actions?

I agree with you, but it is easy to calculate.

 

[Stalker0]

Hold up. That banish.

DC24 Cha save or deal damage, incapacitate someone, take them out of the fight and PLACE THEM BACK ANYWHERE WITHIN 120FT OF THE DRAGON!?

There's gonna be a lot of characters dropped from 120ft or higher into lava.

Yes there is a huge amount of control aspect to that banish and its a nice simple way to let the gold control the battlefield in all sorts of interesting ways with a very very simple mechanic. So bravo on that one. I will say a DM does have to be careful, you never want to banish a character after that characters turn....otherwise they will pop back in before they go and will never lose their turn. Its a time when the DM has to "cheese" knowledge of the initiative order to get the full bang for their buck out of the ability.

Overall, the gold looks like it overall got a pretty solid upgrade in damage and stats. I still hate the over-reliance on legendary resistances...its an effective mechanic but its also just exceedingly boring....but I recognize that it wasn't going to go away.

In terms of the rend damage, I don't personally care that much myself, as I normally just roll all my attacks and tell the players the final number anyway, so at the end of the day all they hear is the big honking number. I can say that mechanically, having 3 attacks at lower damage is deadlier than 2 attacks at higher damage in 5e's system..... just because of the way death saves work at high levels. Its far deadilier to knock a player to 0 on attack 1, and then "boom boom" two crits with your other attacks and the PC is dead..... than it is with just two attacks. Now if a single attack did so much damage it could actually trigger the instant death rule than sure....but monsters just very rarely dish out that kind of single target damage.

My biggest peeve with the rend damage is the 2d8 fire damage. That is such an add-on at this level....and as a DM who is running this fight with a complex monster and probably several other monsters and a lair etc etc.... why add on this piddly little damage that I have to roll separately and call out to my players and then they go "wait was that second number 6 or 7? ..... ok thank you....oh crap can you remind me what the first number was again?"

Tracking two seperate damage numbers on an attack is a surprising amount of overhead when your doing it round after round after round. Now I don't mind that for liek a wraith's life drain when the necro damage REALLY matters (since it can't be healed). But for something like this....just up the physical damage and remove the fire. Keep it clean and simple. You already have PLENTY of reason to get fire resistance/immunity to stop the big breath.

I will say that Int save is awefully low for such an epic monster.

The clause on the weakening breath that it automatically ends after 1 minute is a nice little rounded touch, so the wizard in the party doesn't just stay permanently weakened for all time (such 20s aren't an auto pass for saves, it is possible for some players to never pass that save).

I will note that because of this weakening breath (which is very easy to use as you can just replace a rend with it), this dragon is A LOT tankier than the old one. -5 damage on every attack is going to add up pretty fast, and unlike the old one you have tons of incentive to use it (the old one took your entire opening action, what the hell dragon is going to do that against high level pcs....but with this version its coming out right at the beginning).

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Hold up. That banish.

DC24 Cha save or deal damage, incapacitate someone, take them out of the fight and PLACE THEM BACK ANYWHERE WITHIN 120FT OF THE DRAGON!?

There's gonna be a lot of characters dropped from 120ft or higher into lava.

Also: no attack bonus on the stat block for guiding bolt. Dude. Why take spell attack bonuses away from the spellcasting description when you want it to be part of it's multiattack AND legendary actions?

Yes. Banish is way more nasty than before (DC 9 higher).
But to be honest, at that point you want to be able to fly when fighting a dragon anyway. A fighter has a quasi legendary resistance too. A paladin has their aura. Mage slayer helps. So overall, I guess that it is manageable for the average level 20 party.

Yes. Taking away spell attack bonus is as annoying as the formatting of the abilities (why not start lines with success, failure and so on).

Oh, we actually know: they had one page too few to put the haunted house revenant in... so they had to save space.

On the other hand, spell attack bonus is easily calculated either with DC-8 or cha bonus + prof bonus. Should be easy to do as a DM.

They spoke about general guidelines to use a stat block on top. Maybe some missing parts are explained there (Maybe a table to look up a few things. Maybe how to handle hiding in plain sight... probably not, but maybe).

 

[DinoInDisguise]

On the other hand, spell attack bonus is easily calculated either with DC-8 or cha bonus + prof bonus. Should be easy to do as a DM.

I wonder why they chose to forgo that and cram so much other "easy to calculate" math into the stat block. These statblocks are crammed with easy to calculate and redundant information. It seems so arbitrary to exclude this. Almost like it was a mistake.