Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DracoSuave" data-source="post: 4880470" data-attributes="member: 71571">If you believe the DM is not advised to provide places for cover and terrain features to make battles interesting then you seriously need to reread the encounter design section of the DMG, where the DM is, in fact, advised to do these things.Some of those tactics are viable in an open field without any terrain features.  Only if the PCs are all waiting at a singular point.  Six squares away from a 6 square wide cloud gives a lot of spreading out space.  PCs clumping against a dragon is bad tactics and unnecessary.Or, it's 'You all ready your actions?  Awesome.  After some time of this, the dragon comes out...'This takes about as long to execute as it does to say that.  About ten seconds real time.  Seriously.Perhaps, perhaps not.  Regardless, see below.Alright.  The zone of darkness is a 6X6 area. (close burst 2 around a large creature.)  The longest range attack from that spot that a dragon has is it's breath weapon, with a blast 5.  So, 6 squares away means the dragon -must- leave the cloud to breath acid on you.Bear in mind, this illustration is rough, something thrown together in about five minutes.  It is by far not the optimal way to execute this for the players, but it's good enough for the purposes of this discussion.Now look at this diagram.  The red circles indicate party placement.  High Reflex characters are in the center, because they are most likely to take the brunt of a breath attack.  The three in the front are melee chargers.  Here's the thing... the breath weapon is preferable to cloud of darkness.  The latter is the real threat.  As well, without action points, the dragon -can only do one.-  So if he decides to breath on you, he can't put his protection up which gives the party the opportunity to use their powerful attacks.And if the dragon just decides to cloud of darkness, then he's not attacked your party, and well, that means the party just got some damage on a dragon.  That's suboptimal for the dragon.<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v337/drakestyles/tactics.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />As you can -plainly- see, optimal tactics for the dragon isn't -wait for the party to be stupid and jump inside.-  The party now has the dragon sieged.  The party can simply wittle this dragon down slowly over time.  The dragon, if he is such a good tactician, knows this.  Sure, he might wait for his breath weapon to come up again, but that's about it.  He -has- to take initiative.Having a dragon stay in the cloud of darkness is only optimal for the dragon when the party doesn't react to it accordinly.  The dragon is beatable in a flat field with no terrain.  Adding terrain doesn't change that, but gives the players more options.You should also note, it gives the dragon more options as well.That's if you're only making one perception check.  Five players making a total of ten checks a round from a safe distance (and it IS a safe distance) is a different story.Compare a black dragon to the damage output of five kobold slyblades.  The dragon's weak in comparison.  The kobolds have as many hitpoints, but each -individual- kobold can put out 4d6 damage + 5 ongoing acid... if they have combat advantage... now is it hard for kobolds to get Combat advantage?  Shifty is your answer to -that-.Compare 20d6 damage + 25 ongoing acid damage to what a single black dragon puts out.  Yeah.  Kinda puts -that- into perspective.</blockquote>

Verification