Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 4880506" data-attributes="member: 3424">As a general rule, yes. As something to balance the odds for specific encounters, no. And that's my point: an encounter shouldn't require special terrain for it to be balanced.But the PCs who charge the dragon will come within range of its breath weapon.The assumption is that the ranger and the wizard (or other PCs with ranged and area attacks) will be attacking while the dragon is rolling to recharge its breath. The melee-focused PCs will have to resort to inferior ranged attacks or just wait.Right, but while he's waiting, he's frustrating the melee-focused PCs, and when he comes out, he has a potent weapon recharged.Without Skill Focus and a 20 Wisdom, +11 or +13 is about as good a Perception modifier as a 4th-level character is likely to get. Characters with lower Wisdom and which are not trained in Perception have only a miniscule chance of beating the dragon's check.It isn't that black and white. In order for a kobold slyblade to get 4d6 damage plus 5 ongoing damage, he has to hit with two attack rolls with combat advantage. If he hits with one, he only deals 2d6 damage with combat advantage. A black dragon's breath weapon needs to hit only once to deal 1d12+3 plus 5 ongoing acid damage, and if he's been charged by three melee characters, he can probably attack all three at the same time. In addition, the area attacks which are most effective against the dragon may sometimes deal double or triple damage to the slyblades, depending on how many the PC can catch in the blast. The slyblades also have AC and defences about 4 points lower than the black dragon (before taking cloud of darkness into account), and five slyblades collectively have about 210 hit points, about 14 less than the dragon. There may be a bit of "wastage" because the PCs may deal more damage than is necessary to kill a slyblade, but the slyblades' collective damage output also goes down by about a fifth each time one is killed.  On balance, I'd say that the young black dragon is a lot tougher.</blockquote>

Verification