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David Noonan on D&D Complexity
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<blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3125838" data-attributes="member: 1757"><p>All excellent points. That said, I think there are three problems with dragons and the impact they have on the game in D&D:</p><p></p><p>1) They're currently used too often in published materials. I see far more dragons that unique class-level-advanced monsters in WotC and Dungeon adventures, despite the fact that the latter are actually easier to build and run than the former.</p><p></p><p>2) Dragons simply provide an excellent corner case to illustrate the potential headache for the DM of using all these different rules. A well-built dragon uses every single magical buff in the books, a boatload of optional feats, "advanced" rules like grapple, and potentially a host of other multi-stage effects (metabreath feats, etc.). </p><p></p><p>3) IMX, there's a tradeoff between a monster's complexity and the effectiveness with which it can be run by the DM. IMHO, dragons (and high-level PCs/NPCs) suffer from the problem of having umpteen low-level buffs that they're basically assumed to be using to maximize effectiveness. I think it'd be a good thing if these effects were just hardwired into their builds, especially in the case of NPC adversaries like dragons, whom are only going to be encountered by the PCs once. I'm not bothered with keeping track of a great wyrm red's 6th-8th level spell selection, but all its animal buffs, mirror image, displacement, etc? Not so much fun.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="ruleslawyer, post: 3125838, member: 1757"] All excellent points. That said, I think there are three problems with dragons and the impact they have on the game in D&D: 1) They're currently used too often in published materials. I see far more dragons that unique class-level-advanced monsters in WotC and Dungeon adventures, despite the fact that the latter are actually easier to build and run than the former. 2) Dragons simply provide an excellent corner case to illustrate the potential headache for the DM of using all these different rules. A well-built dragon uses every single magical buff in the books, a boatload of optional feats, "advanced" rules like grapple, and potentially a host of other multi-stage effects (metabreath feats, etc.). 3) IMX, there's a tradeoff between a monster's complexity and the effectiveness with which it can be run by the DM. IMHO, dragons (and high-level PCs/NPCs) suffer from the problem of having umpteen low-level buffs that they're basically assumed to be using to maximize effectiveness. I think it'd be a good thing if these effects were just hardwired into their builds, especially in the case of NPC adversaries like dragons, whom are only going to be encountered by the PCs once. I'm not bothered with keeping track of a great wyrm red's 6th-8th level spell selection, but all its animal buffs, mirror image, displacement, etc? Not so much fun. [/QUOTE]
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