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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6639884" data-attributes="member: 5834">You are thinking like a book. I do sympathize with your thought process because I much prefer the way dragons are in books. If you think of dragons in the fashion you choose to think of them in, they won't live long against PCs. An organized PC party can waste a dragon at higher level with fair ease. I know it should not be the case, but it is if you abide by the rules. You can even play them exceptionally well and perhaps get lucky to hurt the PCs. In general, higher level PCs (somewhere after level 11) will crush most dragons. They can take their damage pretty easily having buffs for dealing with the breath weapon and outputting rather nutty damage that chews up the 200 to 300 hits points they have, especially if you are not playing the spellcasting variety.Given this reality in the game world, dragons should be played in a fashion that encourages survivability. The arrogance you attribute to dragons is a sure path to death if they face a high level party. The dragon will have little to no time to assess the PCs that have entered before they have him near death's door. It's better to have the dragon assume he must kill the PCs as fast as a possible and worry about how strong they are later. It's in his best interests for survival given a group of PCs that dares to enter a dragon lair in the first place must be pretty damn powerful.D&D isn't Lord of the Rings or Dragonslayer where wizards are rare and weak. Fighters can't stand toe to toe with them. Priests are just guys that read out of books and baptize people with water. This is D&D. The fighter can hammer them for huge damage in the space of seconds. Wizards can unleash giants hands the wrap the dragon up and bring it to he ground or send warriors aloft in the air to fight them where they fly or create small armies of skeleton archers to pepper them with arrows (an ode to my pal Hemlock). Priests can undo all the damage they've done in a single round. When thinking of dragons in D&D using the Core rules, you must consider the world in which the dragon lives. It is not a world where it is supreme, but a world where it has real equals, one of them being a group of powerful humanoids that can kill it in under thirty seconds if it decides to play around at all. So playing dragons like this is Smaug in Lord of the Rings or the dragon in Dragonslayer is not taking into account the world the dragon lives in. That literary dragon arrogance should be tempered with a very visceral desire to survive by not letting humanoid adventurers live long at all. No talking with the wandering rogue like Smaug did with Bilbo. He's got to be ready to kill and kill fast. Don't play games in a world where wizards and priests make Gandalf look like a stage magician and fighters make Aragorn and Thorin Oakenshield look like the gate guard. At least that is how I see it, though not how I prefer it.</blockquote>

Verification