Dragon Breath Neutered

[Dr_Sage]

Personally I feel the damage from breaths are adequate if you compare to the other dragon attacks.

Characters in 4ed are not the bag of HP they could be in 3.x, specially the defenders used to be (barbarians and con fighters come to my mind).

Monsters tend to have loads of HP and characters tend to do more damage in general to keep the actions interesting.

In our fight with a white dragon we almost wiped mainly becuse the freaking breath weapon was rendering us slowed and weakened frequently. On top of that the dragon defenses were outstanding for our level (it's complicaded to hit someone with a 18 AC if you have +5 bonus).

Anyway I felt that the breath was annoying becuse:

1 - weakened us frequently;
2 - if you add all the damage he was doing in 3-4 party members you will reasise its way more tham his melee attacks would do;
3 - there was no AoE healing for us.

If you really dislike the resistances, you could make all dragon attacks "penetrating" like the older red dragons. But keep in mind it's not the breath problem. Consider this before messing up with that: certanly the designers took resistances into account when they wrote thise ancient beasts.

 

[Stalker0]

Yeah, resistances are thrown around like candy and I don't think it's a good idea. A little resistance here or there, sure, but immunity to ongoing damage, auras, and minions of a certain energy at your tier and effectively weakening or worse other attacks really neuters themed concepts. A party going up against your magma things and hellhounds and all that might easily have half or more people having fire resistance.

Resistances in 4e are definitely one of the strongest options you can have, especially because of ongoing damage. Resistance 5 is still a decently strong ability going into the high levels. Most of my players choose resistances for their magic items, mainly due to lack of better options.

 

[Jack99]

Its not only dragons where this is a problem.
Remember when the Balor preview was posted? Many people said that the damage is way to low and that having fire resistance would block nearly all his damage.
And it looks like those people were right. The Tiefling fire resistance alone is enough to more than half the damage a Balor can do.

Hardly. It was a Pit Fiend

 

[keterys]

certanly the designers took resistances into account when they wrote thise ancient beasts.

That's a curious theory - have anything to back it up? After all, they have no assurances you have any resistances and there are tons of creatures that are nullified by resistances. If they assume you have resistances, then the creatures are overpowered if you don't... and given how easy these creatures are without resistances...

It appears far more logical that they actually assumed you _didn't_ have resistances, and assumed that for any particular energy you wouldn't have more than 1 or 2 resistant and it would mostly wash.

Which mostly works for many resistance types, but falls flat when considering fire (tieflings, black iron, survival, etc) and resistance potions.

 

[CapnZapp]

You're probably right, but I've had few problems with it, partly because I make dragon encounters fairly spectacular.

I know you're trying to be helpful - and you are; but you're essentially saying "I don't have any problems because I'm not using the rules as written".

It's hard not to read this as "I agree the raw dragon breath isn't working"...

What you say is kinda true for the youngest dragons, but I think most breath weapons are about more than damage, and older dragons get to stack on some nasty stuff. If you really want scarier breath weapons you could give younger dragons versions of the ancient's abilities. (oh, and a resist 10 potion is level 14, iirc)

Green - a potion will negate most of the damage, but there's still the slow effect (and aftereffect). And good god, Mind Poison is nasty; it's pretty close to "save or lose". Fortunately only ancients can use it.

Well, again a "yeah but" post... I appreciate you trying to see the positive here, but what I'm walking away with is "the youngest dragons' breath can be shut down entirely by a potion" and "only the ancient green has a scary breath" respectively.

(What I am considering for my adventure is an adult green, by the way).

As I recall, in 3e it was fairly easy for any level 5+ caster to basically negate a dragon's breath weapon with a spell if they were prepared for it. The potions make it possible in 4e to a lesser extent.

A DM is well within his rights to allow for the possibility that the dragon has heard of Potions of Resistance and might take measures to circumvent them (like flying away to wait the potions out once it realizes they've been used). Perhaps some special dragons ignore or reduce resistances. If you're tossing a lot of dragons at the players, vary them a little bit (e.g. let one dragon suffer, another dragon ignores it somehow, and yet another does something suboptimal to circumvent it).

For that manner, a DM is well within his rights to ban certain items if he really feels they damage his game. For instance, I've done so with that Orb that increases some Wizard's save penalty abililty to auto-win levels.

Well, banning bothersome items is always a possibility, of course.

However, I definitely don't want to have my monsters have to go through hoops just because the rules work the way they do. Having "special" dragons ignore resistance or find a way of breathing some other damage type is just lame, IMO.

It makes me think of the old "classic", when Detect Evil meant that everybody important had a Hat of Non-Detection. The correct conclusion is to remove Detect Evil; not add the stupid hats.

Personally... I think the resistance potions were a horrible addition to the game. Your mileage may vary, but I doubt anyone outside your play group will beat you up for tossing them.

Now, whether your players consider the game better for letting them burn surges to make themselves immune to a dragon's breath or not, I can't answer. I would say that a dragon confronted with people immune to its breath might be inclined to just leave, though.

Interesting opinion. Do you feel the potions are bad because they drain surges, or just because they exist in general?

---

What's somewhat interesting is that none of you have touched upon the solution that I find to be most straightforward...

Making level 10+ dragon breath cause ongoing 10 instead of ongoing 5.

This way you'll accomplish
* unprepared heroes need to flee or they will die
* prepared heroes will still respect the breath attack, but will also feel rewarded for going about all that trouble finding resistance potions.

Which happens to be precisely what I believe were the original design goals (only that they weren't reached).

Specifically,

1) I like the 3E idea that dragons are calibrated on the assumption they're fought by prepared parties...
2) That a "wandering monster" dragon will be (at least) one difficulty category higher.
3) ...and that this isn't considered a big problem in 4E, because the game is not supposed to be about "random" encounters

 

[keterys]

Ongoing 10 doesn't do anything to a PC with a racial resistance after about, oh, level 10 and is also defeated by all paragon sources of resistance...

Also, this problem is not one limited to dragons. Pit Fiends and Magma Beasts and Chillborn and... all kinds of things deal energy damage that are shut down by trivially achieved levels of resistance. At higher levels people will even have the resources to just say 'Y'know, it's worth taking a -1 to Fort/Ref/Will so that I can be 80% immune to the enemy we're preparing to fight next encounter' and swap necks (or armor). Or to just spend a surge, a commodity that in many games is near meaningless since rest is assured when surges approach 0.

That said, a _lot_ of monsters have an awful lot of room to grow for damage output, so that's certainly one route you can take.

The 'you lose unless prepared' and 'you lose cause I prepared' mentality is one I've lovingly abandoned. I think I crumpled it up along with the page of paper I used to use to track the 20+ buffs I used to cast on every PC in the group in 3.0 or the page that tracked durations as they steamrolled through a tower in 119 rounds so that their 1 min/lvl buffs would persist through the entire module...