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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5276471" data-attributes="member: 4937">It doesn't work that way.  You are making the false assumption that 1e has some sort of unified design pattern.  The fact that ancient dragons had maximum hit dice was a special rule unique to dragons, and was part of what made them so dangerous.  The special rules for what was then a Type VI demon was that there were three sizes of them, and there fire immolation ability did progressively higher damage.  Hit points were determined normally.I disagree.  I suspect the problem here is that 1e featured so many house rules that virtually everyone who experienced 1e experienced a different game, but if you played 1e D&D according to the rules and assumption of the DMG and the MM, dragons were plenty dangerous and featured in alot of 1e party TPKs.  More than one party was wiped out by unexpected encountering a dragon, and against most dragons you were 1 round away from a TPK or near TPK.  By design, no 3e party encountering a dragon of its CR should find itself in that situation.  For example, the CR of an ancient black dragon is 19.  It's breath weapon does on average 50 points of damage if the save is failed, which is probably about 25%-50% of the hit points of a typical 19th level character to say nothing of the ubiquitous resistances and defences available at that time.  An ancient black dragon in 1e of the average sort would have a breath weapon that did 56 points of damage, which, against a name level party is probably death on failed save for everyone not a fighter.  And remember, after name level 1e classes virtually stop gaining hit points, unlike 3e characters that continue to accumulate hit die so that breath continues to be relevant.  I've never seen a PC 1e M-U with 56 hit points.  And, the 1e dragon can repeat the attack on round 2, which the 3e dragon can only do in 25% of the cases.   The 3e ancient black dragon is somewhat superior in spellcasting ability to its 1e counterpart, but at 11th level of caster ability is still far behind the ability of its likely foes.   Honestly, against a reasonably experienced party even without a high degree of twinking, it's going to go down like a chump.Right.  The DM was right because strictly speaking 1e didn't 'modify the die' with respect to monsters, it adjusted which row in the matrix you used.*  A 19 with a +1 bonus meant you adjusted the row 1 more favorably to determine whether the attack hit (read the instructions on the combat matrix).  Most combat modifiers were actually adjustments to the armor class (what we started calling armor bonuses), which didn't actually change the AC from 2 to 1 (for example) but adjusted which row or column you used to determine success with the die.  This was important because of the way it interacted with the 'weapons vs AC' tables.  Very very few monsters qualified for actual modifers to hit and damage (demihuman leadesr, bugbears and giants being examples that come to mind).  A Rhemorhaz, while a very nasty monster, has no bonuses that I remember.   The house rule you describe if it worked in any sort of standard way would have adjusted the row of the matrix a number of places more in the attackers favor as if you had lower AC. Of course, to make matters more confusing, even this was not always described in a uniform manner.*Further in your DM's favor, in 2e the need for an unmodified 20 was stated explicitly in the monsters description.</blockquote>

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