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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lukelightning" data-source="post: 2888364" data-attributes="member: 9745">Sheesh, I'm not talking about 1000-year-old dragons. I'm talking about young adult type dragons, you know, 50 years old. Yeah, it might be experienced but it is still not smarter than a typical 15th level wizard who may have much more experience in terms of travel and variety of encounters and situations.  And besides, the rules perfectly support a 1000-year-old dragon's experience without having to resort to new mechanics or metagaming.  A dragon like that is in the "ancient" category; an ancient green dragon has a BAB of +32, an Int of 20, a Wisdom of 21, casts spells as a 13th level sorcerer.  This dragon also has a gazillion skill points (to complicated for me to figure out quickly because of the way Int increases don't work retroactively), meaning skill such as spot, listen, spellcraft, sense motive, use magic device and a few knowledge skills at high rank (probably arcana, local, geography and religion). It would be incredibly hard to get the drop on this dragon just from the plain spot/listen and sense rules, and the knowledge and spellcraft skills means that this dragon would know what spellcasters are capable of and how to recognize and counter them (not just "counterspell" counter, but knowing that wizards can teleport, clerics can "righteous mightify" themselves, etc.).  Plus between its knowledge skills, UMD skill, and spellcasting abilities, it will have identified and been able to use any magic item in its hoard (a 50-year-old dragon may not have the ability to identify some of the magic items it has aquired...it only has a few spells so may not have chosen "identify"). I believe any dragon which has substantial usable gear should have an increase in its CR to reflect this, much in the same way an NPC with extraordinary gear should have an increase in CR.Then there are the feats; this dragon has 11 feats, some of which may be epic, and many of which are beyond the capabilities of most PCs (breath weapon feats, monster feats, etc.).So the rules have shown that just for being 1000 years old a dragon has lots of experience and power.  There is absolutely no need to say "well, a 1000 year old dragon is very experienced so I guess I'll assume it knows everything about the PCs and has a +10 to knowledge skills..."  Call that "rules bound" but it is at least a solid basis on the dragon's capabilities without screwing up the game by vastly increasing the dragon's capabilities and resources.To be clear: I'm not saying that you should ignore the dragon's age and capabilities, but that doesn't mean you should go beyond its stats and make some mechanical rule on how it is better just for being older.</blockquote>

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