Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tovec" data-source="post: 5465508" data-attributes="member: 95493">All the issues I've ever encountered as a DM or a player have to do with the encounters with dragons.When you are ready and geared up for a battle with a dragon it can be easy as pie. When a dragon falls out of the sky and burns everything in sight then it can be deadly. I don't think this is much different than most other encounters except that dragons are weak against opposed elements (ice really defeats those Reds ladies and gentlemen). Any prepared wizard can get things in order to take one down, adjusting for its extra senses, breath weapon, flight speed, etc. In such cases the fight is over very quickly. When it swoops out of no where, and players aren't ready for it then it is a much bigger difference. They have to use terrain, smarts and tactics - all of which the dragon has the advantage.Most of my experience has been tackling larger dragons in their lairs and dealing with the results. In nearly all situations we won nearly hands down. The only time it would be contested is if they had other monsters (non-dragons) to help them.To compare this to other monsters. How often do you find a lair of an evil outsider on material plane? It doesn't happen very often. Best chance you have is finding a caster you know will summon a demon (for sake of argument) and prepare for that. Even when that happens they have much more variety in what they will summon. A beholder isn't weak against a specific type of element. A troll, while weak against fire and acid, HEALS all other damage up like it never happened. Not the same with dragons. If dragons were immune to all damage or resistant to the extend of regeneration or something similar that would be a different story. When a caster can divine specific answers before entering battle and prepare then the CR is vastly overrated compared to the monster encountered.What I would suggest to fight this is take the expectations and flip them on their head. Take a breath weapon from a blue, a couple of magical abilities from a green, the mindset of a white and put them onto a red, then make the red NOT weak against ice but instead something like acid. I think dragon design should be much more grab bag with options but sadly no dragon design book has worked this way. They just put out splat books with pre-designed dragons and hope they fit into you game.In the future when I'm going to be running dragons I hope to do it more grab bag of abilities, ones that I feel fit as opposed to what the book designers tell me fits. I don't know how well it will work but if it does I'll let you all know of my progress.ps. If you really want to mess with party have the above Red look and act like a humanoid until he shows his real teeth.pps. I hope to run a council of wyrms game coming up, so maybe I can test things out then.</blockquote>

Verification