Persiflage
First Post
Can't neither. Not unless the DM has played with the feats: Black Dragons don't pick up Flyby Attack until the Mature Adult stage and this one's only Young... Yes, the DM might have opted to give this one Flyby Attack several age categories early, but that really would be a mean thing to do and there's no need to buy trouble.
For goodness' sake, don't make this worse than it already is
Now this I obviously agree with, unless the DM's kind enough to let you fight it indoors or something.
Again with the excessive doom-mongering. It's a friggin' Young Black Dragon. It doesn't get Alternate Form, ever, and it's certainly not old enough to have Polymorph as a spell. As far as I can recall, it's only Good dragons who get an alternate form, at least out of the SRD: Bronze, Gold and Silver.
Yeah, but they can do that by being intelligent, having good AC's, having a scary full-attack sequence, being able to fly and of course by being able to kill your ass from a long way away just by breathing on you. You don't need to credit them with extra mojo. A Young Black Dragon is far from being the sharpest tool in the box with an Int of 10, but that's still about what the average person will have and they're more than capable of using the abilities they've got to their best advantage.
Sound Burst, SRD, Cleric 2... Fortitude save to avoid stun and Close range, so won't help if the dragon's intent on using its breath weapon at a distance.
Sun Bolt (from Shining South), Cleric 2, 2d6 damage plus Reflex save or blind for one round. Meh. Or, of course, Blindness (SRD), Cleric 3, Fortitude save or permanently blind. Might be worth a shot. Of course, dragons have Blindsense: rendering it blind seems to me to be a way of absolutely guaranteeing that the creature will stay 60' away from you and spray you with acid (because having concealment won't help you against the breath weapon as there's no attack roll), so make sure you've got it to melee range before assaying this tactic.
Not as crazy as it might sound for a Medium dragon, although if I were DM'ing, I'd probably curse you for making me work out how to resolve the attempt. Given that we're already talking about a situation where you've got the dragon where you want it, I think you should either use nets or stick with my Entangle suggestion, on the grounds that a) it's more likely to work, b) it's one action by one party member rather than multiple actions by multiple party members, and c) your DM is less likely to jam a d20 up your nose.
He must be: the party is still alive. Either that or he's a total sadist, dragging the anticipation of death out for as long as possible
Well, firstly we're not talking about the "iconic" 5th-level party (whatever the hell that means these days, although I think "an arcane caster" would be in there somewhere), we're talking about a Fighter/Ranger (which I've just realised invalidates my Entangle idea, so stick with nets), a Rogue and a Cleric. No arcane goodness for them, no sir, and no Druid either which means that most of the good low-level battlefield control options are out of the question.
But in any case, I don't see how a 5th-level party is going to easily handle a dragon unless the DM nerfs the environment in the party's favour. Out of doors in the open (or heaven forbid, underwater), the party is pretty much hosed unless the beastie fails a save-or-lose (Blindness being probably the best example), and at that level there won't be many of those to throw around. It can literally just fly around in circles, coming back to breathe on them every 1d4 rounds. For sure, the party's going to hit with the odd bow-shot, but breath weapons don't miss and arrows do (and will). And that's without the dragon getting smart and dropping rocks from a height in-between.
There's no reason for the dragon to close with the party under most circumstances (plot devices aside), so - played properly - the dragon won't. It can kill the party at minimal risk to itself just by being patient.
