Help Set the CR for "Dumb" Dragons

[JDeMobray]

I posted this on the Wizards boards but I imagine EnWorld gets more traffic (Which is quite a feat when you think about it).

I'm in the process of writing up a new campaign for my group.

As part of the backstory, just about three thousand years ago there was a great war between the races of Dragonkind and the Titans with Humanity (and Demihumanity) caught in the middle. Humans entered into an alliance with the Dragons and together created a great magic ritual that would seal the Titans in the underworld forever.

What the Humans (specifically the first human Emperor of the vaguely Roman themed empire that still stands today) didn't tell the dragons is that they were also afraid of the dragons power. They snuck in some extra magical stuff into the ritual that permanently bound the "souls" of the dragons into ten noble houses of humanity (justifying the use of the Bloodline rules from Unearthed Arcana).

Now for the last 3k years, the dragons have been reduced to essentially soulless animals. They are bred by the empire as war machines and mounts, but otherwise live throughout the world like any other wild large predator. I want to drop their intelligence down to 2, lose the spellcasting and spell-like abilities and probably drop the SR. This should greatly reduce their CR but, not being exactly a rules guru, I don't know by how much.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

IMO you would only reduce the CR by 1 or 2. While dragons casting spells are very powerful, the nerfing of darkness and their low caster level/CR ratio meant that a single dispel would rip off most of their buffs. (Removing the ability to cast heal is a big deal, though.)

Dragons with lower Int are just the way I like them, though I would use a background (eg they're a different race of draconic creature).

 

[Orichin]

simply dropping the int of a dragon should drop it's CR by 2 or more, imho. Keep in mind a monster's tactics are reflected to some extent in CR, removing the monster's ability to create tactics beyond 'kill' and 'smash' greatly reduces the threat of these powerful creatures.