D&D 5E How did you fare against Venomfang the Young Green Dragon Lost Mine of Phandelver?

[CapnZapp]

What’s happened to your party (or as a DM, the party) when you (they) encountered Venomfang the Young Green Dragon in Part 3: The Spider’s Web 7. Dragon’s Tower encounter (pp 32-33)?

Did you talk to him to avoid combat?

Avoid him undetected? (does a DM give any XP for that?)

Fight and somehow take him to down half HP to make him fly away per the adventure notes?

TPK?

Run away!?

Other tactics and resolution?

Side notes: I haven’t checked to see if his XP value makes a difference in leveling-up throughout the entire adventure ie. do you have to deal with him somehow to get at least a certain amount of XP?

[minor spoiler] ‘Hew’ the Dwarven +1 Battleaxe in his treasure that he doesn’t know about helps role play because it was used in a Dwarf's feud with dryads. So it makes the wielder feel uneasy in a forest. Was anyone able to get it from his lair maybe by distracting him (like telling him his mom told him he had to go home for dinner that tastes much better than what’s in front of him)?

We quickly took him down to half hp; at this time he flew away. Otherwise I think we would have killed him, possibly at the expense of one character.

 

[Ganymede81]

Some of our group was outside talking to it while i was searching around inside. They pissed it off and it jumped off the tower to chow on our wizard, he went down. That gave me the chance to run up the stairs and jump off the tower onto its back. We dumped everything we had on it and it was about half dead. The dm wanted to at least take down another person before it flew away so it stayed around. Then we had something like 5 critical hits against it in one round and had something like 5 hp left maybe and tried to run but just took one more shot to kill it. We saved the wizard and my girlfriend and the dm was pissed because we did so well. We were all stunned that we did so awsome.

On this episode of Actual Things that Really Happened...

 

[abomination5]

If they manage to get surprise on him, a group of 3rd level fighters should be able to kill him before he can act, especially if they are able to get him prone early in the encounter with superiority dice. The adventure notes he loves to admite hos horde, so surprising him is in the realm of possibility. Even without surprise it should be managable to get him to half health with good initiative rolls, although the breath is deadly when he does act.

Sent from my SM-G935V using EN World mobile app

 

[dave2008]

I left out a little, but that was the gist. I swear, the only thing I did to help them was I didn't have the dragon use its breath attack. Cause, you know, that would have ended the fight immediately. I figured the dragon wouldn't want to melt its treasure horde.

You realize a green dragon's breath weapon is poison gas, not fire?

 

[tglassy]

I thought it was acid. Yay me for not paying attention.

 

[Immoralkickass]

So my party managed to kill Venomfang. We are 4th level: 2 fighters, a monk, a rogue and a sorcerer (me). Here's how it went:

After talking to Reidoth, we went to the cultists' hideout and had a chat with them. We found out their plan was to offer the dragon some diamonds to negotiate for a truce. We agreed to help them, but after some private discussion, we decided to betray them. So we butchered them easily due to a surprise round, took the Potion of Flying from Favric, and head off to the dragon lair.

Approaching the tower, we pretended to offer gems and diamonds to Venomfang, in exchange for a few questions. The dragon quickly tire of our questions, but our Fighter, using the Potion of Flying, superman his way up to Venomfang (who was perched on the tower), grapple it and wrestle it down to the bottom of the tower. The rest of us rush in and thus the fight starts.

I cast Enlarge on the Fighter so that he can maintain his grapple. The monk and 2nd Fighter try to cast net on the dragon. Took a few tries, but they eventually succeed. Venomfang tries to break free but failed. He breathed on 3 of the nearest guys and 2 went down. But we got them up with the Goodberries we got from Reidoth. We had some pretty lucky rolls during the fight, some of us rolled nat 20s, including my Chromatic Orb which crit for some ridiculous damage. Our Battlemaster applying Distracting strike means the Rogue gets sneak attack very often, and soon enough the dragon is dead.

Honestly, it was easier than expected. We had the dragon under complete control, so it couldnt do much. The DM seemed a bit disappointed that the fight wasn't as challenging as he hoped to be lol.

 

[Warpiglet]

We jacked him up! It was luck in many respects. The party included 4 spell casters and a fighter. He landed briefly to blow gas in a window of a building we sheltered in as we confronted cultists.we entangled him and incredibly another character hit him with entangle. It was saving withdisadvantage since it was already entangled. Then my tempest cleric cast gust of wind! This allowed us to converge and cut him to shreds. My tempest cleric survived and with a successful survival roll claimed a mantle of green dragon hide. So so lucky. The dragon made one mistake and we capitalized. I do not think it would play out that way twice...

 

[Motorskills]

I was DMing for a large, tough party (7 x 4th level), so I decided to amp things up a bit. The party needed the hoard, I had "visioned" the cleric that a scroll of Hallow was part of the treasure, and was needed to cleanse the chapel in Cragmaw Castle.

I made Venomfang's tower defendable, the building was roughly repaired*, albeit the top of the tower was hollow, allowing Venomfang to fly in and out as he pleases. There is just enough room in the building for Venomfang to move around.
The windows are boarded up.

*I didn't explain this, but if necessary, I would have had it done by the Cultists, trying to curry favour with Venomfang.


The party wasted no time with the Cult (I was disappointed!). They just pointed at the obvious-looking bad guys and blew them away.


So they skip over to the tower...and Venomfang has spent the last few rounds breathing inside the building....the party can see green gas pouring out of the holes and cracks all over the building.

So now the party has a problem, I am not having the poison gas simply dissipate, rather it hangs around for several rounds. They will take a small amount of damage every round they are within 5' of the building, and lots more every round they are inside the building.

The outside of the building was swarming with ankle-biters. If you start your turn near the building, roll a 1d4. On a 1. nothing, 2-3 one twig blight, on a 4 two twig blights.

So the party couldn't just stand there, they had to force their way inside. They broke through the door (well the raging Bearbarian did, since he was taking only small damage from the poison)...only to find that Venomfang had another nasty surprise waiting for them.

Inside the doorway were three (IIRC) ash zombies, trapped in a jerry-built cage. The zombies are immune to the poison of course. This was the inspiration for the cage (actually just heavy timbers that Venomfang had placed there):

So now they have to get inside the entryway, kill the zombies, and then dismantle the barricade, all the time taking moderate amounts of poison gas damage.

And when Venomfang himself gets going, actual breath attacks as well....

The party did have some things going for them. I hadn't reduced the potency of Sharpshooter at this stage of our game, so the archer was having fun popping shots at the bulk of the beast through the narrow (arrowslit-style) windows in the tower. Eventually Venomfang had to do a runner, but he was actually killed mid-flight by the Sharpshooter at (normally-would-be) extreme range.


Epic fight, and I am really pleased that I jazzed up the fight in a meaningful way, while preserving the overall theme.

 

[Shadow Adanza]

I DM for a party of 5 players using the Starter Set's 5 pre-made characters. The party was at level 3 and our last session they had just arrived at the ruins of Thundertree and met Reidoth (who I used the voice of Deckard Cain from Diablo for.) In exchange for the location to Cragmaw Castle, Reidoth asked them to drive off Venomfang from the ruined city. So tonight's session, the party took to the outskirts of town and cleared out the other buildings. They antagonized the cultists by using their Halfling Rouge, Alton, as kind of a lure and baited them out into a trap after the Halfling shouted some insults and such. This ended with the Strength-Fighter, Bomark, bashing in the leader's skull to a pulp with a shield and causing the rest to flee. After then clearing the zombies and twig blights in the town, the party caught their first glimpse of Venomfang as he flew over head carrying a calf to his tower. Knowing that he'd be resting for the night, they returned to Reidoth's and settled down for a long rest themselves.

On the next in-game day, they went up the curving path towards the tower and Alton scouted ahead. Detected by Venomfang on his approach, Alton listened to Venomfang call out but didn't respond to him and fell back to where the rest of the party waited down the path. Talking it over, they decided to just go for a fight straight out with this dragon. So with Alton moving back towards the door where Venomfang was murmuring from inside his tower over what remained of his slaughtered calf, the Wizard, Zoltan, stealthed up behind the some-what crumbling tower and looked for a spot that was liable to cause the tower to fall. With a 18 Stealth check and natural 20 investigation check, he found a spot perfect for what the party had planned and wasn't detected himself by Venomfang who continued to call out to the halfing. The dex-fighter: Penelope, Bomark, the cleric: Set, and Alton all stepped back and Zoltan cast Thunderwave right up against the wall. The tower wall next to him crumbled inward onto VF and, hitting the bottom of the other half of the tower, caused that side to crumble down on top of VF as well. I decided to give it 10d6 damage for the falling tower as I'd made the tower quite tall, making it 38 damage right off the bat.

Now, with my boss characters I like to use a dynamic boss health, with the base hp and max hp possible both available based on how the party's doing. So already, VF was getting near half with just the falling tower. So VF, angry, rolls a natural 20 to burst out of the rubble that now coated him with a big "fwoosh" of his wings and rearing his head out. I gave the party a surprise round when he burst from the rubble, apart from Zoltan, as they'd all readied their ranged attacks for the first sign and then we got into combat proper. As soon as his turn came up, VF let loose his poison breath and knocked Zoltan out and left Alton and Bomark in dire straits as they were the 3 who'd been the only ones really clustered. Bomark, downing a health potion, rushed into battle with VF and fought him bravely before eventually falling unconscious from a claw attack. With Bomark and Zoltan down when he hit half health (of his max hp, I'd long since decided on the full health fight) (he had been fighting Bomark when Set dragged Zoltan out of view and healed him and Zoltan had yet to show himself while Set had moved up again to the top of the hill), Venomfang was confident in his chances and taunted the player party's futility over Bomark's body before, instead of flying away, he moved in for the complete annihilation of the remaining band and moved for Set, immediately gashing him with a claw and bite attack. Set meanwhile, healed Bomark while Zoltan showed himself once more with a 2nd-level Magic Missile. Things quickly went bad for VF when he crossed the 136 hp base threshold as he continued to take Penelope and Alton arrows while fighting Set. Landing a bite attack on Set, VF snarled as he latched onto his shoulder and held it there, where in his pain Set reached up and cast Inflict Wounds to a devastating effect, pushing VF up to 179 damage taken. Bomark then shoved his longsword into VF's back flank to the tune of a natural 20, pushing VF dt up to 193 of his max 208. It was here that Alton threw his bow on the ground and raced up to VF to attempt a leaping stab attack with his shortsword (I never tell my players the enemy's health, but I describe how the enemy is looking and at this point VF was looking really bad, so hearing that description of the dragon growing desperate he moved). Rolling a 19 acrobatics check and a verified nat 20, Alton did in one attack the last 15 damage exactly.

As a big fan of Critical Role, I ask my players "How do you want to do this?" when they kill a major enemy and then I will either add to it or let it be how it is, or describe it for them. So he wanted to run, grab onto VF and swing across the back of his neck and use his sword to decapitate the dragon. So, putting his wants into words, I described how, after VF bit into Set and got hit with Inflict Wounds, he reared his head back in pain before Bomark's stab caused him to toss his head in agony. Seeing the dragon's writhing, Alton rushed up and leaped to grab onto Venomfang's crest and launch himself over the neck before grabbing onto VF's lower jaw on the other side and using that hold to slam his sword into the dragon's neck and dig it into it where it sank until it hit bone, a half decapitation. At the pain, VF lurched his head back, taking Alton with him and the jerk of his head severed what meat and bone held the now heavy head on and the head snapped off and fell to the ground (with Alton taking 5 points of bludgeoning damage and falling unconscious from the head landing on him). Headless, the young green dragon's wings and claws fluttered and protested for a moment before they fell lifeless and with a deep sigh of relief and many smiles around the table, the party applauded their conquering of this worthy foe.

 

[Solophein]

Our group decided to tackle the dragon at 3rd level despite the protest of our paladin.

The group was comprised of a Hunter Ranger, Vengeance Paladin, Life Cleric and a Fiend Warlock.

The party was tricked into following Favric into the tower for an ambush by the dragon, Favric the proceeded to lock the party into the tower with the dragon forcing a fight.

The fight began with the party all scoring high initiative rolls, even the paladin. The DM managed a natural "1" for Venomfang's initiative.

Round 1 started and the paladin opened up with a vow of emnity gaining advantage on attack and hitting the dragom for a sizable smite roll. The other players all managed to hit the dragon as well and surrounded it, however the warlock made the mistake of being too close to the cleric. Venomfang unleashed his breath on the cleric and warlock, instantly downing them, and finished his turn by flying up to the top of the tower opening.

With the dragon now out of reach, the paladin used Command to make the dragon approach him on his next turn, while the ranger kept up the pressure with a well placed shot. On the paladin's next turn he rolled a nat 20 and smited the dragon again, followed immediately with a thundering smite that also succeeded in knocking the dragon prone (dealing a whopping total of 42 damage). On the dragon's next turn he stood back up and attacked the paladin with his bite/claw attack, wounding him but not enough to down him, then attempted to flee.

This gave the paladin an attack of opportunity which he ised to finish him off.