How frequent are dragon encounters in your game?

[Trickstergod]

Rarely. Out of a 6 or so year old campaign, I think I only used dragons 3-5 times out of the entire game.

Fighting a dragon should be A Big Frickin' Deal. I didn't use the first dragon up until the party was around 10-12th level. Little pissant dragons are not satisfying; I don't think they have much purpose in play. Big, screw off dragons, though? Yeah, absolutely. The sort of creatures that any party below 10th level should avoid under any and all circumstances. The sort of monsters only the most stand-up and capable heroes should be capable of handling.

So rarely, just enough that when I used a dragon, the fight was a big deal.

 

[Thanee]

Definitely rare. Dragons are no monsters to be overused.

Bye
Thanee

 

[CleverNickName]

Dragons are a pretty important part of my adventures...I use them as iconic "bad guys" more often than any other type of creature. I know that the latest fashion is to use an NPC spellcaster or an undead monster (or both, even) as the BBEG in any given dungeon, and that's fine. And to each their own.

I voted "Often." The party doesn't randomly encounter them or anything, but each major adventure seems to have a dragon of some sort in the end.

 

[Iron Sky]

In my first game ever(2nd edition AD&D), the party eventually decided they were dragon hunters since dragons had such neat loots. Usually lost a player or two per fight, but that didn't deter them from going against bigger and bigger dragons. Ah, the good old days.

Since then they've been rare.

In my story-hour game, the players only fought one dragon, but they encountered a bunch more. I prefer to use them as powerful npcs than have the PCs fight them, especially since I like to run my enemies as smart as possible and well-played dragons(especially 3.x ones) are lethal.

 

[Anguirus]

I voted "sometimes." I use them much more often than the other DMs I know seem to...I'm in a multi-year campaign arc in which we fought two.

I, on the other hand, believe firmly that a proper D&D group should get to add some dragon notches to their belt. In 3E I carefully picked draconic spells to make them suitable challenges. Now they are much more balanced and fun to use for all levels, without the conundrum of "players below 9th level are fighting pissant wyrmlings." I tossed a 4th level black dragon with two blackscale bruisers at a fifth-level party...they just landed their ship at a nation run by metallic dragons and dragonborn, so this was the equivalent of a street thug who's going after them for money. He proved unable to regenerate his powers for round after round, so only the extra help saved him from a one-sided butchering. He didn't take anyone out, in the end, but bloodied a bunch of them and shook them up...which was pretty much my goal!

As a player, I've only tangled with one dragon in 4E. It was four 12th level characters against an adult blue...we won with one of us conscious and at <10 HP, and that only because our last survivor used a Bluff check to make the dragon think we'd surrendered for a round! Blue dragons are nasty in this edition because of the extreme rage of that at-will lightning blast.

 

[Tuerny]

In the past? Very little. Now? I am running a dragon-centric campaign, buttressed in part by the Draconomicon.