I didn't vote it, but I did run Council of Wyrms for awhile.
How many dragons?
I didn't vote it, but I did run Council of Wyrms for awhile.
ParanoydStyle
Peace Among Worlds
In my experience, it's not that huge of a gap at all, because I have never had the good fortune to run a 10+ year campaign (I expect like most of us) and (again, I expect like most of us) my campaigns tend to last between 12 and 24 game sessions max. Of course, at a certain point three or four years ago I made a conscious choice to keep my campaigns relatively short because with the constant fight against player attrition and my friends' schedules, the failure rate of campaigns meant to be much longer than that was approaching 100%. And at that point in my life I had started running maybe 45 TTRPG campaigns and finished 3. Now I've started maybe 55 TTRPG campaigns and finished around 10*. So the decision did work, it improved my rate of campaign completion from 6.6% to 18%, nearly a threefold improvement.
* Three of these were different "Seasons" of the same horror campaign, but considering that there was very little continuity of plot, player characters, or setting from one Season to another, I count them separately.
This is just part of what I meant by dragons having the [Awesome] subtype. I'm not sure if you were playing during 3.X or played Pathfinder but compared with those, 5E dragons are very reasonable: they have certainly been nerfed good and hard, primarily in terms of AC and raw physical brutality.
I like that people are mentioning atmosphere building "dragon sightings" and the like because I do that too. Occasionally I will just have an adult blue dragon flying past overhead: it has nothing to do with the campaign, it hasn't noticed the PCs and/or doesn't care about them. It's just there to remind you that you are in a world of wonder and amazement...where there are flying dinosaur wizards in the sky.
Also, yes, in case it was unclear, friendly and neutral dragons totally count. The question was "how many dragons are there" not "how often do your players have to fight a dragon".
Most of my players...actually, all of them that I can think of...have reacted to any dragon appearances in a suitably impressed manner without me needing to do much extra work narratively or descriptively. I have never gotten an 'eh' reaction from a dragon appearance.
It's impossible to overstate my jealousy of you guys and your epic campaigns. I had a Call of Cthulhu campaign and a Shadowrun campaign back in high school (wow, big wave of nostalgia) that lasted several years, mainly due to not playing on a regular weekly, or bi-weekly schedule. Even once a month was not guaranteed. It sucked (as it sucks for me NOW that I don't have a gaming group but I digress). Likewise, I think the Shadowrun 4th Edition campaign, Carnival of Echoes, that I wrote as my "master's thesis/unsolicited pitch" to get into the CGL freelancer pool, lasted for about three or four years, but again, rarely did we manage anything like regular weekly meetings. Still that campaign was (now I'm guessing) less than 50 sessions long, as were the ones I ran in high school, but longer than anything I've run since. Because as I mentioned, at a certain point I decided to limit my campaigns to a short length so that I could actually finish a campaign rather than just abandoning it when something else captured my interest.
I've been hearing about people whose D&D campaigns lasted many, many years or even decades. Usually those people are long in the tooth grognards talking about their glory days, but clearly not always based on some of these poll results. Anyway my reaction has always been the same: pure envy. My mental health would be vastly improved if somehow I could be guaranteed that I'd be allowed to play or run D&D at least once a week for the rest of my life. I wish that I had tails to tell of epic PCs I'd played for eons or campaigns I ran that lasted eleven years, but I have never had that kind of stability in my gaming life.
ATTN: so, I can't edit the poll, no big surprise there. For those of you rocking the super-long-and-stable-campaign life (you bastardos have I mentioned I'm jealous?) please mentally replace the word "Campaign" in the second poll option with "Year". That should fix the issue, I believe.
I am pretty sure this literally CANNOT HAPPEN in 3.5 unless by "I am not very good at the tactical use of dragons versus the party" you meant "I literally have the dragon sit there and do nothing while the party murders its face off" which I can't imagine you did. Using the "Very Old Red Dragon" as a benchmark (age categories in 3.5E go up three more levels past "Very Old" through Ancient, Wyrm, and Great Wyrm; 5E reduced the number of dragon age categories from 12 to 3). A Very Old Red Dragon (let's say his name is Vord) in 3.5 has 449 hp, AC 36 (sufficiently high that even for most dedicated fighters, power attacking is risky; anyone who doesn't have a good BAB protection is only going to hit on a natural 20), and its saves are Fort +25, Ref +19, and Will +25--for a frame of reference, a VERY, VERY good spell save DC for a high level caster would be 18 + spell level (and note that's for an extremely cheesed out caster with a maxed out casting stat and a +6 enhancement bonus item on top of that, plus assuming Spell Focus) so Vord can still only fail a save on a natural 1. So without even getting into the specifics of his offensive capabilities (18d10 breath weapon? check. full attack of +40/+35/+35/+35/+35/+35 with option to power attack in an edition where an AC of 25 or better was considered pretty good for a PC? checkaroo) Vord here really cannot be used to wipe the floor. The floor cannot be wiped with him. He is not a floor wiper. He wipes floors. With others. Mainly with their blood.
Not sure why I spent so long on this, I just thought it was interesting that it's possible to run a powerful dragon "wrong" in 5E, since it literally wasn't in the edition I've spent the most time with.
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I remember a red dragon in 3.0, hasted casters deluged it with spells until it rolled a 1 and was Polymorphed.
Campaigns - I guess the WoTC default expectation is 50 sessions weekly over a year, maybe 35 sessions if you're playing a 1-15 hardback campaign adventure. I find for me around 2 years is typical regardless of play frequency.
Campaigns - I guess the WoTC default expectation is 50 sessions weekly over a year, maybe 35 sessions if you're playing a 1-15 hardback campaign adventure. I find for me around 2 years is typical regardless of play frequency.
DND_Reborn
The High Aldwin
Well, as an older player and DM, I do feel badly for anyone who hasn't known the love of a longer (say 5-years or more) campaign with the same characters. Sure, some players and DMs might get bored, but when the characters really seem to take on a life of their own it is a real pleasure to watch them grow.
My greatest one was from 1998-2003 with characters starting at level 1 and ending between 15-18. The VERY FIRST encounter was with an Age 10 Green Dragon (2E)! It attacked the elven town, killing nearly everyone but the party escaped along with many others. They had many adventures and the game lasted about 25 years in game time. They got married, had children, built homes (and castles) and established their lives. They traveled through the City of Dis (2nd-level of Hell), fought Beholders, Giants, Krakens, Dinosaurs, Dragons, and so much more! We played every week for hours at a time and never got tired of it.
The characters went to meet Corellon Larethian in the Outer Planes and faced his challenges to restore a fallen comrade (the wife of one of the other player's character). All but one succeeded (the husband, actually...), who decided to remain in the afterlife with his love instead of returning to the mortal realm. One of the players actually cried when the other player's character failed in the final challenge! The characters all said their good-byes and the others returned to the mortal realm. When it was all done, I closed my notebook and set it aside, announcing the campaign was over. There was stunned silence as the players (we had a total of eight of us then) looked back-and-forth to each other and me. Then we all broke out in grins. It was a good ending to a great game.
Of course I've run shorter games, but most last 2-3 years with short breaks maybe for another RPG. I hope some day you get a set of players and circumstances that allow you to play something that lasts a long time and really stirs your heart and soul to remember it decades later. I've had plenty of incredible games and hope to have many more, but those longer runs really mean more IMO. Best of luck!
As an aside, dragons would be 2-4 per year maybe, still more than your revised option 2 LOL.
ParanoydStyle
Peace Among Worlds
First off, it's funny that I voted for by far the least popular option in my own poll. I do shoehorn a dragon into every session I can. Even if it's just, as mentioned above, seen passing overhead from a great distance.
This is an interesting response because it has a kind of absoluteness to it that seems to innately confer authority (like Chef, from South Park, telling everyone when teenagers are old enough to have sex: it's 17. "But doesn't it depend on the-" No. 17.)
Personally, in a 20 level Dungeons & Dragons campaign I would feel cheated if there were less than a dozen significant dragons, and I would expect to meet at least 20 distinct dragons over the course of the campaign (although obviously not at a rate of one dragon per level: they'd mostly be backloaded towards the higher level stuff). I'd also want to kill at least 6-10 dragons over the course of a 20 level campaign.
I know it's silly, and it's funnier still that I grew into this preference at such an old age (I expect like most of us there was no point in my life when I didn't think dragons were cool, but until 2015 or so I wasn't particularly worried about including "enough" of them in my D&D) but it's very important to me that my D&D have enough of the second D.
To anyone who has read this and thought "but doesn't having dragons appear regularly make them less special/less impressive ("oh yawn, another dragon")?" I think that's only the case if you run every dragon the same or at least run all your dragons similarly. Some of them should be combat encounters, some of them should be non-combat social encounters, some of them should be brief brushes with dragondom that don't qualify as encounters at all, and so on. Dragons should run the full spectrum of the gamut from dumb to ingenious and from evilest evil to purest good. No two dragons should be quite the same (well, excepting mated pairs, perhaps, although the idea of a long-married dragon couple that is constantly bickering is very amusing to me).
This is an interesting response because it has a kind of absoluteness to it that seems to innately confer authority (like Chef, from South Park, telling everyone when teenagers are old enough to have sex: it's 17. "But doesn't it depend on the-" No. 17.)
Personally, in a 20 level Dungeons & Dragons campaign I would feel cheated if there were less than a dozen significant dragons, and I would expect to meet at least 20 distinct dragons over the course of the campaign (although obviously not at a rate of one dragon per level: they'd mostly be backloaded towards the higher level stuff). I'd also want to kill at least 6-10 dragons over the course of a 20 level campaign.
I know it's silly, and it's funnier still that I grew into this preference at such an old age (I expect like most of us there was no point in my life when I didn't think dragons were cool, but until 2015 or so I wasn't particularly worried about including "enough" of them in my D&D) but it's very important to me that my D&D have enough of the second D.
To anyone who has read this and thought "but doesn't having dragons appear regularly make them less special/less impressive ("oh yawn, another dragon")?" I think that's only the case if you run every dragon the same or at least run all your dragons similarly. Some of them should be combat encounters, some of them should be non-combat social encounters, some of them should be brief brushes with dragondom that don't qualify as encounters at all, and so on. Dragons should run the full spectrum of the gamut from dumb to ingenious and from evilest evil to purest good. No two dragons should be quite the same (well, excepting mated pairs, perhaps, although the idea of a long-married dragon couple that is constantly bickering is very amusing to me).
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jgsugden
Legend
...I meant in my campaigns there are usually about 8 meaningful dragons in a 20 level campaign... I was recounting my general pattern, not dictating a plan to others...
BronzeDragon
Explorer
Dragons are mostly rare in my campaigns, except when I run Dragonlance.
And they were everywhere when I ran Council of Wyrms once upon a time...
And they were everywhere when I ran Council of Wyrms once upon a time...
ParanoydStyle
Peace Among Worlds
I know, I was just kidding. : )
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