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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7999439" data-attributes="member: 18">Humans are very good at working out ways to murder large, dangerous creatures. Dragons are intelligent, so that helps them, but they're also solitary, and typically have no spies/enforcers/guards (or few guards) to keep them safe, and no massive entrenched cultural and legal system to protect them (unlike, say, feudal lords), and they get tired, need to sleep, eat, drink, and so on.So from a realistic perspective, if dragons bother humans, humans will work out ways to murder them. They might not hunt them (not without special equipment), but they'll come up with something. GoT did it to death, but specifically-designed ballistas (need good ability to elevate aim) would be a serious threat in many cases (albeit at much shorter ranges than GoT had - but D&amp;D dragons can't repeatedly shoot fire the way GoT ones can).From a game perspective, clearly dragons can be killed, because they are killed, and often by small groups of adventurers. So the difficulty isn't that they can't be killed, it's that the person involved is hyping how tough they are to the point where he can't believe it. Typically to kill a larger, older dragon, adventurers need planning, luck, and a good deal of magic. It's not easy. Size-wise, it's more like being killed by a group of rats or something. Could semi-humanoid rats with sharp knives kill a man with a full-body suit of armour (with weak points)? Probably. D&amp;D doesn't simulate bleed-out and wear-down which I think would be real issues for a dragon in a more realistic scenario. I doubt most dragons can fly all day, for example, and there's no reason to believe they don't need to sleep. They could probably be pushed into exhaustion. It's not like they're easy to hide or hard to spot if they're flying cross-country.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7999439, member: 18"] Humans are very good at working out ways to murder large, dangerous creatures. Dragons are intelligent, so that helps them, but they're also solitary, and typically have no spies/enforcers/guards (or few guards) to keep them safe, and no massive entrenched cultural and legal system to protect them (unlike, say, feudal lords), and they get tired, need to sleep, eat, drink, and so on. So from a realistic perspective, if dragons bother humans, humans will work out ways to murder them. They might not hunt them (not without special equipment), but they'll come up with something. GoT did it to death, but specifically-designed ballistas (need good ability to elevate aim) would be a serious threat in many cases (albeit at much shorter ranges than GoT had - but D&D dragons can't repeatedly shoot fire the way GoT ones can). From a game perspective, clearly dragons can be killed, because they are killed, and often by small groups of adventurers. So the difficulty isn't that they can't be killed, it's that the person involved is hyping how tough they are to the point where he can't believe it. Typically to kill a larger, older dragon, adventurers need planning, luck, and a good deal of magic. It's not easy. Size-wise, it's more like being killed by a group of rats or something. Could semi-humanoid rats with sharp knives kill a man with a full-body suit of armour (with weak points)? Probably. D&D doesn't simulate bleed-out and wear-down which I think would be real issues for a dragon in a more realistic scenario. I doubt most dragons can fly all day, for example, and there's no reason to believe they don't need to sleep. They could probably be pushed into exhaustion. It's not like they're easy to hide or hard to spot if they're flying cross-country. [/QUOTE]

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