TwinBahamut said:
Well, I think both Beowulf and Tolkien's The Hobbit will disagree with you, but that is a different point... Edit: Looking at your post again, even you seem to recognize this with your Smaug reference, so I wonder why you made this point at all.
Yeah, my ideas were sort of changing as I wrote the post. What it really comes down to is that while a BBEG need not be a Mastermind, animalistic brutes don't make for very satisfying BBEGs in a long campaign. Dragons who fill the BBEG role should be clever creatures, if not necessarily brilliant.
Beowulf's fight with the Fire-Drake was spectacular, but when you get right down to it, it was just one battle. In a D&D game, it wouldn't have taken more than a single session to complete. That's what I mean by "hike up to the dragon's lair and kill it."
The Hobbit is a much better case; it's a long story that's very much in the classic D&D "quest mold." It's not just hiking up to the dragon's lair and killing it. It's hiking through the hills, getting caught by trolls, tricking the trolls into being petrified, visiting Rivendell, crossing the Misty Mountains, getting caught by goblins, escaping the goblins, finding a magic ring, meeting Gollum, having a riddle-game, escaping from Gollum, escaping the goblins again... et cetera, et cetera.
And no, Smaug isn't a Mastermind. But he
is quite intelligent. He has to be intelligent so you can hate him; otherwise there's not enough motivation to carry players through a big campaign, and the final confrontation is just another fight. After you've been through the sort of stuff Bilbo had to go through, the confrontation with the Big Bad has to be suitably epic.
TwinBahamut said:
The Mastermind is not the only archetype for the BBEG. In fact, the archetype many people are referring to in this thread, the hidden figure who controls the world from behind the scenes, is just a subset of the idea of a Mastermind. Dragons shouldn't be built with the assumption of that one subset of a single archetype.
Regardless, I prefer dragons to be
The Dragon, rather than the villain itself, and they
certainly don't need magic for that role. They might not even need a lair for that role.
Dragons certainly make excellent Dragons. Still, I dislike always having them in a subordinate role.