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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merlin the Tuna" data-source="post: 3988183" data-attributes="member: 55638">Derren, this is getting more ridiculous with each post.  We've <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20070822a" target="_blank">already seen</a> a snapshot of an encounter with a dragon.  It's got over 1000 hp.  It's not vulnerable to cold despite being fire-based.  It can loose a breath weapon and make three attacks, all as free actions.  Said breath weapon can also apparently dispel or ignore elemental resistances to it.  It's got an AC of 49 -- even not knowing attack bonuses, I have a hard time seeing mobs of people getting +30 to their attack rolls... and even that only gives them a 10% chance to hit.  We have absolutely no reason to believe that they'll only be threats to small villages.You seem to be taking a bizarre assessment of the situation -- that is, that dragons are exactly the same as they are in 3e except that they have no spells, that magic is exactly the same as it is in 3e, and that cities are exactly the same as they are in 3e.  Yes, if you take a 3.5 dragon and just strip away his spellcasting, his CR drops.  Whoopty-friggin'-do.  We've already seen that different abilities have been stepped up in the place of that.  WotC would have to be idiots to just delete the spells and say "Okay, done with design!"  They aren't, and we've seen more changes than that.Similarly, you can't just assume that because a 17th level Wizard has certain tools at his disposal in 3.5 that a dragon will need defenses against them in 4E.  We know magic is changing.  We have no idea how impressive disguise, movement, or buff spells/skills will be -- at this point, there's pretty much no justification to say "He doesn't have Alarm!  He's doomed!"  Will anyone have Alarm?  Maybe not.  Invisibility?  Might be a fairly exclusive ability.  Greater Magic Weapon?  I'd even peg that at unlikely.  Scry'n'Fry?  We already know that flying is significantly more difficult -- presumably these two are, as well.And then there's cities.  3E had a lot of rules for who went where, and it often resulted in having a lot of fairly-high-leveled characters in PC classes.  And then there's FR, which seems to ignore even those conventions and add in fistfulls of epic mages on top.  Given that having gobs of off-duty megaheroes is pretty counterintuitive to the "points of light" scheme and that we already know that FR's mage herd is getting thinned, it isn't hard to imagine that city-building is going to yield pretty different results.So no.  Given what we've seen already, I see absolutely no need for magic in a dragon, and the pseudo-context you've created where you pull the problems with 3.5 together with rampant (and ocassionaly incorrect) speculation of 4E doesn't even begin to change that.</blockquote>

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