Sword of Spirit
Legend
Has anyone else noticed that the lung dragons in Oriental Adventures seem underpowered compared to their metallic and chromatic equivalents?
From looking them over, here's what I see:
1. If you take away their detect thoughts, invisibility, alternate form, and plane shift abilities, they are roughly equivalent to the standard dragons without spellcasting. Unless you count the ability to make wing attacks as fairly powerful, in which case they would be weaker.
2. Their CRs indicate they are intended to be as powerful as their HD equivalents in the standard dragons (they should be compared to the 3.0 MM).
3. Therefore, it seems that the designers are counting those 4 special abilities indicated above as roughly equivalent to a standard dragon's spellcasting ability.
This seems wrong to me. For young dragons, sure. Those special abilities are pretty neat. But they do not scale. They are nowhere near as powerful as 19th level sorcerer spellcasting. Advance your dragons beyond entry level great wyrm (following the SRD rules for advanced dragons) and their increase in spellcasting leaves the lung dragons flailing in the dust.
I'm trying to think of a house rule to bump lung dragons to equal footing with standard dragons, but I'd love to hear any suggestions before I finalize anything.
From looking them over, here's what I see:
1. If you take away their detect thoughts, invisibility, alternate form, and plane shift abilities, they are roughly equivalent to the standard dragons without spellcasting. Unless you count the ability to make wing attacks as fairly powerful, in which case they would be weaker.
2. Their CRs indicate they are intended to be as powerful as their HD equivalents in the standard dragons (they should be compared to the 3.0 MM).
3. Therefore, it seems that the designers are counting those 4 special abilities indicated above as roughly equivalent to a standard dragon's spellcasting ability.
This seems wrong to me. For young dragons, sure. Those special abilities are pretty neat. But they do not scale. They are nowhere near as powerful as 19th level sorcerer spellcasting. Advance your dragons beyond entry level great wyrm (following the SRD rules for advanced dragons) and their increase in spellcasting leaves the lung dragons flailing in the dust.
I'm trying to think of a house rule to bump lung dragons to equal footing with standard dragons, but I'd love to hear any suggestions before I finalize anything.