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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8675247" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, they were always VERY BIG. A full sized bull elephant stands about 12' at the shoulder, is around 15' long, and weighs in around 7 tons (that's about the limit of bigliness, though mammoths and such did get a bit larger). The SMALLEST AD&D 1e dragons are 30' long. So already 2x bigger than the biggest elephant. They must perforce weigh in at something like 14 tons, and a Red Dragon is 48' long, so MUCH MUCH bigger, and thus probably on the order of 30 tons. Note that the writeup is pretty unclear on what 'Size' actually means, as the MM states that dragons come in 8 age categories and 3 sizes (which is orthogonal to age). Now, we could assume that the 48' long Red is an Ancient Huge dragon, but we could JUST AS EASILY conclude that it is an Adult Medium sized red dragon, and then we could EASILY assume that an ancient huge version is 'Kaiju Sized'. OTOH I don't disagree that AD&D 1e dragons are somewhat on the wimpy side, for D&D. I mean, a red will do an average of 24 damage, enough to put a decent dent in a name-level fighter, but not enough to kill him outright (unless you roll incredibly bad hit dice and have a bad CON). The breath weapon, at 88 damage is, however, nasty enough to kill anything but a very tough high level fighter, or a bard. On the whole though 1e dragons are BIG but not as fearsome as things like demons.2e, BTW, embiggened them quite a bit. The Red Dragon still says Size: 48', but that is noted as 'base' and the age categories now go up to 12. The largest Elder Wyrm Red Dragon in 2e is now a full 183' long (and has a 171' long tail on top of that!), an AC of -14, does an average breath damage over 110 points, and it does a MINIMUM of 40 points of damage in melee, and averages 66 points! It also has 23 hit dice, magic resistance, etc. A single 1e fighter of very high level could probably solo a maxed 1e red dragon, a very high level 2e fighter would be burnt to a crisp on round 1 by a 2e maxed red dragon, lol. Anyway, at a snout to tail tip length of 354' it is AT LEAST as big as Godzilla!</blockquote>

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