Providing Dragons With Classes?

[Burne]

I fully support adding Class levels to Dragons and other such big guys. However, I do agree with Someone (sorry) comment that a class level does not equal +1 CR when given to a dragon. As for my personal experience I mostly a handful of sorceror lvls (to give them a certain spell) or customize the dragon itself in someway. For example, I had a dragon who casted as an X lvl bard and had the bardic music abilities, but I didn't actually give the beasty any Bard levels.

In a campaign I play in the final goal of the campiagn is to kill the member of the dragon council that have been corrupted. All members of the dragon council are Half Fiend/ Half Celestial Great Wyrms with 10 or more class levels. Needless to say our 12th lvl party hasn't fought them yet

 

[WanderingMonster]

I really dislike this whole idea. Integrating this into a campaign would require some unnecessary tweaking and--in my opinion--ruin the perception of dragons as fearsome opponents. It's also just plain silly if you'd given a moment's thought to it.

Here's some relevant text:

Keen Senses (Ex): A dragon sees four times as well a human in low-light conditions and twice as well in normal light. It also has darkvision with a range of 100 feet X the dragon's age category.

As you can see, this completely counters what you all are proposing. It goes against the very design philosophy intended by the designers. Their Blindsight ability alone makes your argument just plain ridiculous!

My group has a paladin with a hatred of evil dragons (he serves Kord) and an intolerance of bullies. So they next time he encounters a myopic red dragon, what is he supposed to do? Geez, what's next--contacts for beholders? How about neck braces for a catoblepas? Maybe platform shoes for dwarves??? Really, if only you could hear yourselves sometimes.

 

[jasper]

What do you do if the so called Maiden offered isnt ... hmmm.. well... intact ? What does the good manners book say ?

miss dragonic manners here,
the problem of maidens with manufacture defects are like being gasous in public.... A good dragon does not mention the fault in polite conversion especially in stated maiden.

If this is a repeating problem, a nice whisper aside to the server is recommend followed by choosing ala carte.

SPEAKER IN DREAMS SPOILER





I took the dragon mention and had it start with a 1st sorcerer level. Since the players were hem hawing around, the dragon started taking out the evil. The dragon did go up a couple of levels...

However if a dragon was going to be a political power. It would start out small, polymorph ability would allow it to adventure and make contacts. Etc. However I would always make it the puppetmaster twice remove.

Giants with levels . Bad. If you want to see what I have done ask and I post my small stone giant adventure.

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Hmmm...well, platform shoes on Dwarves does sound strange! The whole keen sight thing with dragons certainly obviates the need for Blindsight, I can understand.

However, I'm not quite sure that I understand how anyone can't see how providing an ancient Great Wyrm with Wizard levels isn't workable, or somehow, not desirable from the Dragon's viewpoint. To wit:

A Great Wyrm is incredibly powerful;

However, Dragons certainly have the interest, the passion, and the capacity to benefit from having all of the abilities of a Wizard, in addition to their natural abilities. I'm not sure that I can see why a Dragon, as intelligent as they are, wouldn't want to develop his abilities as a Wizard, in particular, but other classes could offer things as well. Dragons are, after all, extremely intelligent, and seek to maximize everything about themselves, one would think. It would be like saying to the Dragon, in meta-game speak:

"Dragon, don't you see that if you train in 15 levels of Wizard, and 5 levels of Arch-Mage, you will have many more skills and spells, and your power will be greatly increased?" So says the friendly security consultant, hired through the local B.A.D.D Guild.

The Dragon turns his great head towards the neatly dressed human, speaking confidently, "No! No! I don't need more spells, more skills, or more powers! I'm already powerful enough! I don't need to be improved! My abilities as stated in the Monster Manual are sufficient! It hurts my pride to think that I somehow need to be "improved!"Hmmph! How much is the monthly security package?"

Just some thoughts though.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[WanderingMonster]

Greetings!

Hmmm...well, platform shoes on Dwarves does sound strange! The whole keen sight thing with dragons certainly obviates the need for Blindsight, I can understand.

However, I'm not quite sure that I understand how anyone can't see how providing an ancient Great Wyrm with Wizard levels isn't workable, or somehow, not desirable from the Dragon's viewpoint. To wit:
SHARK

Oh! Classes...my bad. I thought you guys were talking about glasses. No. No, that's a really good idea. Mmmm, yeah. Nasty dragoneses. Carry on.

 

[Errant]

...Dragons certainly have the interest, the passion, and the capacity to benefit from having all of the abilities of a Wizard, in addition to their natural abilities. I'm not sure that I can see why a Dragon, as intelligent as they are, wouldn't want to develop his abilities as a Wizard, in particular, but other classes could offer things as well...

Do they have the interest & passion?

I can certainly see how they might, but this is a campaign flavor decision that (as I think I previously alluded to) can dramatically change the campaign world.

On the other hand, they might just as easily be too vain, prideful & arrogant to ever actually train. Such concepts might be enough to make a dragon's scales crawl! Study! Practice! Pffft! Activities for minions & lesser beings.

The rules certainly make it easy to do, but I would suggest that unless you want to make dragons a dominating influence in your campaign, you'll avoid doing so except in the rarest circumstances.

 

[Voadam]

I have played in games where the higest level characters around were elves, vampires, liches, dragons, and wizards (some dwarves got pretty nasty as well), The fact that this corresponded to the amount of time they had to perfect their crafts, so to speak, just added to the sense of versimilitude in the game world.

It was a game where there was always going to be levels of toughness above the PCs in the game world that could be interacted with so having individual dragons who had mastered claw style combat techniques and others who had devoted their time to magical mastery seemed to make them more developed NPCs when they were encountered.

I remember one black dragon who was a major NPC in the game was known as the Feng Shui master. He was called in as a consultant when the elvish archmage wanted to create a magical elven forest.