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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7225527" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's true, but it's not really relevant to what I was trying to communicate.What I was trying to communicate is that a newly hatched average sized red dragon with 10 hit points is supposedly by virtue of being much younger than an ancient dragon with 80 hit points, also a much smaller dragon.  But by the normal rules this newly hatched dragon still attacks as a 10HD monster, still has a 6d6 damage bite, and still is technically 42' long (or however long reds are supposed to be normally) because 'young' and 'ancient' dragons by the normal rules share the same stat block.  This lack of uniform scaling becomes very important when you are trying to pick a dragon to be a good challenge to a 1e party.  If you pick a young dragon with low hit points and consequently a small breath weapon, you are getting a monster that delivers outsized bite damage and is very difficult for the party to hit.  But once the party gets high enough level to deal with larger breath weapons, the damage from the physical attacks become trivial and the same dragon is trivially easy to hit.   This leads to a 'glass cannon' syndrome where the fight is basically over by the initiative roll and no really interesting cinematic combat can occur.In my opinion, good combats tend to go 3-5 rounds.   Shorter ones involve little decision making and are too abstract to visualize in any way that is fun, and longer ones tend to drag.  These dragons are intended to survive at least 3-5 rounds versus even large well equipped parties of an appropriate level, while during that time achieving a middle ground between dealing overwhelming amounts of damage and doing enough damage to be threatening.  One thing you might note is that I've extended the monster level table up above X, to suggest monsters that are much more potent than even name level parties can easily face.  The Huge Great Wyrm Red Dragon is for example listed by me as monster level XVIII, which suggests you shouldn't be fighting one of these at all at merely 10th level and would need to be 15th level or higher or otherwise be a very large party (perhaps 12 characters) to consider this anything like a fair fight.  This Tiamat, with more hit points than Zeus, is monster level XXIII, suggesting you need a true end game party to face her.   And I dare say she's a more interesting fight than '100 liches' or other 'Bloodstone' style encounters, and indeed a far more interesting foe than the version of Tiamat that appears in that series.Normally, with monsters with any sort of special abilities, the value of XP from hit points is a relatively small percentage of the total XP.  You can see I'm aware of how 1e XP works by examining "Table 4: XP Value of Chromatic Dragons by Age and Species", and you should note that if it wasn't for the fact that I'm giving my version of dragons much more 'bonus hitpoints' than is usual with 1e AD&D design that the amount of XP from the hit points would be rather small.  Only because I'm doing things like HD like '10+50 HD' that you otherwise only see with 1e Daemons, do the XP bonus from hit points get relatively significant.I'm aware of all the 1e rules for dragons, including the 1e FR rules and those published on several occasions in Dragon magazine.   I was referencing rules such as the FR rules when I wrote, "That dragons were broken was nothing new to myself or the community at the time, but looking back it's easy to see that while many knew that dragons for all the elegance of their design in some areas weren't working, no one seemed to really be able to put their finger on why. Many valiant efforts were attempted over the years, but in retrospect none quite worked right because they set about fixing the wrong problems."The FR rules are an example of good intentioned fixes that are in fact fixing the wrong problems and thus making the actual problems worse.   Upping the number of attacks per round just made the dragon even more of a glass cannon, and splitting the breathe weapon up made sense only if the dragon was engaged with 0th level warriors and had nothing to do with the more pressing problem of dragons engaged with player characters.   The only thing I've really kept as a nod to the FR or Dragon magazine rules from that era is the 10 age categories, as opposed to the 8 of early 1e era dragons or the 12 of 2e era dragons.   I figure 10 is enough, and it makes some of the math a bit easier.   You could go to 12 age categories if you wanted, and you'd get even bigger nastier dragons, but as my examples show I'd prefer to create end game content using a slightly different approach.</blockquote>

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