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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7484362" data-attributes="member: 4937">Define 'worked'.  So, there are a lot of things wrong with the 1e AD&D dragon.   One of them is what you focus on in the rest of your post, namely, that the hit points and claw/claw/bite damage of a dragon seem to be balanced against a party with fewer hit points and less damage per round capacity than what a 1e AD&D party can actually generate.  And I'd actually agree.   But that's only the tip of the iceberg.One problem not addressed by that is that the breath weapon is actually balanced against a party with even more hit points than a 1e AD&D party is likely to have.  The breath weapon as written TPK's a party in as much that you'd generally expect the PC to die even if they pass their saving throw.  Now you could argue that that is intentional, and the idea is that if you meet a dragon then you have to defeat it by subterfuge of some sort and that is by design, but if that is the case then it totally undermines what you've just said about the combat ability of the dragon.  Why is there such a binary thing where if the dragon breathes, then it's probably a TPK, but if it does claw/claw/bite then it would be at least balanced and potentially weak?   Or to put it more generally, why is the most exciting part of the combat the initiative roll to determine who goes first?Further, Gygax attempts to simplify the dragon entry down to about three pages by using a single stat block to represent a whole range of dragons and he does this by fixing the hit points of the dragon based on age.  At first glance this looks really clever.  We can use the same stat block to challenge a 3rd level party with a rather young dragon, and a much higher level party with an ancient dragon or a mated pair of adults.  And, certainly looking at the DMG this seems to be Gygax's intention.  But it doesn't really work, because scaling the hit points only scales part of the challenge.  If we assume that the adult version with like 5 hit points per HD is well balanced against its intended level party, then when a lower level party faces a younger dragon its AC becomes a more serious challenge and its claw/claw/bite attack becomes proportionately more problematic both because it's using the same attack matrix and generating the same damage.  At the extreme, you have a wyrmling dragon doing a bite that does 6d6 damage (average 21).   That's extremely threatening to a lower level party, yet the same party 8 levels later is now facing an ancient dragon that does only the same damage and likely even the party M-U can take that hit.  That uneven scaling means that not only is the stat block unintuitive process simulation (surely a younger dragon should be shorter and do less damage with its bite) but generating interesting encounters gets harder for the DM.  For example, if I want to have a fight with a brood of dragons, I probably don't want each individual baby dragon mechanically working just like the momma dragon and differing only by hit points.      That raft of problems remain even if you don't bring UA into the mix or don't particularly power creep the expectations of a PC party.I'm not familiar enough with OD&D to assert how balanced a dragon would be in that case, nor do I even know what the stat blocks look like.</blockquote>

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