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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7484790" data-attributes="member: 4937">So the whole, "You are supposed to take out dragons by stealth" is a line of argument that I have mentioned and anticipated.   And the problem that I have with that argument is threefold.   First, it strikes me as so much retroactive justification BS.  You are supposed to take out dragons by stealth, because you need to take out dragons by stealth.   It's finding high levels of intentionality in the design that I don't think is actually there.   The 1e AD&D is a design that mostly works for average dragons 4-5 h.p. per HD.   It's when you want to do something that significantly departs from that framework that it falls apart.   Second, even if that is the intention, the question that needs to be asked is, "Is it fun?"  Ultimately you are rendering 'taking out a dragon' a non-interactive experience that makes rolls like 'chance of sleeping', 'surprise', and 'initiative' the most important aspects of the scenario.   And thirdly, the problem with that interpretation that dragons were created as this narrowly designed glass cannon intentionally to force a certain style of play on the game is that it is a whole lot of onewayism that precludes using dragons in various roles and diverse encounters, which in actual practice the DMs of both homebrew games and published modules tried to do both because no one wrote down in all caps this intended single usage intentional design you are claiming, and because in literature and the imagination dragons do so much more and are involved in so many more scenarios than the murder hobo one you envision as the one true way.Again, if you imagine that the dragons are meant to have 4-5 hit points per HD, then a totally different interpretation of the design becomes possible - the dragons are well-balanced and available for diverse play.   A dragon that has 30-40 hit points has a sweet spot which about hits my '3-5 rounds of combat is about ideal' point and is fairly well balanced in terms of how hit points, AC, and breath weapon compare with each other.   The innovation that ultimately does not work is the idea that all 8 given age categories can use the same stat block while only varying hit points.   You can actually from the text draw evidence that Gygax knew that this wouldn't work straight up, as he gives a complex formula for determining effective HD of the creature so as to give the dragon a balanced saving throw array.  But that quite obviously doesn't go far enough, since 10 HD is still 10HD on the attack matrix whether the dragon needs more or less.  And the breath weapon mechanic, well balanced for mid-levels versus mid-level dragon threats, breaks at higher levels because AD&D PC hit points is soft capped, that is AD&D PCs max out their HD at name level and only gain relatively low amounts of hit points after that.  The result is there is never a point where an 80 damage or 112 damage breath weapon is well balanced.Most of the rest of the problem can be correctly attributed to the power creep that AD&D began to suffer, both because players eventually had characters that were a higher level Gygax had ever really gamed with prior to publishing the rules, and expansions to the rules almost invariably result in power creep, and a Unearthed Arcana certainly did.  The result was that not only had Gygax never hard considered what gaming would be like after the 10th-12th level his most powerful characters had attained, but characters were effectively a couple levels more powerful than he had envisioned especially when it came to damage dealing.   And dealing more damage unfortunately intersected with the one area that most published monsters were most deficient in with respect to providing interesting challenges - hit points.</blockquote>

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