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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7488560" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know quite what your scale is here, but a huge adult black is right now intended as the sort of thing you might face at 8th level.  It presently does 5d8+5 damage, averaging ~14 damage on a save.  Now, that won't threaten extreme cases like an 8th level dwarf fighter with 19 Con (88 hit points) or an 6th level Barbarian with 18 Con (87 hit points) but against a more realistically optimized party, 14 damage is a major blow and 28 damage is serious.   A typical 8th level fighter might have more along the lines of 60 hit points, so each breath is knocking roughly 25-50% of his hit points off.   A typical 9th level thief probably has along the lines of 41 hit points, so losing 14 or 28 is a bit of a problem.  An 8th level M-U has more like 28 hit points, so failed save on average is putting them in death territory.  None of that might matter except I'm not expecting this fight to be over in one round, but last say 4 rounds.  So everyone is going to be coming out of a level appropriate encounter down like 30 hit points or more unless they tactics and system mastery the heck out of the fight.  Throw that same dragon up against a 6th level party and you'll be lucky to not generate a few deaths.Now, you are actually suggesting 8d10+40 damage as a breath weapon?  Average damage of 62?  Back to that 8th level party, everyone is dead or in death territory on a failed save.  Everyone fails that saving throw vs Breath Weapons unless they roll between 15-17 (depending on class, ignoring the relatively rare saving throw bonus from a good ring of protection, high dex, or a magic shield) so say 2/3rds of the party is potentially dead round 1 and the remainder have lost half their hit points.  Plus, depending on the situation, this dragon can attack with its claws in addition to its breath weapon.  It's only lost its bite in this write up.  They've got to generate 70+ damage against AC -3 and a 65% resistance to magical attack while trying to soak and deal with a breath that will almost certainly kill whomever the dragon nexts selects for the honor.  To 'fix' that mess, I've now got to suggest this is higher than level VIII monster.  But, that means I'm edging back into the territory that I'm exactly trying to move out of, namely that a dragon only represents a threat to a party that would be expected to face it because of its out of scale breath weapon damage compared to its physical attacks, HD, hit points, and other defenses.  And if we scale them all upward, we're just engaged in pointless power inflation where all the numbers get bigger just because some people are impressed by big numbers, like multiplying all the points on a pin ball machine by 100 or 1000 to make the scores seem more impressive.</blockquote>

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