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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tormyr" data-source="post: 7287322" data-attributes="member: 6776887">I have run around a dozen 5e dragon encounters (chapter 10 of Age of Worms has 2-3 dozen dragons alone ranging from wyrmlings to Ancient Red, Green, Blue, and Purple). I found the dragons to be under-powered when one or more of the following things happened:1. The breath weapon was not used effectively.2. The attacks and legendary actions were not used for damage every round.3. It got swarmed.The dragon's CR is built around the damage from its breath weapon and legendary actions. The problem is that it is difficult to use those effectively in the same round without being swarmed. Tactics that worked well for the dragons included a wing buffet to knock PCs prone followed by grappling a prone PC and making all attacks with advantage especially if the PC was knocked prone and grappled with legendary actions right before the dragon's turn came up.Dragons also work very well when they do a breath weapon flyby and only return once they have recharged or take one PC away from the encounter area to split the party. They have the strength score to pull that off.A couple things I have learned about encounter balance in general that apply well to dragons.1. Dragons, like any other encounter balancing in 5e will only be a medium encounter for a party of 4 adventurers of the same level as the dragon's CR (i.e 4 level 16 PCs agains a CR 16 dragon). The dragon needs to be sever CR higher than the party's level to be any sort of challenge, but the higher you go, the higher the potential for it overwhelming the party badly between its breath weapon and hit points.2. If you are running a published adventure, it probably is built around a party size of 4 PCs (even if it says 5), or an experienced group can at least treat it like it was for 4 PCs. This means that the lone dragon needs a higher CR to have the intended challenge for that point in the adventure. The easiest way I have found is to add 40 hp per PC after 4. If the solo creature is CR20 or higher, that moves to 90 hp per PC. If the creature has legendary resistance, it can swap 1 PC's worth of additional hit points for an extra use of legendary resistance. This helps it keep from getting overwhelmed by a lot of extra casters using save or suck spells.</blockquote>

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