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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7297758" data-attributes="member: 42582">This doesn't make sense to me. It's like saying that if the Australian cricket team met the Chinese field hockey team on the field, the Chinese would win - it's positing a clash of incommensurables.Before an AD&D dragon can face a 5e dragon, they need to be converted to a common system which properly expresses the fiction in respect of each of them. In numerical terms, the most obvious change is that a hit point in AD&D represents a greater degree of in-fiction toughness than a hit point in 5e; but other changes would also be necessary.To continue my (somewhat strained) simile: the numbers are higher in cricket than in hockey (hundreds of runs compared to single digits of goals), but that doesn't mean that cricket teams are (necessarily) tougher. To the extent that the numbers are measuring anything at all, they're certainly not measuring the same thing.This is why I was trying to make the comparison on a fiction-to-fiction basis, which seems to get at relative toughness.I think I got the paladin metric from an old Dragon article by Roger E Moore!Are 5e paladins less squishy than AD&D ones? Again, I would see this as being about the fiction. And I'm not sure what the answer is, because low level 5e PCs are fairly vulnerable, while judging upper levels seems pretty contentious - witness this thread. (In 4e, I'll confidently say they're less squishy at Heroic tier, more squishy at Paragon compared to a name-level AD&D paladin, but then less squishy at Epic than is possible for an AD&D paladin outside of some ultra-Monty Haul context.)I think I agree with all this - from my point of view, what you describe above is why I prefer 4e;s combat system to AD&D's. But it seems orthogonal to the question of whether 5e dragons are tougher or weaker than AD&D ones.I think this is more about how the PCs compare to their adversaries, in mechanical terms; rather than about how monsters from one edition compare (in terms of toughness) to monsters in another.</blockquote>

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