Shadow Dragons and LL: Monster's Handbook

[Kitsunekaboom]

There is a template called the Half-Breed Dragon, which gives a dragon the better breath weapon damage between two species of dragon. What happens if you use a shadow dragon, is level damage greater than regular forms of damage? Equal to? Worse than? I have no idea how to look at this one ^_^*.

 

[MissHappen]

Feeling gloomy?

That's a good question. Potentially, level drain is uglier than just pure hit point damage... personally, I'd select the level drain, though I suppose it sort of depends on what kind of theme you're setting for your monster.
If you wanted to be particularly nasty about it, you could bump up the DC of the level drain in proportion to whatever other Dragon you were using in your equation (if the base DC were higher or it did stupidly huge amounts of damage or whatnot), and rationalize that as compensation for the lack of 'actual damage' in the Shadow Dragon breath weapon.

-MsM

 

[Kitsunekaboom]

Good point, and I think I will do that when I start doing crossbred Dragons. Though since the Half-Breed DOES have access to both parents breath weapons, just that they take the better damage from each, I guess I'll just let him have one damaging and one non.