[Shrewscon stay out!] Dragon Tactics

[Reynard]

So, for the local annual game day/mini-con, I am running what refer to as a "Hardcore" game -- all rolls open on the table, let the dice fall where they may, win or lose by tactics and luck. This year, it is Hardcoreragonhunt. Despite some "adventure" pretenses, really it all comes down to a fight between the PCs and a dragon. Here's the details:

There are 12 (!) 12th level PCs, covering a broad range of classes.

I allowed the sue of the Draconomicon for PCs, so there are lots of anti-dragon feats in use.

All PCs have max hit points, 32 point buy attributes, and standard wealth with a limit of 24K on a single item. One paladin PC has a dragonell mount.

The dragon is a Very Old Black -- CR 18, with feats built primarily toward aerial combat and spells bent toward illusions.

The dragon rules a flooded valley and lairs in a submerged cave system.

I am looking for some advice as to how to make this a truly "Hardcore" game -- I don't want to cheat or screw the players, but I do want to see some PC deaths. i want to scare them. What kind of tactics need to be worked out? What do I need to think about to make sure the fight is hard? the dragon has some divination type spells, so he knows the PCs are coming and can view them from afar (the dragon has bred with some local nasties, so it will be able to witness an encounter or two with the PCs versus dragon type creatures).

One thing I have already worked out it when the dragon is ready, it will ambush the PCs with the intent to kill one character, a spellcaster most likely but it depends on how some of the "test" encounters go. Giving thanks to the designers for the horrible penalties to spot for distance, I plan on having the dragon dive/charge, quicken breath breath, tail constrict/snath the target, and if necessary go aloft and drop the PC from a great height. Other than that, I only know that the dragon will use water to its advantage and has a high hide/move silently score for ambush purposes (invisibility is just too easy to beat at high level).

Help me make some PCs suffer!

Oh yeah -- I plan on having the dragon use Otilukes Sphere on characters it has dragged under water so as to trap and drown them. Is this viable?

Thanks.

 

[Plane Sailing]

By default I would expect the dragon to be a relatively trivial challenge for the party, because they outnumber it so badly.

The dragons only chance of survival is to keep its mobility unimpaired, and to do that it has to consider what options 12th level characters have for preventing it from moving freely. Wall of force & solid fog are both big problems - no save and no SR, so it must have at least one dimension door and/or teleport prepared if it can.

I think it's only realistic option is to fight in and beneath the water all the time. Grapple individuals and move away, holding them beneath the water. Make sure the water is so muddy that there is zero visibility.

Your breath weapon is so weak that it is never worth using.

If possible, open the encounter with an illusion spell that might encourage them to waste powerful spells in the first round.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I've got to go with Plane Sailing on this one: The dragon simply doesn't stand a chance against that many level-12 opponents at once, especially not with 32 point-buy and maxed out hp. The dragon's best bet is to gather his hoard together and run/teleport away.

Just as a random example, even assuming that you ban the unbelievably overpowered Lower Spell Resistance spell from Draconomicon, if all 12 of the characters were mages who expected to fight a dragon and thus took both Spell Penetrations and bought the ring and ioun stones of +1 caster level, and they had 22 Int at this point (easily doable with buffs), you could expect save DCs of 19 on Maximised Fireball (not even the ideal tactic, but just a random blundering attack), meaning that the party would be likely to kill the poor dragon on the very first round of combat without even much strategy.

 

[Reynard]

The things that can't change at this point are PC stuff -- levels, gear, etc... But nothing else is set. If a CR 18 dragon is too weak a challenge, what should the CR be? Or should there be a pair of CR 16s? The game is saturday morning, so i still have time to tweak it.

 

[Old One]

Agree completely with the above commentors...

This will be a cakewalk for the party (due primarily to numbers) unless they have to fight through a bunch of encounters prior to meeting up with the dragon. Using my handy dandy Grim Tales EL-XP calculator, I show that the CR 18 dragon barely makes the party break a sweat. It lists as a "moderate" encounter, using 18.75% of the party resources and yielding a 90.63% party survival calculation.

Even if you add 20 CR 5 dragon minions and 4 CR 8 dragon minions to the same encounter, it only ups the encounter to "very difficult", using 62.50% of the party resources and yielding a 68.75% party survival calculation.

The only way to really make this a challenge, IMO, is to use lots of environmental effects, constant encounters to wear them down and prevent rest and cagey "hit and run" tactics by the dragon. At 12 level, both the wizard and sorcerer have access to scry and teleport, making the scry, bluff, teleport combo available to them - unless you exculde those spells from their spell lists.

Here are my suggestions:

1) Environmental Effects: Fog/mist, shifting and unstable islands of floating vegetation, changing paths, quicksand, sink holes, near constant insect swarms (use the swarm template for biting flies, army ants and other annoying creatures - damage is relatively minor, but they can carry disease, prevent rest, devour food stores, etc), corrosive water (the black has been using its breath weapon for years to create large areas of corrosive acidic water that starts eating through non-magical gear and may pose an eventual danger to magic gear), double/triple canopy sections of overgrown trees and thickets (this breaks contact between flying party members and those on the ground, since if effectively breaks line-of-sight between 15-20' off the ground and 75-100' off the ground and makes flight through the middle band of 20' to 75' virtually impossible). Footing should be treacherous in many places due to soft spots, roots, etc - requiring a DC 5 or DC 8 DEX check each round of combat to avoid tripping or effects similar to a grease spell.

2) Dragon Minions: Enhanced lizard men with half-dragon shamans and leaders on giant crocidile mounts sounds about right. Giant crocs have a nice grapple (+21) and are good for dragging PCs underwater to drown. Add in stirges, various giant insects, a giant insect swarm or two, free-roaming giant crocs and giant snakes, maybe a roper or two, some carniverous trees, lots of advanced assassin vines and a flight (3-6) of advanced gargantuan wyverns (11+ HD) to deal with the pesky paladin and his dragonelle mount.

3) The Dragon: Consider advancing the dragon to Ancient (or even Wyrm) status to make it a truly memorable event. This provides additional hps, boosts the dragon's spell ability to 11th/13th and, if advanced to Wyrm, moves it to the gargantuan size category, picking up the tail sweep attack. The dragon should use its minions to wear down the party through successive encounters and use hit and run tactics to pick off stragglers/separated party members to attrite party strength. One nasty little trick is to hide and use its "corrupt water" ability to spoil most of the party's potions and drinking water. For an ancient black, this ability has a range of 300' (30' x age category), a DC 28 Will Save for any magic potions or items in a PC's possession and affects 80 gallons per use. Imagine the look of shock on the tank's face when he pulls his Heal potion and tastes brackish water instead !

The dragon definitely should stay below water for most of the adventure...I don't think flying is going to help it much and exposes it to way too much firepower. Its superior swim speed, some magical enhancements, creative use of spells (expeditious retreat underwater, anyone?) and indirect attacks should be the order of the day. If the party beds down on an island of floating vegetation to rest, the dragon swims underneath, severs the roots holding it in place and slowly drags it into a deep water rapid current - sending the PCs on a medievel log flum ride. Then, just for fun, it swims underneath and gives the island a shot of acid breath weapon. Now the PCs are on a rapidly moving, disintegrating island of vegetation and all of their water-breathing potions have been corrupted...what fun!

Got a couple of other fun thoughts...but have to run now...back with more later !

~ OO

 

[Old One]

Additional thoughts...

OK...a few other random thouhts.

1) As Plane Sailing noted above, use of an effective illusion, particularly if it is out of the 120' range of true-seeing, can be an excellent way for the dragon to gauge PC abilities and siphon off big damage spells. A lot of dragon hunters expect the dive, breath, snatch and fly away routine...so give 'em an illusion that does that...preferrably right in the middle of a lizardman/half-dragon minion attack.

2) If the PCs use boats or have to swim, have the dragon swim underneath them in the murky water and breath. If you assume the acid is lighter than water, it will float to the top and cause at least some damage plus eat the bottom out of their boats.

3) No body left behind. When the dragon (or dragon minions) kill a PC, they either drag off and hid the body or devour it to prevent use of raise/resurrection magic.

3) Done properly, you could turn this into a pretty cool and tense scenario. The dragon seeks to isolate and pick off PCs one by one. It ruins their potions, never lets them rest and, in fact, hunts them - instead of them hunting it. As you kill off PCs, have NPC sheets for the dragon's minions handy and turn them over to dead PCs to keep them in the action. Once the dragon has whittled the party down to half strength...it gets bold and attacks with its remaining minions (handled by the dead PCs players).

~ OO

 

[Stik]

One important thing that many people forget about dragons, especially old dragons, is that they are DRAGONS. A dragon is pretty much a living billboard for a huge treasure hoard: you see a dragon, there is gold nearby. So a dragon must stay on his toes if he is going to reach Old age. He must be strong, smart, tough and crafty. After all, this is probably not the first time that adventurers have attempted to take his hoard.

So, how does a dragon protect itself?
Start with the entire environment around him. Given that Black Dragons typically live in swampy areas, you can go one of two ways: a deep, dark, impenetrable swamp, where getting to the dragon's lair is fraught with dangers like alligators, snakes, quicksand, ROUSes, etc. or you can go with a wide open area, like the meadowlands in New Jersey (no, not the football stadium, the swamp surrounding it) a vast area of low-lying flat or gently undulating land covered in marsh grasses and reeds to a height of about six feet where there is little cover from aerial attack. A dragon settled for any length of time in a given area will know it like the back of its hand. All safe paths through the swamp will be monitored and/or trapped to make them unsafe, or will lead somewhere other than to the dragon's actual lair.

The dragon may in fact have more than one lair and more than one hoard. Imagine a dragon fighting fiercely to protect what appears to be its lair, and then retreating and leaving the party thinking that they have won. They enter what seems to be the lair, and spend time working their way in to eventually find a small cache of treasure. All the while the dragon has been using the time to gather his minions and prepare an ambush, this time on ground he and his minions know well and which may have traps or prepared hazards the minions know about but the players do not.

Intelligent local monsters will be loyal to the dragon (if for no other purpose than self preservation) so as the characters attempt to approach the lair, they should expect to be fighting an almost constant guerilla war against numerous low-level foes: lizard men, orcs, etc. This will be a drain on their resources, spells, healing, etc. By the time they arrive, they should be feeling somewhat drained both physically and mentally. Ideally, such attacks should come from all directions, so that the party does not know where to expect trouble. Alternately, they could attack every time from the same direction, with the goal of driving or luring the characters into a particular area, one in which the minions and/or the dragon will have a tactical advantage, or in which they can play a dirty trick (such as an area downhill from a dam. The dam can be destroyed, thereby subjecting the party to a flash flood, for example).

Also remember that dragons live a long long time. They are unlikely to throw their lives away over something as insignificant as money, especially if they have a very good chance of getting it back later. The dragon can simply withdraw, lick its wounds, and then return to hit the party again later. Imagine trying to cart a dragon's hoard out of a swamp, all the while being harassed by the dragon and his minions.

Also remember that a live dragon with a thirst for avenge can be your worst nightmare. Clever, experienced and immensely patient, a dragon can go to great lengths to ruin a person's life without a single bit of contact. Imagine a dragon following a party, then setting fire to every village, town, or city the party stops in. Imagine the dragon finding out where the PCs are from, and then destroying every building and every person in town while the PCs are out adventuring.

In a well-crafted campaign there are dimensions to the baddies that go far beyond what they can do in combat.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

One way to give the dragon the leg up and reduce the chances of the adventures will be a restrictive line of sight effect - if the swamp is constantly shrouded in a fog (or better yet, a toxic sulphur fog that makes everryone cough) it will be much easier to devide the party and cut them up, as well as "nerf" the wizards line of sight spells.

Make sure the dragon can see through whatever it is though!