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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorhook" data-source="post: 8997400" data-attributes="member: 58401">For what it’s worth, nobody seems to be talking about the most mechanically interesting dragons that WotC published in D&D: the (chromatic dragons from 2011’s Monster Vault (a core product 4E’s Essentials product line). By 2011, WotC had finally nailed down their monster math for 4E, and they were trying to revise key pieces of 4E that players found boring or overly similar. Unfortunately by 2011, 4E was losing the big Edition War, so the Essentials line was totally overlooked—and the fact that it was revised intro/core content in a digest format meant that even lots of 4E players skipped it. It’s a real shame, because Essentials was peak 4E for sure. If I ever play 4E again, it’ll be Essentials.For these dragons in particular, the designs leaned hard into 4E’s monster roles. All of these dragons were also “solo” monsters, meaning they were designed to fight alone against a party, but the specific roles gave each one vastly different tactics and mechanics to support those tactics. A red dragon was a “solo soldier”, so it stayed in melee and got a freebie claw or bite attack on initiative 10, regardless of what other actions it took. A blue dragon was a “solo artillery”, so on initiative 10 it would fly a short distance (without provoking opportunity attacks) and then breathe a “lightning burst” area attack at some distant foes. In addition to their classic breath weapons, most of those dragons also had another form breath weapon that recharged separately and supported the dragon’s role (the blue dragon’s lightning burst is one example). There were many more unique features that protected these dragons’ action economy too. I highly recommend folks at least review these designs directly—they’re really fun to play.These were the last core dragons released before 5E… and 5E’s monster design in 2014 was a major step backward.What, no Monstrous Menagerie by Paul Hughes??</blockquote>

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