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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6983423" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, the dwarven army that Smaug defeated was, in D&D terms, an army of NPCs. And dwarven NPCs in D&D aren't more powerful than the ones in JRRT - after all, they're pretty closely modelled on Tolkien's dwarves.From the point of view of mechanical design, I think there are two main options. (Maybe there are others I've forgotten or never thought of or encountered - but these are the two that I can think of at the moment.)One way: we acknowledge that the mechanics, or at least parts of the mechanics, are solely for resolving conflicts involving the PCs. Eg we might say that the "nat 20 always hits" rule is applied to the players only - so their characters always have a chance to get lucky - but not to generic NPCs - so we can have dragons unable to be shot out of the sky even by an army of 1000 archers.4e went broadly this way (with a discussion of this approach in an early chapter of the DMG). In this case, the breaking of the dwarven army under Smaug's assault is purely narrated, not resolved mechanically. And part of the power of D&D PCs that you mention is evidenced in the mechanics that give them a chance that generic PCs lack.A possible problem with this approach becomes - what to do if the PCs recruit an army of dwarves? I think 4e had an easy solution - the army gives the PC an extra power (in my game, it was a squad of drow rather than an army of dwarves, and I let the PC in command of them call in a modest AoE as a minor action), but other versions of D&D don't really support that degree of mechanical flexibility.The other way: the mechanics of a dragon are, more-or-less, a model of its capabilities in the fiction. This is what I think AD&D was aiming for, what 3E went for, and what (as best I can tell) 5e is going for. In original AD&D it was almost impossible for an army of dwarves to stand against a dragon, because they would break and flee. However, this was handled through giving dragons a fear aura rather than the standard morale mechanics - ie dragons weren't, independent of their fear aura, something against which an army of dwarves couldn't hope to stand. I think that counts against dragons in AD&D, and helps explain why they were beefed up in 2nd ed AD&D and in later volumes of the Mentzer BECMI.The biggest obstacle to this approach is that simulationist D&D has no easy way of combining "nat 20 is an auto-hit" and "not even an army of ordinary archers can shoot this thing out of the sky".And 5e has the additional issue that, with bounded accuracy, generic archers might hit a dragon on less than a nat 20.I think it's an issue if a RPG's generic resolution mechanics make it hard to emulate a pretty standard genre trope (like the dragon who can't be shot out of the sky even by an army of archers, but who is nevertheless vulnerable to the "chosen" or "lucky" archer, ie - in the RPG context - the PC protagonist).Can you elaborate? Presumably you don't think that a GM could get the same results with a giant rat as with a (traditionally statted) dragon just by playing it a certain way. Or, if you do, could you explain what you have in mind?</blockquote>

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