jshaft37 said:
Could you elaborate on this?
4e dragons, at their best, are mechanically interesting in one and only one way: to fight.
My games have been using the Three Pillars since before they were a buzzword, so combat is only one part of the interesting parts about my games. I can't afford to have a monster who is only mechanically interesting in combat if they are to be a big part of my games. I need them to be able to be interesting out of combat, too.
The main thing that helped me in 2e and 3e were the automatic unique abilities that dragons got as they aged. Things like the white dragon being able to make a blizzard, the red dragon locating objects from its hoard, the green dragon's link to the fey via charms and plant abilities, the black dragon's alliance with bugs and lizards, the blue's capacity for illusion. Few of these abilities were directly useful in combat, but they helped the dragon cast a shadow that was much longer than a single combat.
4e shoved all those abilities into the ritual ghetto and then pretended mostly like they didn't exist, and even when an effort was made to present them, it had to fight uphill against 4e's focus on combat.
herrozerro said:
The dracomonicon books are better for this kind of thing.
I've really gotta vehemently disagree with that. Major villains are the anchors of the conflict and interesting encounters in D&D games, and the monster books deserve to be designed with the idea of
interesting encounters first and foremost. Dragons should be
the major villains of basic vanilla D&D -- they're freakin' in the title, and since lairs are dungeons, you've got a double whammy.
I think you could structure a monster manual around the five dragons (and perhaps the gold) as anchors and make a much better monster book more useful than any that has come before.
Alphabetical lists of statblocks are much better in a web tool like the Compendium. For a book, I need lairs, I need peons, I need villains, and I need different kinds of encounters lined up at the ready.
I know that might not really happen for 5e -- people kind of
expect an alphabetical listing of monsters from a book called "Monster Manual." But at the very least, I need my dragons to be suggestive of something more than just the ability to kick someone's butt in a fight.