(Win pdf books!) Now closed (except for some book-keeping)

[RangerWickett]

Update: After two weeks, I'm ending this thread. It was fun, but Thanksgiving is coming up, and then Christmas, and I want to encourage people to shop at the EN GameStore instead of trying to just win free stuff. *grin* I enjoyed it while it lasted, though.

I'm looking to give away a few dozen free pdfs, and I need your help.

This is week two of the giveaway. Week one's thread is here.

Basically, what you need to do is post something interesting, something that amuses me or makes me think (and preferably does the same for your fellow posters). Then include in your post the name of an E.N. Publishing product you're interested in. Every day or two there'll be a new topic, and whenever I post a new topic, I'll send out pdfs to one or two people each day whose posts I liked best. Everyone who posts, as long as they contribute something, will receive at least a Pick-n-Mix product from the new EN World Gamestore

You don't have to post your email address. The new EN World Gamestore lets publishers send complimentary copies to whatever email address you registered when you joined the boards, and you can see the entire catalogue of E.N. Publishing products here if you want to see what you might win. All you need to do is post, and include what book you want, and I can send it just by entering your screen name.

This is the last topic, and it'll be open until Monday night. The topic is memorable scenes. Share stories from your games that make for the most iconic scenes from those games. I am not concerned so much about the over-arching storyline, just the specific scene. If you can't have good scenes in fiction, you can't have a good story. Feel free to focus on combat, puzzles, narrative, or whatever else you can think of.

Day Eleven to Fourteen: Memorable scenes from your games.
Day Nine and Ten: Dungeons!
Day Seven and Eight: Dragons!
Day Six: Friendship, rivalry, and the adventuring paty
Day Four and Five: Raising, Resurrecting, and Reincarnating
Day Three: Monsters!
Day Two: Topics and about topics.
Day One: Any random topic.

 

[demiurge1138]

Dragons are special. The game is Dungeons and Dragons, after all.

The reason dragons are special is because they're mythic. Everyone knows that the highest echelon of heroism is the dragonslayer. Every culture where dragons are evil (as opposed to beneficent spirits) has one. St. George. Siegfried. Heracles. So DMs treat dragons with respect. Rarely, if ever, will you get a random dragon as a random encounter. Dragons are there to be a goal. Either the dragon has something you really want (Fafnir) or is the end of a quest in and of itself (George's dragon).

The rules reflect this. Compared to just about any other creature of its CR, any dragon you care to name has a distinct advantage. They get d12 hit dice and all good saves. A dragon will have more average HP and a higher AC than most anything else of its Challenge Rating. While this may smack a bit of robbing the party of their relative dues in experience, it ensures a memorable encounter, one full of high heroism and near-death experiences.

I've run a dragon fight a few times, and each time the dragon was itself the focus of the quest. A rust dragon squatting in Acheron is the current receptacle for an ancient dracolich spirit, one that the party has crossed before again and again and who plans dark things for the entire Realms. A dragon escaped from the Styx itself, growing ever fouler in the sewers beneath a metropolis, exerting tendrils of influence on the city above, warping its already fragile people further towards depravity. An ally of the githyanki, cruel and ancient in the nostril of a dead god, its mind full to bursting with secret lore the party needs to prevent the end of all things. Each of these dragons was the culmination of a long time spent adventuring, and the party was very high level each time they faced one of these monsters.

The last dragon I ran, only a few weeks ago, was something of a different tack. It was fairly young, and the party was also fairly low level (average party level 8th). They needed a dragon's bone to create a magic item, and they did not trust their ability to purchase one. Besides, they were a plane-hopping group temporarily trapped in Greyhawk, so the quest to go slay a dragon in the Cairn Hills seemed like a good way to pass the time, get what they needed, and earn some money on top of it.

That is not to say, of course, that getting to the dragon was easy. Far from it.

I was reading a book on lizards this summer, and there was a photograph of some poor fence lizard that had found itself the victim of a butcherbird. I knew at once how the dragon was going to behave.

The party was traveling the thin trails along rushing montane rivers to reach the dragon's volcanic lair. After several days travel, they reach a clearing, with a wide wooden bridge crossing the ravine over the river. On the far side of the clearing, they see an awful site. A tree, forty feet tall and its canopy nearly so wide, leafless and studded in cruel thorns the length of a human arm. Impaled on the branches of the tree are bodies. Deer. A hippogriff. Goblins. Humans. They are clearly still alive, faint moans of fear and pain barely audible over the sound of the water below.

The party panics. And then they hear it. The beating of wings.

They frantically scramble behind rocks, trees, bushes. Off of the road, out of the way, but still trying to see what's going on. They hear something land, see the faint cloud of dust it kicks up as it lands. But they see nothing. Until one of the tree-studding bodies, a young girl, is delicately lifted from the tree as if by invisible claws or tentacles, and is bit in half by invisible jaws.

And then the invisible dragon stops. It sniffs. Live prey.

The party panics. Again. Harder than before as the dragon burns out the bridge with its fiery breath and begins to circle the area, hoping to pick off the poor mortals as they try to make their way across the chasm.

The players all hated me, in the best possible way. That "oh, you bastard" sort of way where they're really enjoying the challenge, as they send their horses running down the trail as a distraction, the sorcerer flying across the ravine to stretch a perilous rope across, the fear of crossing the rope, the rushing river below, as the dragon swoops back to pluck one of these morsels from their tenuous grip, and the harrowed chase as they found the hollow beneath the roots of the thorn tree and escape with the hot wind of the dragon's breath at their heels.

Compared to that, the final confrontation with the dragon (when they were fully rested and buffed and protected from fire) was pretty disappointing.

Demiurge out.

Oh, and I still like EN Bestiaries.

 

[Evilhalfling]

I love Dragon fights, but they have to be handled carefully, Dragons should be a challanging fight for the whole party, and it is often difficult to make them so. They tend to stand alone which means that the party gets 4-6 times as many actions as the dragon does. Frequently the dragons strengths and weaknesses are well known. Parties normally are well prepared an buffed for dragon hunting. So the dragon really has to make good use of his enviorment and allies to be a challange, unless you only run dragons that are well over the parties ECL.
at least +3 if not more.

What they are best at (if smaller than Huge) size is running away. Even then they tend to have no healing avalible, and so are vulrenable to frequent raids until they are exahusted.
They should have great lair traps, but they have no great skill or magic to create them.
The Draconomicon was a great and needed power boost, allowing them to specalize in flying, melee, breath weapon tricks or magic. I always wish that dragons were a little better in hand to hand. Until Huge, they are out performed by PC tanks. I don't play much at lvl 13+
so they are forced to use guile, enviornment and allies, to keep up.


I have played 2 great dragon fights, the first started out badly with most of the dragons hp vanishing in 2 rounds. A flying archerer took aim at the thing and was about to finish it off its 8 hp, an I mentioned that the dragons ear was nearby, he took the hint and shot a volley straight down the dragons ear with a nat 20. That and descriptions made the battle feel epic, event though it was a blowout. The fun part came when one chaotic player hired a nearby tribe of stone gaints to dig out the body and bring him the hide, in return for the coins in the horde. The peasentry got rumors of a dragon leading an army of giants into settled lands and immigrated by the thousands. The PCs were even asked to go stop the invasion.

The second was as a player fighting a underdark dragon. After being wounded it grabbed our mage and threatened to kill him if we didnt let it go. We assumed we could finish it off or the mage could teleport before being killed. Neither one was true. 1 dead PC, 2 KO and several lost levels, that was a dragon worth fighting. True to ledgend the party broke out in a fight over its horde (Well I and the raised mage did at least)

 

[Alzrius]

The only dragon encounter I ran quickly went very badly for the PCs. The problem (aside from them being not fully prepared) was that the dragon can fly, and thus can quickly decimate a party that will only have limited ability to fight back.

While flying, a dragon is only vulnerable to ranged weapons and spells. Spells need to overcome both SR and saving throws to have a major effect. An intelligent dragon will use its natural spells to cast protection from energy against effects it knows it's weak against, as well as buff spells like cat's grace to enhance their saving throws, and spells aren't such a threat...especially when you factor in that only arcane spellcasters have many offensive spells.

Ranged attacks are a little better, but they typically only do 1d8 points of damage, and are subject to DR. Having them be enchanted does get around the DR, and does additional damage, but it's still not something every party member is likely to be able to bring to bear (since it's unlikely they'll all have enchanted longbows), and the dragon can use AC-raising spells also. Likewise, being out of range, it doesn't provoke AoO's.

Finally, in addition to range (where they can use spells and breath weapons freely), they also have their flying combat maneuvers, mostly through feats such as Flyby Attack and Snatch. A dragon using those in combination can fly past a party, grab a party member, fly away, and drop the character, all in one round.

The major trick then becomes how the party can ground the monster, before it slaughters them all from above.

I don't think I can win something again, but on the off chance I can, and this post does, then I wouldn't mind a copy of Chainmail Bikini.

 

[Roudi]

See, now, dragons seem important to us, mainly because we're pretty often reminded of our brief mortality when face-to-face with these deadly beings. The honest truth is, if a man were a god, then a dragon would be a chicken (and a house would be a plane and a squirrel would be a tarrasque, but that's just a bit of fun; I'm sure you get my point).

Once upon a time, when the gods looked over the land and found it mostly empty, they rumbled and shouted and angered. For they were hungry, and the land, being empty, offered very little to eat. As they rumbled and shouted and angered, they scared a wee little dragon (that would have been the size of a mountain, but was surely a quite wee thing to such a person as a god) out of a hole. Seizing upon this animal, they slew it and gorged upon it and found it disgusting and got salmonella. Upon curing themselves, they caught another dragon and slew it and this time cooked it with a bit of rice and vegetables and peanut sauce and some spices; and thus did the gods create thai cuisine.

Finding that they were still very hungry, and that catching these dragons made them more hungry, the gods decided to invent farming and start a dragon ranch. So they did, and they named a type of sauce and salad dressing after the dragon ranch, which incidentally is called "ranch". Anyways the ranch was a whopping success, and the gods feasted mightily for several days. However, suddenly the dragons started dying on their own, and the gods couldn't figure out why until they realized that dragons need to eat too. So, never ones to do anything the boring way, the gods decided to make dragon food that could run around and build villages and invent devices and write boring literature. So they made some meat and gave it arms and legs and a head and then said "let's make different flavours". So you had short, stocky flavour that was very meaty but liked to hide in rocks; you had another flavour that was very lean and thin and was great for the dragons because it liked to hang out near vegetables; and then there was the leftover stuff that the gods just said "oh sod it" to and used for filler. These leftovers were, of course, humans.

Now the dragons were very crowded on the ranch, and now that they weren't starving to death they started getting into fights with each other. The gods didn't much like this at first, but one fateful meal changed that all around. One night two gods were arguing over which dragon was the biggest and, therefore, the best one to eat. A third bloke on the outside said "think about it logically... the biggest dragon could beat any other dragon, right? Well, just let the two fight each other and the biggest one will naturally win!" All the other gods thought it was a great idea and cleared some room on the table. They tossed one human between the two dragons and watched as the beasts tore each other up to get it. The stronger dragon won, and was promptly bashed over the head and baked into a lovely quiche.

A taste for watching dragons fight soon spread through the gods as quickly as dragonmeat satsified their hunger. It wasn't long until three official dragon fight leagues popped up and began selling tickets to their events. Sideline bets on dragon fights became the highest-stakes gamble in the multiverse, surpassing tarrasque rodeo and speedwalking. The dragons themselves went from food source to celebrity, some of them earning annual salaries as high as 8 Caves Full of Gold! Of course, as gods are able to make pretty much anything out of thin air, money was never in short supply.

As quickly as it grew, however, dragonfights soon became boring. The leagues reacted by attempting to spice up the competition. The Draconic Danger Deathmatch league gave it's competitors all sorts of bizzare powers, such as flaming breath and magical spells and theme music, as well as garishly-coloured hides. The Deadly Dragons Bloodsport league countered by incorporating more dragon food. Somtimes the food appeared in the form of a flavourful group of "adventurers" who were given a fighting chance against the dragon. Other times they mounted humans on the dragon's back to flail and swipe at the opponents (critics of dragonfights have considered the latter a very Weis maneuver for the DDB). The third league changed its name to the Lucha Libra del Draco, and dressed its dragons in masks and speedos. I hear the program can still be watched on local access cable.

Like all fad sports, dragonfights lost its lustre and was abandoned by the gods (most moved on to the next big thing, giant spider goddess baiting). Unfortunately for us "dragonfood", their "athletes" are still around, still sitting on their salaries, and still tasty in peanut sauce.

So remember... the next time you go up against a dragon, check with your local multiplanar bookie. Who knows? There might be more money in betting on the dragon.


As a side note, Roudi is quite interested in Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth

 

[mythusmage]

...Mythic absurdity...

You do have a talent for making me look normal.

 

[mythusmage]

Just Sparking Ideas ...

... so I'm not going to list a book.

Anyway ...

A fight need not be a physical thing. Even if physical combat is involved, it need not involve the BBEG. Take a first level party. They run into a band of goblins and beat them. Subsequent investigation reveals the goblins were hired muscle. This leads to a gang lord and once he's dealt with that is where things seem to end.

But then certain "parties" start expressing an interest in the group. Some is benign, some is malign, and as the adventurers improve in capability the interest becomes more "capable" as well. And connections between events and incidents begins to appear.

As a sub-topic, what if the paladin doesn't know he's cooperating with evil? (Put that in your coffee and sip on it.)

 

[Estlor]

Everyone assumes, and I can't say incorrectly, that a fight with a dragon automatically equals going at it sword and spell to claw and breath in the dragon's environment in a winner-take-all situation. That's a stirring visual from fantasy, be it Bilbo and the dwarves in the Hobbit or Ashram and his cronies in Record of Lodoss War. But let me tell you about the most memorable dragon fight a party of mine ever had.

I had a couple of new players in the party so I was going against type and DMing in the Forgotten Realms. (Normally I DM Mystara fairly exclusively, but I figured with two newbs I'd use a setting my other two players were very familiar with, that way they could help with setting questions.) I had the party set up as confidants of a minor noble forging a domain of his own up in the Silver Marches. They were doing a cross-country run around Anuroch (and please forgive me, I don't have place names memorized for FR like I do the Known World) and were going through that big forest where there's kind of a war between the elves and the druid brewing. Anyway, they decided the solution to the problem was to help the elves by bringing a local green dragon into the fray. The elves offered them the best deal - passing through the forest unscathed. My plan was to have them come back through some time later and have to deal with the consequences of their actions whichever way they resolved things, but the party rogue through a curve at me I had never expected. He tricked the dragon into leaving them alone with its hoard.

Now I know this doesn't seem possible but it was a younger dragon and the guy who played the rogue plays BRILLIANT rogues. No lie. So I figured I'd "reward" him by letting the scheme work. The dragon went off to maul some druids and the party went off with the dragons hoard. Everyone was happy, throwing high-fives and "we did its" around for the rest of the session.

The next week, the party ran across a rather unassuming young sorceress NPC. She was charming and intelligent, the sort of person that the rogue delighted in, and the party was thrilled to have some additional magic support because they didn't have a wizard handy. The rogue and the sorceress adventured side-by-side for the rest of the journey across Faerun, saving each other's backs more than one time like good friends do.

Do you see the twist yet?

The sorceress just happened to be a polymorphed green dragon. An extremely BITTER polymorphed green dragon. Jaws dropped when she suddenly torpedoed the rogue from behind at a very inopportune moment. Jaws dropped even further when she turned into that green dragon they had stole from all those weeks and levels ago. Yes, it was a TPK. But once they got over the fact that the dragon wiped them all out, they started putting it together. All the little things that had gone wrong for them along the way, all the times it looked like their goose was cooked, all of it was the dragon all along. They realized that, because they took the dragon's treasure way back at level 3, they had spent the rest of the campaign FIGHTING THE DRAGON.

Yeah. An entire campaign built out of a single, protracted fight with a dragon.

It's one of the few times I haven't had a player upset when their PC gets toasted.

(Should this post please the humble reviewer, Elements of Magic II: Lycean Arcane would be a humble and generous thanks.)

 

[Kelleris]

Well, the sheer awesomeosity of Roudi's post intimidates me, but I'll throw in my two cents.

To my mind, there are two things that every dragon fight (and encounters with similar creatures) should have - it should be a set-piece battle, and it should devastate the surrounding terrain. I'll illustrate both of these points with examples from a recent battle, not with a dragon (it was a fiendish destrachan), but close enough.

By set-piece battle I mean that the challenge should be more than a simple slug-fest - there should always be something to do other than deplete hit points. Sometimes this can simply be a tactical problem, like the dragon's minions or its flight capability, but better are things like Demiurge's spike-and-gorge setup. In my own case, I was working with a split party, so standing against this fiendish advanced destrachan was a 7th-level sorcerer with 2 1st-level slots and a handful of cantrips remaining, and a fresh raptoran archer.

Now, a couple of rounds of combat made it clear that the PCs were badly overmatched, so I started encouraging them to do something stupid/heroic. Their immediate reaction was to attempt to lure the destrachan into their base's flooded basement/former first floor and attempt to feed it to the spellwarped lifeleech otyugh that lives there. Long story short, we had a lengthy combat in which the fighter attempted to manhandle and provoke the destrachan about 45 feet from its starting position and down a trapdoor while the sorcerer spends his few remaining spell slots and cobbled-together mixtures from his alchemist's lab to attract the otyugh's attention. Many attack rolls and such were made, but the focus was not on hit-point depletion, and that went a long way toward making the encounter really memorable.

As for the other thing - terrain damage - I think it's important to emphasize when dealing with really impressive creatures. After the fight, the PCs should know they were in a fight. Now, this means taking a beating, of course, but that's commonplace. Having the dragon collapse a hillside, smash craters in the ground with its fiery breath, and body-check buildings puts things over the top, I think.

Returning to the destrachan example, during the fight I made sure to describe how the creature's high-pitched laugh at the PCs' ineffectuality shattered windows behind them and caused similar damage. At one point the beast stripped the archer of his armor with its sonic attack and I described his chain shirt flowing like water around him under the waves of sound and collapsing to the floor behind him. The final step in luring the thing to the otyugh, in fact, came when the fighter managed to get it to use its sonic attack at full power and shatter the floorboards, dumping everyone into the poisonous water below. By the time the battle was over, the place was a true warzone, and the players are going to have a smashed base in need of repairs to remember the fight by.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Dragons are underemployed. Their usage, as a result of their stat blocks, tends to emphasize brawn over brains. Look at their tactics -- most often advertised is breath weapon to soften up followed by leap in the middle of the PCs and full attack.

Now while that's sufficiently devastating -- and it makes sense for the younger dragons -- it really doesn't play dragons entirely to their strengths. At their age and intelligence, older dragons should be much more cunning and subtle. Traps, minions, magic ... all should take a toll on the party before the dragon makes its appearance.

they best-played dragon to me isn't a "brute force and ignorance" sort of dragon -- read Smaug in The Hobbit -- but instead a cunning, beguiling dragon. The vampire Strahd, the xenomorphs in Aliens, the Predator in Predator ... all have traits that should be brought to the table when playing a dragon. IMO, the party should be terrified of the dragon, and seeing him around every corner, long before he makes his actual appearance on stage.

Dragons may typically be a climactic encounter ... but how often are they actually the movers & shakers, the sinister, unseen power-behind-the-throne of the campaign. Given their age, intelligence, and capabilities, we should see a lot more of the latter.

But even if you don't use dragons that way, no game session of D&D that includes a dragon is a bad thing. They're like, iconic, y'know?