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Message: <blockquote data-quote="demiurge1138" data-source="post: 2720318" data-attributes="member: 7451">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.</blockquote>

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