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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2721394" data-attributes="member: 19130">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.</blockquote>

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