Tuesday, February 5, 2013

On AD&D Dragons

Reading Beedo's excellent Black City Campaign logs, we were treated to his players manhandling a dragon, thanks to a serious bum-rush, a killer robot, and some goofy rules that come with dragons. And some commentary on dragons.

Seriously, dragons get the shaft in D&D, or at least in the older versions I used to play. Everyone knows their HP, damage, etc. They are often caught sound asleep. Unlike other monsters, they don't just get to decide on their attack but instead have to let the dice decide, and they can be subdued.

To be fair to Beedo, he's playing them by the book, and specifically by the Red Box book. I'm more familiar with the AD&D ones, so I'm going to chat about them here.


Dragons need some changes to make them scary.


The usual approach is more hit dice, more flying, more attack modes, more more more. But I think there are some simple changes you can make to how you run them, and one to how they fight.

Some changes you can make easily:

Decide For or Against Breathing, Don't Roll - Demons don't roll to see what spell-like power they use, mages don't roll to see what spell they cast ("My enemies are bunched up and I've a Web spell ready! Okay, roll, roll, roll, I'll cast Audible Glamour.") So why should dragons? Even the stupidest ones are smarter than animals. If they have a tactical choice between claw/claw/bite and a breath, do the one that makes the most sense for the dragon. If they have spells, let them diced how best to use them.

And yeah, some of them are stupid and impulsive and bad tempered. Play that. If the smart move is to claw/claw/bite the fighter in front of you or breath on the group of archers, but your red dragon just got painfully nailed by a wand of cold from that wizard . . . breathing on the wizard makes sense. It would be in character, and take away some of the calculation the PCs can make about its actions. It's still an elemental force of terror, and a manifestation of some of humanity's worse flaws (sloth, gluttony, greed, pride, bad temper, murderous rages, etc.) so it might not react tactically if its character flaws are prodded.

Lower the Sleeping Percentages - Even Tiamat has a 10% chance of being caught sound asleep. Any other monsters that vulnerable? No. But sleeping dragons are part of the myth and canon, so use it . . . but drop them. Cut all percentages down by a factor of ten. White dragons at 60% chance of sleeping? Make it 6%. Red Dragon? 2% Tiamat? 1%. If it's sleeping, check early and often to see if it wakes up.

No Subdual Rolls - you want to subdue the dragon? Good, whip it down to 0 HP. None of this "roll to see if it is subdued yet" crap. Earn it. Heck, make them get it down to 0 and then have it roll to see if it's subdued - make it a saving throw if you want.

Finally, a rules change if you want one:
Random Dragon Breath - Okay, so let's say you think dragon breath is too weak. Make that damage the average. Dragon with 11 hit dice and 88 HP does 88 points of damage. So make that 22d8 damage - that averages to 99 points, with a min of 22 and a max of 176. Scary, and it gets rid of that auto-calc. Basically, double its HD and roll that many dice. It'll average to the same but get some really swing-y nastiness sometimes. Especially if you like to roll 22 x 1d8 instead of d8 22 times.


Anyway, that's how I'd do AD&D dragons if I was running AD&D again. And by extension, how I'd modify dragons in a clone or in B/X or whatever, if I ran one of them.

17 comments:

  1. All the talk at Beedo's about dragon-breath is making me really glad for the "use it whenever you like, but it costs FP and has a recharge time" mechanic in GURPS.

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    1. Yeah. The base dragons in GURPS Dragons just have a FP cost for breath, but no recharge time. I prefer that approach - there is a cost but if you really want to keep blasting it out, well, play now and pay later.

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    2. I feel like my Action Point rules, if they were in use, would be fun here. Gives a within-fight recharge time if the dragon paces himself, but if he goes nutso, he'll drain fatigue and be significantly, perhaps, down in stat levels.

      I know that's a lot more bookkeeping than many prefer, but for those that want to keep track, it seems to provide a nice tradeoff.

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    3. I'm not proposing weaker dragons here Doug. ;)

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    4. With a FP cost, you get a certain number of breaths, then you're really tired. With AP, if you pace yourself, you often can do MORE than with FP. But you have to pace yourself. On balance, it makes for longer fights and stronger foes, unless you burn all at once.

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    5. I just give dragons a big ER.

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    6. Well, that'll certainly do it. :-)

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    7. Yeah. If you really like "occasional ravagers" then you could give them a lot of FP and/or a big ER, but put a really slow recharge on it or one that only recharges in their sleep. That way they'd still want to be sparing, they'd need to eat a lot and sleep a lot in between big blowouts. But it would be exceptionally dangerous to bleed them down on breath attacks.

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  2. To get even more swingy result you could double and reverse :)

    11d8->22d8->8d20

    or just roll HDd20 for breath weapon damage (but this could be a little too much)

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    1. Depends. If the result of a dragon's breath weapon is "hunker down for a moment like the Spartans in 300 when the sky turns black with arrows" then the lower damage is probably fine. If what you want is "even mighty heroes yelp like a toddler and run screaming for something that resembles cover" then your plan is best.

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    2. Reversing the dice would lower the average damage as well. Average on 22d8 is (22+176)/2=99. Damage on 8d22 (using that die to preserve parity) is (8+176)/2=92. Sure, that's not a big difference, but it is notable.

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  3. Check out the dragons in the Rules Cyclopedia, they are foot stomping, tail slapping machines of death. If flying they can land on top of you! -squish-

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    1. I know of them - mostly dragons on a bigger scale. I think a lot of what the upgrade in damage and attacks does, can be done with smarter tactics and getting rid of some of the special rules that make them easier to beat on. Not all, of course, but a good portion of them.

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  4. Very interesting ideas. Lots of food for thought.

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  5. Have you checked AD&D 2e dragons? They are scary, especially the red.

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    1. I've never played 2e. I'm just trying to help out those poor 1e ones.

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