One thing from AD&D that we never had happen - not once - was selling a dragon.
We didn't have people fight to subdue, either, which is probably the primary cause of not having dragons to sell.
But overall, it's one of those things I found odd. There isn't much of an economy for monsters. A few - mostly ones that can be trained as mounts - have valuable eggs or young. But you don't have a sale value for orc slaves, owlbears you trapped in a cage, that roper you charmed, etc.
But dragons have a standard market value - and it's not even that terribly high. 1d8 x 100 gp per HP. That huge, ancient red dragon that seems to come up in every campaign somewhere is worth a whopping 88 x 100-800 gp or 8800 gp to 70,400 gp. Not low, really, with an average of 39,600. But how high is that when the average gp value of its monetary hoard is a bit above 80,000?
Potentially it's a way to increase the value by 50%. Or realize profits when you catch the dragon out of its lair and can't find it or get to it.
Yet I've never seen it done. I've read about it in Gary Gygax's columns in Dragon magazine, and in the AD&D books, but never seen it done in play.
Just another element AD&D spent a lot of time on that just didn't impact my gaming.
I've certainly been in games where we've sold pieces of dragons, but never the whole thing, nor a live one.
ReplyDeleteWe have sold dragon eggs however. I forget how much they went for.
Same here - sold bits, not whole dragons. And certainly didn't capture them. In AD&D, we didn't even sell the bits.
DeleteIt must have come up in Gary’s games. Ask Gronan or Rob. They would be able to tell you.
ReplyDeleteIn my games I’m always on the lookout for eggs and I always try to bargain with dragons etc.
But no, I’ve never had the chance to catch or capture. It’s a shame. I want to real bad.
It must have come up in Gary's games, he's related stories of it happening. I'm curious if it was ever a thing in other people's games.
DeleteDragon subdual happened at the same time as "Breath Weapon does dragon's current HP in damage" and "You have to earn your high level PCs the hard way." The combination of the latter two made the first rare as heck.
ReplyDeleteWas "current HP in damage" an OD&D thing? I know it was in Basic D&D. It's not in AD&D. Or at least, AD&d just says "dragon's hit points" and not "dragon's current hit points." Basic says "remaining number of hit points" specifically.
DeleteWe always played it as current in both basic and AD&D, but I do remember that there was discussion about the actual intent of the AD&D rules since they are ambiguous.
DeleteHaving mainly played AD&D, I don't recall anyone arguing it was current HP. I think if you come from a "current HP" background it's easy to read that in, but if you don't, it doesn't say enough to imply it. The only example we have is subduing a dragon, so it's clear subdual damage doesn't reduce it.
DeleteThe official approach of AD&D was breath weapon always did the same damage, that of the dragon with no wounds. This wasn't written clearly (big surprise...Gary wrote it) but it was probably explained in a Dragon editor's column or Q&A response. It was definitely confirmed by Tim, Rob, Frank, et al at Dragonsfoot. BD&D gave clear wording that it was the current hit point level of the dragon. That made it far less dangerous if you could surprise a sleeping dragon since by the time it breaths on its first round it likely has less than half its starting hit points. It also allowed players to metagame how much more damage they have to do to kill the dragon and whether it is likely they could beat it in one round/hit. On the other hand, AD&D made subdual ridiculously easy and BD&D it was a bit harder, IIRC.
DeleteIt's certainly not written clearly enough to win an internet argument about it, for sure. . . but if the intent was, damage equal to max HP, that's how we played it. As I said I never heard it argued otherwise, and schoolkids will argue anything.
DeleteIn traditional campaign play I have not seen a dragon subdued much less sold. However in our OD&D sandbox games every dragon got subdued and used as a flying supertank. If everybody had a dragon who wanted one the dragon was sold at the market. We discussed the moral implications as a good party selling evil dragons to someone who both wanted and could afford them, i.e. probably budding evil overlords, but the DM kept the effects of selling dragons simple and abstract just like you do with magic items sold in town: they are removed from the game. So we never had to worry about them being used against us, or other good people, but I thought that was a way to make the decision to sell dragons an interesting moral quandary.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. So this was a modern game? I suspect a lot of things made their way back into gaming thanks to people re-starting to play old games based on later discussions. I never had a megadungeon until I read about them on old-game-focused blogs, for example, even though a megadungeon is pretty foundational to the original campaigns. It had passed aside by the time I came into gaming, and I only gave it a go decades later.
DeleteMy old/first D&D group did one megadungeon once... it was a GM homebrew. His first and last, he told us halfway through he hated it, and so did we, so we quit that campaign and went back to playing the way we preferred.
DeleteMy last gaming group did a megadungeon, technically, when 3e came out. Our GM ran The Night Below campaign from AD&D. While it's not a 'traditional' megadungeon, it very 'megadungeony', as in you return to base after each foray, you clear your way in (and sometimes back out), and you don't deal with any non-dungeon stuff once you get into the dungeon.
Yes, I was lucky enough to have a Meetup in my area in the first half of this decade which played OD&D megadungeons and, later on, wilderness exploration. During the wilderness exploration there were a number of dragon encounters. That group moved away from me and I haven't played in years but we did have several dragons subdued, first for enslaving them and later for selling them.
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