So, what’s the deal with dragons? I want it to be simple. My eyes glaze over when I think of all the dragon pages in the other monster manuals I have. What I like about dragons is the idea that they are like *kami* – the dragon is the guardian spirit of the forest, the mountain, the river. And they are chaotic beasts that destroy cities under mountains and by lakes, if you get my drift. And then they live in the ruins. I need to think about treasure. It’s probably going to be a multiple of what dwarves will have. In order to reflect dragons as powerful magical creatures, I think requiring a magic weapon to hit them is appropriate. What do you think? In my game, 15 HD starts getting in the semi-devine territory, so I would prefer not to have dragons with 20 or 30 HD…
#Monsters #Old School #RPG
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Still the old colours? Or is that a holy cow not to be slaughtered? Anyway, love the drawing.
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-27
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Thanks. Well, to be honest in my own games I only ever use red dragons. Dragons = fire. I also *talk* about other dragons and I try to add green dragons to forests, but I don’t actually remember an encounter. And I’ve used the dragons in modules I bought which were of course the standard chromatic dragons. What do you use in your games? I never use the metallic dragons, much less gem dragons and whatever else they designed later.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-27
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Well, in my Pathfinder game I use all sorts of dragons, but the traditional ones, too. And yes, there are a lot of Dragon stats in various sources (I am quite the monster book fan). But I made random tables for stats in excel back in 3.0 with random body shapes as well. The effect is more or less the same - no Dragon is alike.
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-27
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I’ll probably redo the Dragon body shape table for either some more old school system (maybe LL or BtW because they are in German) or Fantasy Age sometime in the future.
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-27
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Does the body shape have a mechanical effect? Some can fly and others cannot?
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-27
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Yes, but no wings doesn’t automatically mean a Dragon can’t fly. I was heavily inspired by medieval and renaissance depictions of dragons as well as pop culture, so I had basically no legs up to 12 legs, massive body shape to long and snakelike, feathers and fur as well as scales, different colours including translucent skin... Yeah, I think I have to do this. Just writing about it is fun.
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-27
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In my old game dragons were simply the apex predator and a lot smaller than your typical D&D dragon. More in line with the medieval depictions and JRR Tolkein’s illustration of Smaug in *The Hobbit*. [These are the size of adult dragons: Metal Animal Art Sculpture Statue for sale - Life Size Dragon ] Colour was indicative of the terrain they’d be found in. So green dragons inhabited forests, blue dwelt in lakes and the seashore, red in mountains, white in tundra and snow, purple underground, brown in desert, black in swamps, etc. [Although actual colouration and details do vary.]
Metal Animal Art Sculpture Statue for sale - Life Size Dragon
[With 5E dragons I had a nice idea that every wilderness would spawn a “dragonheart” which had the lair effects of each dragon, and the dragon was actually a protective antibody spawned by attempts to intrude on the wilderness, necessitating that the dragonheart be found and destroyed before the wilderness could be safely colonised. If the dragon was destroyed it would swiftly be regenerated by the dragonheart. Although in my actual 5E game they are the invading creatures (of unknown origin) that drove humanity underground.]
But really dragons are probably one of the best candidates for being completely unique legendary monsters, with lots of unique attributes (such as provided by Dragon Table V in *DCC RPG*). But that all that really depends on the cosmology that spawned them.
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-27
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Oh. Nice. I just thought about attributes depending on alignment, like white fluffy hair for lawful (good) and soothblack spines for chaotic (evil) etc...
Now, do I look that DCC table up after or before I get to work? Hmmm...
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-28
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Using dragons as guardian spirits of the wilderness (great mountains, forests, rivers, etc.) comes pretty close to your dragon heart (except there’s no physical dragon heart and thus no respawn of the dragon).
Those metal statues are awesome and if they need magic to be killed, then that also explains why the can be rather small and still be formidable.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-28
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Now I’m reading *The Evolution of Smaug*.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-28
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I think you seriously underestimate how hard it is to kill something of that size, especially if the skin and underlying muscle is sufficiently tough to easily shrug off spear heads (I wouldn’t even bother attempting to kill one with a sword).
That’s the reason why a charging knight was needed. With basically a ton of mass behind the spear point you had a chance to drive it into the vitals of the creature (and hopefully it’s heart). [That’s the *C&S* reason for why knights vs dragons work - the dragon rears up in face of the charging knight to breath, and the knight has one chance to kill the dragon.]
A crocodile is smaller, and my favourite way of killing a crocodile with primitive technology is to wrap bendable sharpened bone in sinew and hide it in convenient parcels of meat (like chickens). The crocodile eats the meant, the sinew dissolves and the croc gets staked from the inside. Finding an appropriate poison is too difficult in a primitive setting, and besides - I suspect most dragons can detect poison and bad magic easily enough. Should also work on dinosaurs (it’s good to have emergency survival plans in case of inadvertent time slips).
[Although modern crocodiles, whilst ambush predators, are still surprisingly fast on land (although they overheat so don’t have much endurance). Having had closer encounters than I want with salties I can attest to this. But in the Pliocene they had crocodilians with long legs that seemed to chase down prey...
It’s also why I really think the damage vs larger creatures exception for spears is important when hunting any animal. Humans are comparatively week and fragile to most wild animals that will want to hurt you.] The reduced damage versus larger creatures for weapons like swords should also be use for animals (not so much ogres and giants I suspect).
Although yes, dragons used to use the Fantasy Combat Table in *Chainmail* which meant they could only be engaged by other mega-monsters or hero types (this was the origin of “you need magic weapons to hurt this creature”). Although also remember that HD/level also serves as an equivalent. Thus a giant can fight a dragon without the need for a magic weapon.
When I have a tactical exercise my goto rules is *The Fantasy Trip* for working out how things interact with their environment. One of the things is that large creatures are very difficult to pin in place
[That said my dragons had acidic blood so most weapons didn’t last long against them.]
And yes the Ryu are Kami in *Bushido*, although there are Tatsu as well, which onlookers would confuse as being a dragon but without the divine aspect. This is similar to Glorantha where dragons are often mistaken for terrain features (but their dreams manifest physically and like most ego-based creations, like collecting the pretties). *Powers & Perils* had a whole cosmology of dragon descendants from gods on down. The serpents were all descended from dragons. Which is why I think cosmology is important for dragons.
The dragonhearts idea was basically going back to my old campaign basis where Law was civilisation and Chaos was wilderness. Most players were lawful - occupying the wilderness and taming the chaos (whether the wilderness or those inside it wanted to be tamed or not). The dragonheart was actually the big dragon treasure in this instance as well.
I do like the various scrap metal dragon statues. They are the right size and right form for me. [Although I also like the TFT dragons, which are longer and more serpentine.] But a **lot** of people really hate that concept. For them dragons have to be these great huge bigger than a 747 things that are mobile natural disasters.
If you want big dragons then I suggest looking at *Barony* (if you can find a copy). They had an excellent system where players seeking to kill the dragon had to charge into the Zone of Terror (the area around the dragon) and draw a card to see what happened. These cards presented an opportunity to do something if you made an appropriate skill test (sometimes you were forced to, other times it was optional). If you succeeded you usually got the opportunity to climb on the dragon, where you got to draw cards for a new situation, hopefully eventually managing to get to a location where you could hope to strike a vital blow and wound or kill the dragon. Of course, failure was met with the dragon’s reaction (which was effectively an automatic attack). And when you did kill the dragon you got to suffer the consequences (such as the dragon thrashing around and crushing everyone in the zone of danger) [another table].
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-28
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In my recent classic D&D games players have killed several dragons in the surprise round, so I’m looking for the least wordy solution to this. “Requires magic to hit” is one way. Maybe I should note that many (all?) fantastic creatures should count as magic in this respect. This would include giants, unicorns, etc. – and maybe also elves and magic-users polymorphed into dragons.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-28
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That just shifts the burden to later, when they have magic weapons and it is thereby even easier to kill the dragon.
The Barony system might work in that regard.
A similar approach that can be interesting for large creatures is when the player says “I attack the giant,” ask “Which foot?”
Admittedly I think the best response in this sort of combat is an armour absorption system like *Runequest* A set of giant armour is going to be thicker and heavier than normal armour so most weapons simply bounce.
One thing I will probably be doing when fighting larger creatures is reduce the damage die that the character uses for each increase in size (this is somewhat similar to the approach taken in *Ars Magica*).
So your longsword used against an ogre does a d6 damage, not d8. Against a hill giant it does d4 damage. The weapons simply cannot reach or be effective against the bigger opponent - regardless of the armour (which is already increased)..
I do have to admit my system also allows me to take the same approach with magic. Would casting a 5d2 *firebolt* help?
Reach would offset this penalty so spear wielders and great weapon wielders would not suffer as much of a reduction. Similarly weapons that are rated as larger than normal wouldn’t be penalised (so that ballista is a viable weapon against larger monsters).
In return I’d almost certainly allow attackers to attempt to choose to attack a vital location where their attack might not suffer such a penalty. Although I’d have to think about what to set the penalty to be.
I sort of already do this with smaller creatures, because a longsword for a smaller creature is a d6 weapon (a pixie longsword is a d4 weapon). Would a double penalty then be appropriate? Hmmm. Maybe just keep it as size difference and ignore the smaller weapons (although a magic pixie longsword blade can be refitted into a nice magic dagger for a human, which sounds aboutright and was the origin of the damage reduction). But setting it to target size, rather than wielder size, is probably the better approach.
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-28
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Hm, I always wondered about those size modifiers. I guess it might work. But I also feel it involves a lot of rules for not much gain. It would satisfy the systematizing urges I have but perhaps I should try to fight those. I could also say “attacks by giant creatures *will* hit anything that can only be hit by magic.” That might be enough. And called shots are also tricky, adding a whole different mini game. I definitely like the counter of “which foot?” when fighting gargantuan creatures.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-28
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Although I will also point out that I do sort of want to capture the feel of the fights in the *Overlord* anime, particularly Episode 9 (which features an encounter with a dragon).
[Although that is also a bit of a bad example, as it’s actually a pair of superheroes pretending to be mere heroes (although you could easily argue that one of them is really demigod level, even if he actually doesn’t use any of his major powers on this instance).]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
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I don’t know. If we’re getting the superhero or demigod levels of power, perhaps a different mechanic altogether would be required. I’m thinking of something like the dueling mechanics of *Mountain Witch*. In terms of D&D it would be something like this: you can deal *megadamage*, if you spend time powering up. The two sides keep powering up until a certain number of rounds has elapsed or until one side decides to *let go*. At this time, all the damage is applied and hopefully this special extra damage makes it extra lethal so that high-level characters can still die. What I’m looking for is a kind of “wager”, I guess. I’m not quite sure how I’d want it to go but it would be a bit different from D&D combat and reaction rolls. Something new?
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
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Oops! Wasn’t trying to make a point really. Just wanted to share a favourite little clip which has big dragon (well two) battling people (or a person). Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.
As for that, they are my in-game titles for the various tiers in my game: 1-4 is ordinary (a normal person can generally have between 1 to 4 HD depending on their role/position/rank). 5-8 is heroic, 9-12 is superheroic (although most become domain rulers), 13+ is demigod because exceeding 12 level is actually breaking the games rules. So I tend to use those terms.
[Generally most PCs actually end up moving into the domain system whilst still “heroes” though, since there are opportunities to do so from the 5th level up
The characters of *Overlord* are super-powered compared to the world they end up in. They are essentially classic MMO characters operating in an OD&D world.
So I thought I would add the caveat (there was no way either Clementine or Kjhajiit could really hope to defeat either Naberal Gamma (admittedly one of my favourite characters) or Mormon the Black [who is actually the titular overlord in disguise]
But then combat is usually a sideline to what else is going on. If Ains Ool Gown didn’t have the sole of a Japanese salesman and absolutely no idea how to cope with the situation he finds himself in, or having only found a life in the MMO, it would be a totally different story. [It also is a nice example of why alignment can matter, especially when you have evil minions. Even if they are on your side they willstill do evil things, even if you don’t want them to 9and if you forbid them from doing so, they won’t understand [but will still obey]).]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
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I find my games moving in a similar direction. Soon enough they start looking for alliances, make friends, get rewarded with titles, or try to build castles, and defend construction sites, and so on. And almost nobody ever goes past level 10. That’s why I’ve used 10 as my cut-off. This allows me to postulate that anything beyond 10 is super hero level and at level 17 you get access to the *wish* spell…
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
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For me gaining *wish* requires finding a *wish* scroll (since all spells are learned by scroll, including wish - although in actual fact this is probably a weird non-sensical grimoire where reading it has a chance of making you insane), being 12th level and have a spellcasting class, and paying a certain amount of experience for acquiring a special ability. The character is now a **wizard** (short for wish-hard) and can use wizardry (which is the wish spell) Using wizardry is harder than sorcery (costs more SP) but it has none of the limits of sorcery.
[Although most mortals that manage to become wizards only manage to gain the first level of wizardry, that of “DO” (which means they can do anything). The higher levels (”THINK,” “FEEL,” and “BE”) get more abstract and profound. For example “THINK” changes relationships in the universe. And yes, wizards are literally immortal demigods as a result - but they tend to be self-policing.]
Although, as in your game, nobody has ever reached 12th level naturally, I might ease the restrictions. But probably not.
Eventually I get frustrated with the *Greyhawk* additions to the spell lists (because they are very out-of-kilter with the lower level spells), and decide to rewrite the magic system, even though no one actually gets to that level anyway. So it goes back to just six levels of spells, but the effects of higher level spells can be made by multicasting.
For example prismatic wall is created by loading a *wall of force* (6th level wall spell) up with other spells when you create it to provide the auxiliary effects.
For interests of general compatibility the marker spells remain the same, but some stuff at 5th and 6th gets squished.into a lower level. I mean 6th level spells should be things like *control weather* and the like. [So naturally the other natural disasters get moved here too.]
My spell point system means that 6th level magic is extremely draining, so a mage casting one won’t have much left in their tanks unless they use a ritual over six days to create the spell. [Advanced thaumaturgy!]]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
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Ah, found my list:
+-----------------+--------------------------------+ | Level | Role | +-----------------+--------------------------------+ | ordinary people | | | 1 | veterans, trained guards | | 3 | a boss of one or two dozen | | | people, captain of the watch, | | | bandit boss | | 5 | lord over a small settlement, | | | a contested five mile hex, | | | a tower, a small fortress, a | | | sheriff, two of these might | | | be the assistants of a level 9 | | | lord | | 7 | a captain of a small army, the | | | most powerful chieftain of a | | | tribe, a second in command to | | | a level 9 lord | | 9 | lord over a town, a castle | | | plus a town or two, multiple | | | villages, a region up to | | | thirty miles in diameter, | | | known up to a hundred miles | | | away | | 11 | great heroes, the favorites of | | | the gods | | 13 | prophets, avatars and holy men | | 15 | demigods and immortals | | 17 | god-like, granting wishes! | +-----------------+--------------------------------+
Not sure what I was thinking when I added that line for 13 but I have since reconsidered. Prophets and holy-men are not high-level.
I’m trying hard not to spend time detailing the rules for a game nobody will be playing. 🙂
If casting high level spells is so draining, do players at the table actually cast them?
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
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If you are using a spell point system you want to try and design the magic system so that higher level spells are more effective than lower level spells, so that when they are accessible they tend to be used. One of the big dangers of spell point systems is where magic users would prefer to keep using the cheaper lower level magic, so you want to try and disincentive this.
Of course one of the big disincentives is reducing the xp award for defeating lower level creatures. But it’s definitely a balancing act.
The players were getting to the stage where they are really starting to look at the difference in costs - will a *wall of stone* do instead of a *wall of iron*.
I suspect *13th Age* does a better job of the sort of progression I’d like, by only slowly increasing the number of available spells, by having the spells themselves grow in power as the caster’s level increases. But I’m kind of invested with this system, and I like the low-level bounds on the system.
Then again the ritual I mentioned was cast from the book/scroll, so the caster didn’t have the magic points to cast it anyway, which is why they used a ritual.
As for detail, most of my game is still in my head. Accompanied by lots of tables and lists. Unlike previous editions of the rules.
But the interaction of the design axioms I chose gives me easy answers to how does this game implement this procedure systematically. So I’m feeling less of an incentive to write stuff down. Probably a side effect of the continuing brain-rot.
Besides most of my players didn’t really read the rules or play a game, they play their characters. As long as there is an understanding of their comparative abilities and how they interact with the environment it seems to work.
And another enjoyable (at least for me) take on dragons: YouTube
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29