What would you say the adjusted-CR would be of a young blue dragon that is sickened, staggered, and can't use her breath weapon? I'm thinking CR 7, but figured I'd get a second-opinion.
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The problem with this idea is that a Young Blue Dragon is already weak defensively for it's CR and only manages to be CR appropriate due to its high damage, which goes down from standard for a CR 12 to standard for a CR 3 by being Staggered.
I'd peg it at CR 6 Saves, CR 3 damage, CR 8 AC and HP, and CR 7 attack bonus. That averages out around CR 6...but is gonna be a really boring fight since it's a long slog of taking minimal damage while hacking away at the dragon.
Pretty much CR "We might as well handwave this fight" because a permanently Staggered dragon is pretty worthless in a fight.
Literally every one of its dangerous tactics (sans Breath Weapon, which this doesn't have either) requires a full round action.
Use a very young blue dragon. (And pretend that it's large?)
I believe what David meant to say is "Use a very young blue dragon. And add the Giant simple template". =)
Or just ignore Staggered and call it a CR 8. That's about right for a Sickened Young Blue Dragon that can't use its breath weapon.
8's a bit more than I'd like. 6 works. It's not meant to be some climatic battle, at any rate, it's meant to be a satisfying chance to beat up a weakened jerk who would otherwise be too powerful. There'll be time for climactic battles against dragons later, with other dragons.
You make a good point that the defenses are still high and might make the fight drag on. I'll have to take that into account and adjust a bit more.
Other than that, thank you for actually answering the question Deadmanwalking, instead of giving unsolicited suggestions while saying nothing actually relevant to what I asked (i.e. what everybody else wasted space with).
I swear, I've gotta start prefacing these posts with "Just answer the question."
Don't post in Advice if you don't want Advice.
That would be a prime example of what I call "wasting space".
I did want advice. Specifically: advice on reducing the CR of a young blue dragon.
...Or did I miss the part where I wrote "What can I replace this dragon with?" in the opening post?
I did want advice. Specifically: advice on reducing the CR of a young blue dragon.
...Or did I miss the part where I wrote "What can I replace this dragon with?" in the opening post?
You didn't even ask for that. You just said "I have already determined the CR of this creature but I need random people to tell me I'm right".
Normally when someone asks for advice, they are asking "What is the best way to do this?". If you just wanted someone to say "Yep, that's CR 7" or "Nope that's CR Whatever", you missed Rules Questions a while back.
And don't even get me started on the passive-aggressive responses to people who are trying to help you out by telling you WHY something would not be a difficult (or interesting) fight, and/or suggesting different ways to do it that might work better than slapping random conditions on an existing creature, which you could have simply ignored instead of taking jabs at people.
But fine. You want the answer to what you wrote in the post? It's CR 9, because nothing you did reduces its CR, just its capability in a fight.
Isn't that a much more helpful response? I should flag Deadman's post and all the rest for being off-topic, because nobody gave a real, on topic answer before now. According to you, anyway.
Fine, if we're going to be pedantic, yes, what I asked for and wanted was either a "Yes it's CR 7" or "No, it's CR [Something else]". In fact your answer that it's CR 9 is closer to what I asked for than random suggestions of changing things. It's not as helpful as an answer that assumes conditions are adjusting CR, but it's still actually answering the question that was asked.
Maybe Rules Questions was the better place for that. I chose Advice because the actual rules on reducing CR are lacking and (as you pointed out), conditions don't actually affect CR by RAW. I didn't think Rules Questions was an appropriate place to ask a question about how something that's not actually in the rules works. Maybe I was wrong and it should have been there.
It's a perfectly reasonable question. One of the Adventure Paths has the PCs meet a CR 4 creature, only it's got the small template, it's on half hit points, it's fatigued, and it's lost half its dexterity to poison. They rate it as CR 2.
Saying, "this dragon is a trivial encounter" is not good advice, since you have no idea what the PCs are like.
It might be make quite a good boss battle for a low level group, since it's the sort of thing that I look for in a solo encounter - something tough enough to last a few rounds, but not with so much offensive capability that it can kill a PC in a single round. That's quite rare in Pathfinder.
So, it's basically a hard-to-kill creature with one +13 2d6+5 attack. That's less damage per hit than a CR3 ogre, but higher accuracy.
I'd rate it overall at CR5 or CR6.