The gigantic albino red dragon then breathed a massive cone of fire that incinerated the magic user so far into negative hit points he was nothing but ashes.Funny - but I gotta say - that was a dick move by the GM.
Actually, I think is an old 2E adventure from Dungeon magazine.
As a player I have only faced red dragon. As a GM I have used the black, white and green dragons in combat. I have also used a silver dragon as a plot device. All of these were in 3/3.5 except for the red dragon; that was in AD&D 2nd edition.
I have never ran into a dragon in pathfinder.
I faced a white dragon once in PF... and several others in other versions of D&D since 1st ed... off the cuff I can remember a couple reds (one Ancient in AD&D, one adult in 5ed) and one hatchling black in a 1st level 3.xx adventure, that was epic, but we won.
I encountered a dragon in the 1st ever D&D adventure I did (possibly 1st session, can't remember how long adventure was) - possibly a green large dragon - that was about 8.5yrs ago - also encountered a dragon in a Reign of Winter Game (unfortunately had refrozen back to a statue by the time we encountered it) - don't remember encountering any more as a player. I've run a few in the WotR game - just about to run the 2nd Mythic Dragon and accidentally put loads of dragons as all-out attack members against drezen (just collected all the CE creatures in a big list from all bestiaries of the right CR and rolled randomly to see what they encountered - which means more dragons than anything else!)
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The gigantic albino red dragon then breathed a massive cone of fire that incinerated the magic user so far into negative hit points he was nothing but ashes.Funny - but I gotta say - that was a dick move by the GM.
OTOH, a dragon using Disguise Self to change colors and pretend he's a different dragon would be interesting. Weaker dragon pretending to be stronger, stronger dragon pretending to be weaker, evil dragon pretending to be good... Lots of opportunities there.
I would say it's primarily a DM problem that dragons are used so sparingly, and I share this problem.
Kind of. The late game necessity (for something more than a big lizard) certainly is part of the problem, but also the design of dragons... wasn't good. 3rd edition created things that didn't match their CR at all, which lead to a lot of problems.
But I'm far more willing to blame the stat blocks, or rather the design principles in play. Dragon fights should be interesting. St. George dragons with tiny hoards are not.
Yeah. A lone dragon is really easy to kill off with action economy, and unlike say, liches, it can be a bit harder to come up with a good reason for meat shield minions.
It can be done, but I normally imagine a dragon by themselves in the iconic depiction.