I'm thinking of setting the bar at CR15 and letting them go wild in terms of age categories, breed, and class levels (which are completely optional). A younger dragon with class levels can stand up to an older one without them if the math brings both up to CR15, right? CR15 is equivalent to party level 15 for setting up encounters, right?
okay, please don't take this the wrong way.
You seem to have issue after issue with power balance, houserules, problems in your home game.
Why are you starting at party level 15 at all? First of all, the endgame is the least balanced of all of pathfinder, and the most difficult to GM.
secondly, 4 CR15 Dragons is not the same as a level 15 party. If you use the actual pathfinder rules for encounters, you're looking around CR19-20 for 4 CR15 dragons. There's no direct APL transition, but 4 level 19-20 characters should find 4 CR15 Dragons a typical encounter.
Please please please, get a solid grasp on the basic rules and run a solid game at low levels before diving into this much out of the box stuff.
You have a point. This will probably end very badly.
And a dragon campaign would have been so cool, too.
Oh, and my issues with power balance and houserules were players who didn't want to obey the rules, not the rules themselves. My rule-fu is okay, it's my people-fu and DO SOME F+@!ING GAME PREPARATION FOR ONCE-FU that needs work. That doesn't make your second point any less valid. You are correct in that this will be incredibly difficult to run and that I don't have the experience.
With free reign over feat and class selection, the CR range would be monstrous - we're looking at epic levels here.
Admittedly, options as to what they wouldn't steamroll would be fairly limited.
The only way I imagine it working is if they were fighting other tricked out dragons, or some other incredibly powerful creatures.
I apologize if I came across saying you don't know the rules.
The fact is, I think the issue with something this out there, is if you have to ask the balance questions on how to do it, you probably shouldn't be.
I apply that to myself too, btw, I don't consider myself expert enough for something this ambitious even with a solid campaign or two under my belt and no major issues.
If you want experience balancing something like this, I highly recommend running a normal campaign, and looking at templated monsters. I gained a world of experience from running a dragon-centric campaign and applying different fiendish and half-dragon templates to things and then running them to gauge power level. There's really no replacement for that type of learning.
My favourite had to be the awakened half dragon fiendish pig with 4 monk levels. An absolute blast to play, and I learned so much from it.
A dragon campaing can be a blast. However, the rules for Pathfinder hardly support such a thing. You should seek out the Council of Wyrm setting, it's made precisely for this. It's D&D 2nd edition, but I believe could be adapted to PF. Or just use the old system rules.
The most epic game I ever DMed was for such a campaing, using this setting, altough it was a solo campaing for one of my friends. Much easier to manage.
Ah, Challenge Rating.
It's based on a few core assumptions, mainly:
- a party of 4 with some diversity
- player races only with player-appropriate abilities
- a 15-point buy
- a certain amount of party wealth
- three or more consecutive encounters
- a time/rest limit of some kind
- players of intermediate expertise (advanced = +CR!!!)
The fewer of these criteria you meet, the less meaning that the actual CR number will have. Violate all of these criteria and a given encounter could be much much easier or harder than you'd think.
As you can see, most players on these boards violate two or three of these criteria as a matter of course (25 points, rest a lot, party of 7, etc). The solution is sometimes to increase the CR of the encounter, but sometimes the challenge needs to be augmented in a different dimension — usually with more enemies, not more powerful enemies.
Luckily, you can throw all of these out the window, and CR still functions pretty well as a general comparison of power between monsters. You'd need to figure out where your crazy party actually sits on that continuum, it could be that all the crazy CR math points at CR13 as an appropriate challenge, but your party/players are actually quite able to deal with a CR17. As a GM, it's your job to find that sweet spot, and be ever vigilant for weird outlier abilities that might violate your expectations.
Run your dragon game if you wish Kelsey, but don't expect CR to help you build encounters, at least not until you've had a chance to pinpoint the CR through trial and error. Pre-encounter math will let you down unless you're running by-the-book.
You also might want to check out Council of Wyrms, if you can find a copy. It would need some major revisions for Pathfinder, but it sounds a lot like what you are wanting.
For example, the very first adventure had a 'party' of several newly hatched dragons. Eggs of different colors are stored in the same place in this campaign, and even different alignments can form strong bonds with other species.
The characters (the dragons) were newly hatched (by which I mean minutes) and they had to stop a band of Ogres intent on destroying other eggs! (If I am remembering right). That was for brand-spanking new hatchlings, fresh out of the shell. It gets tougher as the dragons age.
One very interesting part of the game was that while dragons could get class levels, it mainly dealt with dragon advancement over time. And it really showcased how dragons take the long view of things. Taking a 10 or 100 year break was like having a weekend off for your typical adventuring campaign.
Master Arminas