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I had this idea some days ago about a two-headed dragon I want to use in a campaign. The thing is that instead of making him PL+3, I want to play him as PL+1 twice.
So yeah, one dragon, two statblocks. Can it be done?
Here are a couple of problems I'm running into.
- Movement. They both should be able to move, but I don't want to split up his speed between the two dragons. If one dies and the other one lives on, he should be able to run away.
- Sharing a single space, and getting the players to tell me which one they want to attack. It kinda has to be a surprise, though if they figure it out during combat that's okay.
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Because that would be the easy way out. I actually like a challenge.
Otherwise, I'd probably slap on a multi-headed template from Savage Species or the two-headed template from 101 Not so Simple Templates. I could also just slap on an extra bite attack and call it a day.
But, as I don't like the true dragons at all, I like to make my own dragons. So why don't I make something unique for a change?
This reminds me a bit of this post about a Gemini Beast. Basically, the weakness it had was that when one dies, the other half is slowed down because of the extra weight. So you could have something like that.
But I'm not quite understanding what it is you are looking for. It sounds like you want something a little different from just a two headed dragon.
Run it as two creatures acting in concert (similarly to how mounted characters work). The players will never know the difference.
For initiative let it act twice a round. Just decide which head controls movement, or split its movement rate in half and divide how far it can move in an action between the heads.
Combine HP into one pool and keep rough track of which 'side' the dragon is being hit from. Decide for yourself if AoE effects hit the thing twice, or if half the overall damage gets applied to each 'side'
I once used this trick to create a version of Geryon once. It was a very memorable encounter.
It's a mythic ability, but Dual Initiative let's a monster go twice in one round. The second initiative comes in at the first roll -20 is all.
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You can give it Summoned mechanics. Share hp between heads.
It's pretty easy. Just stat up 2 different creatures. Combine their health totals and move them like a mount & rider.
Alternatively you can stat up one creature with a ton of abilities. The creature gets an extra standard action per turn to represent the extra head. Then the exterm head can be severed by sundering it by dealing 25% of the dragons total to just the one head.
The extra head doesn't actually have extra abilities, it just grants extra chances to use existing ones.
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As some people didn't understand, I'll explain again. I want to have my players fight 2 dragons that are fused together. That means instead of say, one dragon with a CR of 10, they'd fight two dragons with a CR of 8 each. They roll initiative individually, have individual saves, etc. They might not have the same type breath weapon/immunity, but I haven't decided yet.
I'm not using a true dragon, I'm making this from scratch. (And the rules on creating monsters from the Bestiary.)
tsuruki has some good ideas. Having it at like a mounted creature would probably do wonders; say one of the sides is the dominant half for where it moves and such. If you want to keep it more in line of 'one stat block, multiple actions' the campaign setting Necropunk by Little Red Goblin games offers the concept of phases in addition to turns. You could give the dragon extra actions in the round by having it act in different phases, like 2 or 3. I'm not really sure how much is appropriate to share so I'll stop there but consider it.