In game of course. I have been playing for....dang 9 years(is this how it feels to be old?) and have never had a run in with a dragon. Now it was Odd that in the 3.5 and 4e days that I had only really had the dungeon D of the couple but while this is Pathfinder, I still must admit I am surprised.
Have you ever fought Dragons? If so how often? Do you find them cliche' or overdone? As odd as it sounds I almost think a lot of GMs I know avoid them as to avoid old tropes but it just winds up that no one uses them.
I like dragons, they are pretty awesome. So where the hell are my dragons?
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Well in Pathfinder, I'd rather run a PC that's a dragon.
It never came to combat but I've faced one. There have also been times that I've ran them.
I've fought against four. A green one, a brine dragon, and a pair of black dragons. All of them were medium. Most of them were fun but we kinda curbstomped the brine one (7 vs. 1 makes the fight kinda effortless) and resulted in everyone contributing in some way even if it was tiny. They're fun to fight but I wouldn't want to spend the entire campaign fighting them.
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Well in Pathfinder, I'd rather run a PC that's a dragon.
I would do a lot of terrible things to be in game where I could play as a dragon. Once I dmed a game where a guy wanted to play a Kobold, since he was going to be the only melee character I said he could use the Half dragon template....he found out Kobolds were draconic, not demonic...and played a teifling instead.
APs usually feature at least one fight against a true dragon.
Dragons are kind of a big deal, so they're usually used sparingly.
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I have fought all of one dragon in my time playing. It was back in 3.5, and I played a Necromancer. It was not a long fight, as I won initiative and hit him with Avasculate. Poor thing just didn't stand a chance after I swarmed him with his own minions.
APs usually feature at least one fight against a true dragon.
Dragons are kind of a big deal, so they're usually used sparingly.
I understand that you can't just toss dragons around, and if I had just started playing I could understand. But I have had home campaigns up to 17th level(most go to 6 before things fall apart) and in almost a decade I haven't seen one.
I was just wondering if I was an outlier, or do most people not get high enough level to fight dragons?
Well, Dragons can be very low level encounters if you fight wyrmlings and such. I don't think high level play is a pre-req for dragon fights.
If you stick with mostly one group, they might just have a trend of avoiding dragons. Otherwise, it might just be a bizarre coincidence.
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I've fought against a total of 2 true dragons. One young red dragon and a young adult green dragon (which the party fought twice).
The first fight against the green and the fight against the red were both challenging, but we had no deaths.
The second time we fought the green dragon, we had a gained a few levels, my Druid charge pounced into it as an allosaurus (air walk)and grappled it. It was not a very pretty fight for the dragon, it broke the grapple, tried to flee, and my allosaurus grappled it on the AoO, and then the dragon ate a second round of full attacks from everyone in the party (my Druid, an inquisitor, a summoned hound archon, my allosaurus animal companion, the party cleric, and the party archer slayer), with everyone being hasted. It was a very dead dragon.
I'd say from my experience it seems odd for you to not to have run into a dragon, maybe party level matters, but once you hit level 7-8 you can reasonably fight some of the lower CR dragons, so I don't think levels have much to do with it.
But all three fights were in the same campaign, I've yet to see a dragon in another campaign (but I've only been playing pathfinder for a year). I would say you probably just have bad luck in that regard, 9 years with no dragons seems like a lot.
In game of course. I have been playing for....dang 9 years(is this how it feels to be old?) and have never had a run in with a dragon. Now it was Odd that in the 3.5 and 4e days that I had only really had the dungeon D of the couple but while this is Pathfinder, I still must admit I am surprised.
Have you ever fought Dragons? If so how often? Do you find them cliche' or overdone? As odd as it sounds I almost think a lot of GMs I know avoid them as to avoid old tropes but it just winds up that no one uses them.
I like dragons, they are pretty awesome. So where the hell are my dragons?
It almost seems like dragons are one of my GM's go to creatures. Dragons, evil outsiders and drow with obscene class levels (she ADORES her drow but will never admit it, despite them being the main badguys in 4 out of 5 campaigns).
In our retired high level game we encountered 4 dragons at once around level 21. It was in Forgotten Realms 'Year of Raging Dragons' so we were able to kill them since they were half focused on each other while we were fighting.
Still had two characters die out of 6.
Over all I say we have fought at least 20 dragons over the course of her games so far.
Our group fought a silver dragon once, but we were an entire evil party, my PC got his butt-kicked trying to steal an egg, but the party managed to escape as we couldn't kill her, as she was too powerful for us.
In our Kingmaker game we just got ambushed by 3 large adult dragons as a random encounter, we killed one, turned the second into a bunny, and the third cleaned the clock of a silver dragon that was "summoned" for help.
The third buggered off after the mage teleported away with the dying silver. Just before the paladins could get through the woods.
Next week is Treasure Map time!
We maybe run into true dragons one a year or so.
I use lot's of wyvrens and drakes and usually one or two dragons per campaign. They make great bosses because of their power but PC's need to be pretty powerful to have a chance of beating the obvious goto dragon strategy of rain death down from above.
A few.
Two of them in an AP.
Freezemaw stole my Barbarian's hammer, which he came to regret less than 24 hours later.
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I find dragons work better against a party when given the Agile Mythic Template
but then I'm wearing the evil gm hat when I do that
we've fought two true dragons in our current Pathfinder RotR campaign so far, with one run off and one killed after several PC deaths. Several others rumored, but as side adventures not directly tied to the main campaign story line, which we didn't chase after.
In previous 2nd edition and 3.5 campaigns we've killed numerous reds, a brass, several blues, a black, a green, and many, many dragon kin like wyverns, drakes etcetera.
Dragons are tough when played smart, and are usually a great challenge for mid to high level play. they can be strong opponents either alone, or in combination with other creatures/npcs in large fights.
Played in a Kingmaker game where the random encounter charts hated my party and my halfling gunslinger (pistolero/mysterious stranger while it was legal) was gunning down dragons at a rate of 1.5 adult black dragons per round. We fought 1d4 of them three times, each time landing on a 3 or 4 and the dragons would always ignore the halfling with the puny metal tube and go for the spellcaster until I gunned one down during the surprise round (hooray for crits!).
To the previous game I was in, it was Eberron and my warforged cloistered cleric punched a brass in the nose when the party was trying to negotiate with it. He was getting snippy with us so I turned my diplomacy check into an attack roll. He tried to fight back but the party was too well organized for it to really do anything to us.
A nice vampiric red in the aftermath of an Expedition to Castle Ravenloft adventure where the party needed money. And the last time I really was scared during a dragon fight was back in 2e where my fighter landed the killing blow to a green as he got turned into paste.
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Fought a white wyrmling once in a pfs scenario before. I have GMed the same scenario which makes 2 dragons I have ran, Dragon's Demand being the other. There is another high level pfs scenario with either a copper or bronze dragon that if you do not use diplomacy successfully, you will have to fight. Thankfully we had the social skills covered.
I have fought several in high level play, but her hasn't happened in a lot of tears. In one level 30 4th ed game my fighter went toe to toe with one and held his ground until the rest of the party managed to get their act together. After that, Tiamat ate him though...
When I have run games, I have thrown in at least a few. Mind you this is over a span of 28 years. I have never been happy with the way that I ran them so it's been almost a decade since I've tried. I want to give them their proper due, but they are difficult to run well. It's easy to screw it up, and either the party is dead or the dragon fails to deliver the epic battle it deserves.
My first dragon was at level 3. The GM wanted us to have a fighting chance, so the dragon was stuck with its body in a large room and it's head sticking though a doorway and into a hallways. It could go back into the room, but couldn't really do anything else. We fought the head in the hallway. Barely won even with it only having a bite and a breath attack. I don't remember the color.
The next dragon was a blue one in the desert (it's home territory). It ambushed us from the sky, and we barely survived. A few days later, we found its home and ambushed it. We barely survived again (lost one guy), but won this time. It was only a young dragon. We were level 4.
I've faced a while dragon in the snow. Fortunately, white dragons are very stupid, and we were able to win by tricking it to attack things that were not us and we led it into a trap.
I've faced a red dragon in its full might while it was on a hunting trip in a land I was trying to protect. And by "faced" I really mean that I ran and tried to stay alive as best I could while praying that it would go away. I honestly don't remember if that campaign went on long enough for us to kill it, but I do remember that my character was wed to a Druid (NPC) who insisted that the dragon was a precious living thing, too, and that I couldn't kill it just because it's hunting my people - after all, it has to eat, too. It was a political marriage.
All this was back in 2e, and back in the late 90s and early 00s time frame. Not sure exactly when. I haven't seen one yet in 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, or 4e. Come to think of it, I haven't seen one since around when 3.0 came out.
Edit: I take that back; I've seen one in Pathfinder; a white dragon in a deadly dungeon, which i tried to bluff my way out of getting eaten (didn't work, I just made it mad), and then just ran like hell until I got to an area where it couldn't follow.
One time a dragon demanded tribute from us, and with no rolls or spells or force of any kind, we handed over most of our magic items and wealth and then slinked away. We were really pissed. Probably at ourselves. :)
Well in Pathfinder, I'd rather run a PC that's a dragon.
they're actually sub-par in melee, at least all their archetypes gimp the hell out of their melee ability, they kinda get better when they get large, so they can get reach but until then they're far behind.
APs usually feature at least one fight against a true dragon.
Dragons are kind of a big deal, so they're usually used sparingly.
I understand that you can't just toss dragons around, and if I had just started playing I could understand. But I have had home campaigns up to 17th level(most go to 6 before things fall apart) and in almost a decade I haven't seen one.
I was just wondering if I was an outlier, or do most people not get high enough level to fight dragons?
I would say it's primarily a DM problem that dragons are used so sparingly, and I share this problem.
You want to use Smaug. You want to use the big fire breathing behemoth situated on a mountain of gold, and that's just not feasible until late game. I put a treasure map into my 3.5e game last week (speaking of things that you expect to see in a D&D game, yet you rarely actually use) that leads to a dragons horde(they don't know it yet). First dragon I will have used since a young adult black dragon about 4 years ago, that showed up for half the fight then ran away when the barbarian and the ranger started getting back to back crits, and my only thought with this campaign is that I need to slow the party down on their way to this horde, so that I can use a real dragon and not some medium scaled thing that doesnt even have DR. So yeah, I'd say its the problem of us DMs, not necessarily the stats, or even the mythology. nothing wrong with a young dragon, except the DM's perception of what a dragon fight should be.
I only fought a dragon once, in a game of 4th Edition DnD (ugh). My ranger ran around a swamp slicing into the thing and then running away while the rest of the party never managed to hit the thing. We once ran a one-shot where we fought Tiamat. Didn't go well. I've had them show up in campaigns with some level of frequency. Once played in a game where we were trying to collect the Orbs of Dragonkind... for some reason or another.
As a DM, I use them sparingly, but thoughtfully. My home group had a "random" encounter with a dragon several sessions ago that was called to the scene via a scroll. He will be returning later, much to their chagrin. One of the big bads of the campaign is a gargantuan blue, so they're getting a fair share of dragons this game.
Only time I can think of is when we went to a golden dragon for help.
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APs usually feature at least one fight against a true dragon.
Dragons are kind of a big deal, so they're usually used sparingly.
I understand that you can't just toss dragons around, and if I had just started playing I could understand. But I have had home campaigns up to 17th level(most go to 6 before things fall apart) and in almost a decade I haven't seen one.
I was just wondering if I was an outlier, or do most people not get high enough level to fight dragons?
I would say it's primarily a DM problem that dragons are used so sparingly, and I share this problem.
You want to use Smaug. You want to use the big fire breathing behemoth situated on a mountain of gold, and that's just not feasible until late game. I put a treasure map into my 3.5e game last week (speaking of things that you expect to see in a D&D game, yet you rarely actually use) that leads to a dragons horde(they don't know it yet). First dragon I will have used since a young adult black dragon about 4 years ago, that showed up for half the fight then ran away when the barbarian and the ranger started getting back to back crits, and my only thought with this campaign is that I need to slow the party down on their way to this horde, so that I can use a real dragon and not some medium scaled thing that doesnt even have DR. So yeah, I'd say its the problem of us DMs, not necessarily the stats, or even the mythology. nothing wrong with a young dragon, except the DM's perception of what a dragon fight should be.
The giant template might aid you in your quest. ^_^
It still skews the power level, what with umpteen natural attacks and such, but it's not always as vigorous as advancing the age category.
I encountered a black dragon in the Underdark in 3.5. The party was scaling a 100 foot cliff, except the Drow ranger using levitation and the party wizard who was flying.
About 3/4 way up the cliff we heard a whooshing sound of its wings behind us. Within a few rounds it was on us. The Drow ranger wont the initiative and began attempting to overcome its ridiculous AC. His 6 arrows bounced off its scales.
Next up, the dragon grabbed our wizard out of the air and smashed his body between the ground and its enormous weight. The near dead, broken wizard was now pinned beneath this thing.
The rogue activates her ring of invisibility and begins to scale back down the cliff face. At this point, the dwarf sword and board fighter with lycanthrope goes into his hybrid state (he was still on the ground for whatever reason) and charges the dragon in hopes of saving his friend. He manages to get one hit in that barely penetrates the dragons DR.
Finally, it's the werewolf dwarf barbarian's turn. Seeing his friend pinned in the clutches of this black wyrm, he flies into a fit of pure rage, lifts his great axe above his head, lets out a battle cry and leaps off the cliff onto the dragon below (he actually began officially raging while falling). Except, he doesn't land on the dragon.
In fact, he misses the dragon entirely, both with his axe blow AND his landing. The poor dwarf smashes into the rocky cavern floor below and is just barely clinging to life. If he hadn't gone into rage mid-air he wouldn't have lived.
Meanwhile, our cleric is SLOWLY making his way down from the cliff. In the following round the dragon continues to pin the wizard, but turns his attacks to the fighter, whom he utterly destroys in a few hits. The cleric moves to heal the fighter but is himself subdued and rendered unconscious.
The rogue is convinced we will all die and waits in the shadows to pilfer what loot we drop and escape once the dragon picks our bones clean. Suddenly, when all seems lost - the Drow ranger FINALLY lands a hit! Not just a hit - an instant-death roll! (20,20,20)!!! Hallelujah! The GM rules that you cannot "instant-death" a dragon. Silence fills the room. The ranger is quietly fuming after having his one moment to shine and actually contribute in the fight stolen from him.
The rogue finds her courage, dodges the dragons gnashing teeth and slashing talons and revives to cleric. The next round the cleric heals the barbarian who then proceeds to hack repeatedly into the scaly sides of the dragon. The wizard manages to wriggle free and immediately begins to bring hurt into the dragons life by way of Disintegrate spells.
Finally, the thing dies. It was a dragon fight to remember, and probably one of the most ridiculous and intense fights I've seen. :D
Lots. Many were encounters and not fought though.
Here are the ones I can remember encountering:
Black Dragon, Blue Dragon, Green Dragon, Red Dragon, White Dragon, Bronze Dragon, Copper Dragon, Silver Dragon, Celestial Dragon (Spelljammer), one of the Oriental Dragons (1e FF, not sure what type), Chimera, Draconians, Dracolisk, Dragonborn, Dragon Turtle, Dragon Golem, Half Dragons, Purple Dragon, Rift Drake, Linnorm (not sure of type), Woundwyrm.
As a DM here are the ones I believe I've used:
Green Dragon, White Dragon, Gold Dragon, Silver Dragon, Greyhawk Dragon, Animated Object Dragon-Shaped Ice Statue, Arctic Tatzylwyrm, Chimera, Gray Dragon, Sarnak,
I've been playing since '81.
In game of course. I have been playing for....dang 9 years(is this how it feels to be old?)
No.
You're a young whippersnapper. I've been playing for 39 years and I don't feel old yet...
and have never had a run in with a dragon. Now it was Odd that in the 3.5 and 4e days that I had only really had the dungeon D of the couple but while this is Pathfinder, I still must admit I am surprised.
Have you ever fought Dragons? If so how often? Do you find them cliche' or overdone? As odd as it sounds I almost think a lot of GMs I know avoid them as to avoid old tropes but it just winds up that no one uses them.
I like dragons, they are pretty awesome. So where the hell are my dragons?
Bad luck I guess?
Are you the GM? Use some dragons!
I assume you're not the GM, so ask your GM.
As for me, I've used dragons at least a dozen times in the last 9 years:
In a Shackled City campaign a few years back, the PCs fought a wyrmling red dragon when they were only level 2, then dealt with the parent later in the campaign, along with fighting a green dragon in between those, and later there was a blue dragon in a demi-plane they visited. And the fighter in the group was slowly turning into a dragon himself!
In my recent Thornkeep game, there was green dragon in the Echo Woods and another dragon in the Pit of Chains (both placed there by the GM - me - so those aren't spoilers).
The most dragon-happy I've ever been was a homebrew campaign back in 3.5 when they released Monster Manual IV with all the Spawn of Tiamat creatures - I built a whole campaign out of Tiamat trying to take over the world using her spawn as well as true dragons, with the PCs having to stop her and forge alliances with good true dragons to help in the fight. My PCs killed dozens of true dragons and countless spawns. That one started more than 9 years ago but ended just about exactly 9 years ago.
So dragons are out there.
But they're rare for a number of reasons:
1. They should be! Dragons and fun and special, not your common every day household monster. Make them rare and they always feel awesome.
2. Related to #1, it's sad to kill a dragon. Especially a big one. That feels like you took on the ultimate bad guy and won, so what's next? End of game. It's like climbing Mt. Everest. Once you're a dragon slayer, there are few "mountains" left to climb.
3. Dragons don't really make for a good fight. They're almost always solo (think Smaug) because it's supposed to feel like a climactic fight against a super boss, but then like all solo encounters, a decent group trivializes it through much greater action economy. Trying to balance that out with mooks feels wrong (not the epic dragon encounter anymore). And trying to balance it out by raising the dragon's CR is a TPK in the making - the balance point is a very narrow window, it can go from trivial to TPK in just one age category.
4. Some GMs are just burned out on them. For a while, they were ubiquitous in every adventure, which robbed them of their rarity and mystique, so not having them was refreshing. Maybe your GM is on a 9-year refresher...
I would say it's primarily a DM problem that dragons are used so sparingly, and I share this problem.I don't see this as a problem. Dragons SHOULD be used sparingly, or they just become Monster of the Moment. Even when we played D+D, it wasn't dragon every week, or even every month.
Dragons being used cautiously and sparingly isn't the problem (as far as I can tell from the thread), it's the fact that DMs are *overly* cautions about their use, even going so long as a decade without touching the scaly things that everyone expects and wants to see.
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I use at least one in every long-term game I run. There's a classic gigantic red Smaug wannabe in the present game I'm running, though the party (at 3rd lvl) hasn't yet heard about it. I'll likely end up using a handful more, before they even get to it. Whites are likely, and a green or two is possible, along with some water dragon possibles (a lot of the game has underwater stuff).
I've never seen a mimic either.
It's weird. Such a classical monster, and I've never seen one, much less seen one eat the rogue.
In game of course. I have been playing for....dang 9 years(is this how it feels to be old?)
Only nine years? I've been playing for 30+. I've fought all sorts of dragons and negotiated with nearly as many. If you haven't fought any, you've either been playing low level games or your GM doesn't like using dragons.
Dragons being used cautiously and sparingly isn't the problem (as far as I can tell from the thread), it's the fact that DMs are *overly* cautions about their use, even going so long as a decade without touching the scaly things that everyone expects and wants to see.I would say it's primarily a DM problem that dragons are used so sparingly, and I share this problem.I don't see this as a problem. Dragons SHOULD be used sparingly, or they just become Monster of the Moment. Even when we played D+D, it wasn't dragon every week, or even every month.That's a specious assumption. I'm not playing first edition AD+D, or Chainmail, or any game called Dungeons and Dragons. I'm playing a game called Pathfinder that's a bit more evolved from the narrow confines of it's ancestor games.
Dragons, while interesting encounters, are no longer the signature monster of the game.
Signature or no, one would expect to see Spellcasters, Hobgoblins, Barghests and Hags in a fantasy setting, as well as dungeons, castles, battlefields, bogs, and forests. It's hardly a matter of an (arguably) evolved game system simply not using dragons as much as might be expected, it's a matter of DMs across systems being loathe to make use of them, not because of the setting's fantasy, nor because of the monster's stat blocks, but because of preconceptions of what the monster should be. There's a mystique around dragons that doesnt exist for much else in the bestiary, something even Devils and Demons can't match. Sure you can't throw a Balor into the game early on, but I'm willing to bet that everyone here has seen spine devils, Babau and Glabrezu far more often than Dragons.
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I've heard said that when LG was rolled out they re-did the Village of Hommlet moathouse... supposedly in my friend's party as they snuck across the courtyard a wind kicked up... the Paladin went to go look. DM pulled him aside, as said you see a Blue Dragon hovering there... when we get back to the table you get one word then we roll init. They go back and the paladin utters..... "NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!"
Personally can't remember them all... (playing since '80) but went on a date with a Red Dragon once.... that was kinda weird considering the character (a widowed Cleric).
Most recent was the 2nd round of 2012 GenCon Special... Mike Brock was running us... I died... badly.
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Years ago I hosted a game in which my friends were investigating why all the fish near a local fishing village had begun to die out. They spent days investigating the village and countryside in general and the nearby lake in particular. It wasn't until they had all but given up their search for answers, when one of them sat on a tree stump on the beach in a fit of exhaustion/frustration. Unbeknownst to the players, the stump had, had an alarm spell cast upon it, by the green dragon that had recently moved into the lake. The dragon's acidic breath had slowly been poisoning the water, causing the local fish population to die off.
As they caught their breath on the shore, they noticed a fog bank quickly rolling across the lake towards them. Though the fog looked perfectly natural the astute players knew from their ongoing research of the region that fog tends to come from the nearby hill sides and work its way down to rest upon the lake, not start in the middle of the lake and work its way backwards to the shore.
Wary, the player's backed off away from the encroaching fog, and finally the party wizard said simply, "screw it," before hurling a fireball into the mysterious fog bank.
The fog evaporated in fire and smoke in an instant and in its place a very large very angry green dragon charged them in all its horrific glory.
The party broke and scattered in mind-numbing fear. The wizard cast fly and attempted to fly away, but only ended up over the dragon as it maneuvered underneath hoping to snack on its attacker.
Only the ranger's cohort, a relatively low-level rogue, stood her ground against the beast. When her initiative came up, after everyone else had fled, she tumbled underneath the dragon (putting her into a flanking position with the flying wizard above) and thrust her rapier upwards with all her might. Her +1 frost burst rapier crit, exploding in icy cold which, with sneak attack, did just enough damage to qualify as massive damage.
I rolled the dragon's Fortitude save out in the open, explaining to everyone that it would only fail on a natural one.
As the rogue's rapier drove home to the hilt, punctured the dragon's heart, and flooded its system with icy cold, it cried out in angry defiance before freezing solid.
Where the entire party fled, only the cohort stayed behind to one shot the menacing wyrm.
Their first one, and they didn't even get to kill it!
If My Players Want To Fight A Dragon, They Encounter Dragons.