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How many dragons I fought:
-1 Adult Black Dragon, fought him in his lair with a pool of acid, very memorable battle.
-1 Ancient Black Dragon, fought him on top of stairs to another plane.
-1 Juvenile Green Dragon, almost killed the entire party, it was me and the paladin, with a very cinematic ending, as I healed the paladin and went unconscious, so he could deliver the final blow.
-The hoard dragon in the gauntlet [an adventure for 3.5].
Incoming dragon battle:
-A red dragon in his own lair, guarding a special item. A bit excited to see the lava and fire aura from this guy. The only problem tho, currently my party is very high level [I can cast miracle on my cleric] , so while it would be normally dangerous, I'll be surprise if that fight is even going to last long.
Bonus: Epic Solo fight:
-Divine Mind [Me, yeah apparently the worst class in 3.5] vs Half-Dragon Lizardfolk Barbarian. I won in this unlikely arena battle and earned the freedom of me and my peers.
We had an ancient red dragon ambush our party on multiple occasions for having slain his lord and master (some sort of dark knight dragon rider).
The dragon near-TPK'd our party multiple times, with only my transmuter escaping each time.
My current home campaign is kobolds, tatzlwyrms and dragons. So far the PCs have encountered only the first 2, but they've heard about the dragons returning to the land. They're only level 2 and not overly optimized so I've been avoiding even wyrmlings, but I think I'll be adding them in soon enough.
Have fought several over the years, defeating each one in turn, but in most cases at great cost.
The little ones (medium sized and smaller) are always comparatively easy.
Once you encounter the large ones, all bets are off.
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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.
One of my favorite encounters was straight out of a 2e Dungeon. My and my brother's characters are walking through an empty spooky ghost town on our cross-country mission. We keep feeling we are being watched but see no people around. Then the road dead ends and the houses try to eat us.
Multiple house-sized mimics ambushed us at once. A tough combat ending with a dicey and memorable escape.
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.
One of my favorite encounters was straight out of a 2e Dungeon. My and my brother's characters are walking through an empty spooky ghost town on our cross-country mission. We keep feeling we are being watched but see no people around. Then the road dead ends and the houses try to eat us.
Multiple house-sized mimics ambushed us at once. A tough combat ending with a dicey and memorable escape.
Makes me think of House Hunters from Monty Python.
I'm stealing your idea by the way...
Are you talking about as opponents? Not ALL dragons have to be fought.
I've sprung one (age appropriate for the level of my players) on my group: a Shadow Dragon. It was guarding a tree that held a certain artifact.
After they defeated it, a young Imperial forest dragon came crashing into the site - but it wasn't there as an enemy. It was the newly born guardian of the forest, thanks to their defeat of the corrupted Shadow Dragon that was tainting the wilds.
Man, that was a good session! The group loved the young Imperial dragon, and felt rewarded by the experience (rather than the XP).
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It's a bit odd so many years without dragons encounters, but this could happen (as you is proof of it).
Dragons in my Campaigns:
Huge Green Dragon (Young Adult) being helped by a insane plethora of Kytons (most Augurs, but a couple Evangelists, one Lamparidus, one Sacristan, one Ostiarius and a Lunar Naga).
Gargantuan White Dragon (Anciente White) Auranadastra (she was beign helped by a Marilith, so - tough fight).
Two Large White Dragons (Young Dragons) Auranadar and Auranadara, Auranadastra youngling, they were being helped by Bugberars Barbarians.
Cruenitoc Ravener Huge Red Dragon (no combat with him, and i hope for group's sake that no combat with him occurs).
1 Wyrmling Red Dragon and 1 Very Young Red Dragon
3 Juvenille Red Dragons
Spinal (Large Black Dragon) tore the paladin's arm off, achieved to run away.
Daomodar (Huge Red Dragon)
Krishtar (Huge half-fiend Green Dragon), the group had the help of a Dragon Turtle against this one.
Many other dragons, but these are the most memorable.
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I ran a short campaign once, where I wanted dragons in the setting, but not multiple nests for multiple color/metal dragons, yet still allowing all the variety, while keeping the total population relatively small, so dragons could be exciting, but not overwhelming with large populations. So, in that setting, all dragon hatchlings from any dragon (any color or metal) was born gray (or colorless) without a defined alignment. Once they become juveniles, they start to form alignments and they start to change in color or become metallic, once young adults they became a specific specie of dragon. Thus a gold dragon female could raise a hatchling that grows into a red dragon, simply due to alignment chosen by the hatchling. A single nest of multiple eggs could each grow up to be a different kind of dragon...
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And when GMing, I use the 'Hulk rule': Use rarely, foreshadow heavily, and every second he's "on screen" he'd better be doing something awesome.
This thread has given me a lot to think about for the possibilities of villains in my homegame, but this post sums it up nice and neat. Party is level 3, so it will be quite a while before they encounter a true dragon. But I may include things like bastard half-spawn littering the countryside in the general territory of its lair, arcane cults that treat it like an especially greedy god, and most of all evidence of the dragon's own scheming. They are sentient things, Big Bads, and thegreat movers and shakers of the world when they want to be. Plus I want to include more PC specific plots, so our kobold gunslinger will have oodles of fun.
in the meantime, I'll have to see what other iconic monsters I can throw at these guys.
I ran a short campaign once, where I wanted dragons in the setting, but not multiple nests for multiple color/metal dragons, yet still allowing all the variety, while keeping the total population relatively small, so dragons could be exciting, but not overwhelming with large populations. So, in that setting, all dragon hatchlings from any dragon (any color or metal) was born gray (or colorless) without a defined alignment. Once they become juveniles, they start to form alignments and they start to change in color or become metallic, once young adults they became a specific specie of dragon. Thus a gold dragon female could raise a hatchling that grows into a red dragon, simply due to alignment chosen by the hatchling. A single nest of multiple eggs could each grow up to be a different kind of dragon...
Very nice.
As a player I've encountered 4, maybe 5 dragons over 30 years of gaming. I've used about the same, maybe a little more. I'm about to drop two red dragons on the city the PCs in my campaign call home, just to shake things up.
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It is a delicate balancing act but I like to give each dragon a special ability or two. Sometimes nothing powerful just different.
Favorite dragon encounter I made was a dragon sneaking into the night and painting a symbol of confusion on a prominent tower next to a church. Crashed a ceremony the next day and activated it with his breath weapon. Paladins and clerics whipping their own towns backside and terrorizing everyone was a pretty fun encounter to watch the party respond too. Set up the dragon as a pretty hardcore Villanova early off in the campaign.
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The last one I can remember fighting was in 3.5 at level 7-8. It was a blue dragon that attacked us while we were on top of a plateu - so we couldn't just run. It decided to just keep strafing us with its breath weapon - though fortunately it was too young to have significant spellcasting.
Since this was back in 3.5 - before the little known tower shield nerf - I was able to block its breath weapon with my shield. (Have it in full cover 'mode' and ready an action to run in front of it.) That and ranged characters forced it down into melee.
I ran a green dragon in its lair against my party of 6 PCs. The PCs were level 5 at the time. As they made their way up the vine-choked tunnel to its lair, the monk got stuck (and was summarily stuck for the entirety of the encounter, much to the player's chagrin). The dragon breathed on them as they struggled up the tunnel before retreating into a pool in its cavern.
A nasty battle ensued between the (now 5 instead of 6) PCs and the dragon. On the last round of combat, the dragon was reduced to 0 hit points right before its initiative as its breath weapon renewed. It did what it had to do...breathe on as many of the heroes as possible. It got all but the rogue (everyone was badly damaged) and dropped every one of them. Only the rogue remained (with the monk struggling futilely in the vines down the passage...poor guy couldn't catch a break from his dice) and with his last breath he stabbed the beast in the flank and it succumbed to its wounds. Victory for the heroes!
As a player, most recently I encountered the following in Carrion Crown.
Dragons are fun. You should experience them every so often I feel.
In our last campaign: one white dragon, one white dracolich. Don't recall the ages, somewhere around ancient.
I did have one warrior priest in 2E who fought quite a few dragons over time and made armor out of their scales. He had 8 different varieties, and multiple suits of armor from a couple species as I recall.
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I'd say I fight a dragon roughly every other campaign I play in, going all the way back to AD&D. 1st edition dragons were actually kind of lame. Either they toasted the party, or they went down like a lead zeppelin. 2nd ed they got pretty interesting. By 3.5 and pathfinder they are really interesting encounters. Personally I have always wanted to play a martial character that rides a dragon. Perhaps that is the DragonLance books coming through.
Ask your DM if you can use this.>>>>DRAGONRIDER
It's really easy for dragons to suffer from badarse decay since they can come off rather lame if the GM does not run them correctly.
I fought a dragon, but it was severely neutered because we were too low level to fight a real one. It was already half dead and trapped inside its lair. Kind of disappointing really. However, the GM later made up for it by letting us befriend a very old bronze dragon.
The party fought an adult green dragon in my campaign. They dimension doored ontop of its back and had the gunslinger unload on it. It crash landed and flung everyone off except the magus, who lobbed its head off.
Voadam - that village of house-sized mimics session you are referring to was straight out of an old Dungeon Magazine issue from the 1980's - I have it (at home, not here.)
But back on topic... I've set dragons (green, black, white) and too many wyverns to count on parties before, but never have encountered one as a PC.
I wanted to grapple a dragon out of the sky, all 'This is going to hurt you as much as it hurts me' style. By the sorcerer evoc'd it to death long before I got close. Also, DM pro-tip: if the party spots the dragon 1200 ft out, it is a huge situational modifier to the CR.
I have only ever faced one dragon and that barely deserves mentioning.
It was 4th ed (shudders) and the DM was, subpar. She can come up with some okay ideas but her overall style is very very Mother Goose/Fairy Tale Theater. The fight basically amounted to us enacting WW3 outside it's door against its kobold minions, somehow the dragon didn't hear this, so we walked in, surrounded it and Coup De Grace'd the living snot out of it.
Everyone felt pretty meh about the whole encounter and we weren't really enthralled with the looting, just felt so hollow.
Years later, in a campaign I was running with a different group I really wanted them to face off against some kind of Dragon, and they were like level 6-7 so they could handle a tougher fight, but I really wanted Dragons to be these HUGE boss types. So I went with and Advanced, Giant, Flame Drake. That actually really threw them off because the thing was smart enough to have organized a kobold tribe into an effective fighting army and it was way bigger than a normal drake.
They actually handled it really smart, they used Sphere of Invisibility to sneak past its guards, they'd all brought potions of Resist Fire and they used like 4 Web spells to pin it in place so they could fight it.
I still nearly killed the Barbarian and half cooked their NPC cleric.
I am currently developing an adventure for levels 1-3 (maybe 1-4) in which a Very Young white dragon (zurix) is the primary antagonist.
I've spent some time, and will continue to do so, on thinking about how to really make its lair a difficult and engaging challenge. The final actual encounter, especially, I'm pondering and won't sketch it up until I have a particularly memorable idea.
The first time the PCs will meet Zurix is at level 1 in which she'll ambush their caravan and try to kill all the horses and cattle before making her escape, possibly after a breath weapon. She's angry and afraid since her father was recently slain in the area.
So far I like the way it's shaping up and her kobold camps, other allies and hazards/snares/traps should make for a fun adventure, I hope!
Well, I've never seen a dungeon. And thank God for that! I hear they're dreadfully boring and tedious!
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I've fought one very low-level dragon. As a player I've interacted with dragons quite a bit, but always without combat.
As a DM, I don't like throwing easy dragons at the party. Generally I only have 1 or 2 major dragon encounters, and they are designed to be particularly brutal. I emphasize this to the party, and warn them of their situation should they decide to fight (I generally give them an out, though sometimes it's a really bad choice). Dragons in my campaigns are a Big Deal™ and are to be treated as such. When my players are faced with even the idea of a dragon I want them to be afraid.
In the Age of Worms AP there is an entire adventure where dragons are fighting giants when the PCs arrive on the scene. I have no idea how many dragons we fought in that one portion of the AP but it was a lot.
Also there was a 3.5 module... Something "Red Hand" set in the Forgotten Realms. There was a red dragon attacking the town, a blue dragon in a cave and I even think there was some sort of aspect of Tiamat.
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.
My favourite mimic we fought was a Mimic-Door, which fell forwards on us when we tried to open it (or get close enough for melee) - but when we used ranged weapons it just opened & we fired into the room beyond.
As far as Pathfinder is concerned I have experience running a white dragon and a brine dragon which were both from an AP and a module respectively. Also I have fought a red dragon from an AP. They're out there...
Also there was a 3.5 module... Something "Red Hand" set in the Forgotten Realms. There was a red dragon attacking the town, a blue dragon in a cave and I even think there was some sort of aspect of Tiamat.
Also there was a 3.5 module... Something "Red Hand" set in the Forgotten Realms. There was a red dragon attacking the town, a blue dragon in a cave and I even think there was some sort of aspect of Tiamat.Red Hand of Doom
There it is! I guess I could go through the trouble of googling things and supplying links on my own. Thanks!
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?
Man, the feeling is mutual. In my years of gaming, never once have I fought a single dragon (actually, not even something dragon-related).
Sad.
I've fought at least twenty dragons in my days of D&D, Warcraft and PF.
I killed one in Kobold Hall in 4E. It is the boss of that dungeon if you ever played that adventure in DMG (it is pretty fun).
Two in Red Hand of Doom.
Three I think in Warcraft.
One in PF (Blackfang, anyone try that adventure?).
Ten in 2E.
One in DragonMech; also two Lunar Dragons if they count.
And the rest in 3.5 D&D, but they were mostly babies since that was common at low levels.
Best part was when John, who was a mage, suggested the dragon put on the cloak then he handed it over and it wore it. Now this dragon would have killed us had we continued to fight it. What was the cloak?
Cloak of Poisonousness. John carried that thing around for ages after finding out what it was.
Forget what type of dragon/age, but I think it was huge.
Then there was the time my Wu Jen, Slavic Numenstra, fight a, I want to say, large White Dragon with his party. I blasted it with fireball. It buffed up prior to the fight since its alarm spell went off so I assumed it cast Protection from fire. So I blast it again, this time rolling perfect 6's on my fireball. But again, no visible damage. So I switched to my old favorite snake darts.
Now you likely aren't familiar with the spell: 3d6 damage per dart (I shoot 2) and each deals 1d6 Con damage if fail either Fort (Fort Partial, damage from dart still hits).
Now D&D poison hits again 1 minute later (didn't matter here).
Killed it. The Fighters (2 Fighters, 1 Scout)and the other magic users (Favored Soul and a human Evoc blaster wizard) had wounded it enough that Con damage meant death.
After the battle we learned it an amulet that gave it immunity to fire. Sucked that I wasted two turns, but I got it in the end.
That wasn't the last time that spell killed something. I've killed Frost Giants, Fire Giants, Hydras, etc with that spell despite it being Fort save.
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A friend of mine was playing a magic user with a rabbit familiar who could warn him of danger. He knew he was going after a big white dragon so he loaded up on fire spells and acquired a protection from white dragon breath scroll which temporarily provided absolute immunity against white dragon breath.
He saw the giant dragon flying towards him and his party and his familiar started thumping "Danger! Danger! We need to get out of here!" He turned to it and said "Yes I know, don't worry. The trick is knowing when you can handle these dangerous things and the dragon is no match for my magics. You'll see." He stood his ground and read the scroll while the dragon was flying in, he then drew himself up dramatically and cast a delayed blast fireball that washed over the dragon harmlessly.
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.
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Really some of the ways that you can play with traditional dragon weaknesses get hilarious. My GM relayed a story of a 3.5 game he ran where the players got cocky about dealing with dragons because the caster had beefed up Shivering Touch (I think that's the name of the spell-- it does 3D6 Dex damage. Since it targets Touch AC and nails Dex, it's a beautiful dragon-killer).
And then they hit the one particular kind of dragon-- I think Orange or Yellow-- that actually carried a massive Dex bonus. Things did not go well.
I think I gave one deflect ray (like Deflect Arrow... only Rays too) back in 3.5 to help deal with the two billion 3.5 spells which were rays and ignored SR.
a few months ago the party fought and beat a small-ish green dragon(so large sized). My character was a half dragon and i was going to retrain a feat to try to make it my cohort, but he was being controlled by something who killed it after we started to interrogate it. so sad. we never did get to find it's treasure.
Have you seen your Mother-In-Law?
You've seen a dragon.
"dad why did you marry a dragon?"
"I didn't have a choice in the matter, son"
Even if just running in APs, you tend to fight at least one dragon per adventure path.
That's part of why they often are case incentives for the miniatures sets.