Let's Talk About Dragons. [DND 5E]
Gotta Love these Big Bad Lads.
To me, despite being the titular character of the whole goddamn game, dragons really get the short end of the stick mechanically. They’re essentially giant lizards with a bunch of hitpoints that breathe on you sometimes hopefully knocking a party member unconscious so the fight’s actually fair. Although I admit this is a classic representation of a dragon (big fuckoff lizard who breathes fire and burns the town) it seems so distinctly uninspired when the game doesn’t revolve around the destruction of nearby townships. A part of it I’m guessing is ease of use, making dragons something even a first day DM can run without much trouble, the result is a combat encounter that has very little variation between types of dragons beyond what damage type they do, and every fight with a dragon follows a strict 2 step formula (get breath weaponed, then kill it).
There isn’t any intrigue for the players, there’s a single path to victory and maybe 1 or 2 things the group needs to do beforehand in order to ensure victory (ie: prepare resistance, and prevent fear). Even what I consider a fantastic dragon fight from Critical Role, the fight against Thordak the Cinder King although epic, still feels simple. The addition of magical effects added to the thrill of the fight, and Raishan becoming a second villain directly at the end was dramatic and engaging (especially for a player going through it) but the fight itself was very much “Oh no big fire big damage” followed by a whole bunch of actions as normal. The damage of the breath weapon was fearsome for sure, but after it was gone, that was it. There was nothing else to it. I thought I could present some ideas to liven up the world of dragon fights, or at the very least open some talking points that might get other DM’s thinking about how they’d like to change things.
Hit Points:
First off, and probably the most obvious to anyone who’s run 5ed for any length of time, give that big scaly lad more HP. Through my personal experience, any encounter that supposed to threaten the party’s mortality in an impactful way needs to last more than 3 rounds. Upping HP lets the party live on that knife’s edge never knowing exactly how things will turn out, and it extends that timeframe from maybe one or two rounds to 4 or 5, really letting the group stew in their own mortality. It is true however that merely increasing HP causes more bad than good but I’ll address that issue a little later on. Any large, climactic monster encounter (the category which almost any dragon encounter should fall into) should feel emotionally tense, and it should pressure your players into monitoring their own abilities and resources. You can’t do that when creatures are dying before your party’s run out of high damage magic and getting bloodied after one turn of combat. There is a very real power-creep in dungeons and dragons, and stock monsters as they are in the MM just don’t quite cut it anymore.
Breath Weapon:
Breath Weapon Damage:
Hit points are the easiest thing to change when it comes to a combat encounter, letting you draw the fight out over a longer period of time, and when the monster itself relies on nothing but it’s tooth or claw or sword or bow to fight it might be the only change that needs to be made. The dragon’s signature ability thrives on longer fights, the breath weapon that recharges on a die roll lives on numerous turns where the dice can roll in its favor. This means in order to make a dragon fight longer, and more of an extended experience for your players, the breath weapon needs to also change. To talk provide examples on how I changed the breath weapon for my own personal game, we’ll take a look at Aussolex the White Dragon, who my players slew at level 6 at the cost of one of their own party members.
To kick things off, although I was happy with how the fight went, I also am the first to admit that it didn’t quite improve on everything I’d hoped it would, and my work on redesigning dragons into something I can enjoy running is not quite done yet. That being said I still think overall it was a dramatic improvement to the general way dragon fights have gone in the past and I’d recommend people experiment and try out some of this stuff in their own games.
The first thing I did, immediately, was take away the roll to recharge aspect of the breath weapon and change it to a charge based move, where Aussolex would automatically regain one charge at the start of each of his turns, as well as whenever he used a legendary action. If you’re attached to the randomness of the die roll you could just as easily roll to gain a number of charges back at the start of each of your dragon’s turns. In order to justify a longer encounter, I had to get rid of the recharging aspect of the breath weapon, or else the encounter had too high a chance to turn out with a TPK on the second or third use of a breath weapon with the potential of O.K.Oing a party member. A charge based attack with steady regeneration allowed me to better meter out exactly how much damage could be done and how long it would take to do, making a longer fight more viable.
Breath Weapon Versatility:
The second thing I did, and probably the most important is I lowered the base damage of Aussolex’s breath weapon from 12d8 to 8d8. This served the dual purpose of allowing the group to fight a sustained battle where the breath weapon served more to wear them down than outright kill them, and it balanced it with the other abilities I’d planned to give the dragon, which I’ll get to on the next paragraph. As a player and as a DM I find nothing to be more upsetting than falling unconscious in the first round of combat and no longer get to play the game, while simultaneously forcing another party member who may have had a grand plan of attack to instead be forced into a supportive role. I wanted to make sure there was a highly improbable chance of players falling unconscious in the first round of combat, and so I lowered the max damage from 96 to 64.
Now the third change I made to the breath weapon is where I really started to play around with things. As I mentioned above, I wanted the damaging aspect of the breath weapon to be balanced with the other abilities I had planned on giving my Big Lad. Which all the preface in place, I’ll explain why I’d truly made all the above changes.
With more HP I was extending the battle, allowing my scaly lad to take more actions, and have more legendary reactions during the fight, and with the addition of charges, I was able to temper the amount of damage Aussolex was capable of over a course of time. The second thing changing the breath weapon to charge based economy did was allow room for diversification of the utility of the attack. Since Aussolex’s damaging breath was the most powerful of the attacks, I had it cost 4 charges, meaning at best he’d spend one turn afterward unable to cast it again. This is all well and good, but truth told, the singular purpose of the breath weapon has always bugged me, and this was my chance to really create something new for my players. I developed two more, secondary uses of the breath weapon that aren’t outright damaging that cost 3 and 2 charges respectively, and instead of taking up an entire turn only substituted Aussolex’s bite attack, allowing him to attack with his tail and claws on the same turn. The 3 charge use allowed Aussolex to create walls and terrain (as a white dragon these were walls of ice), blocking off vision and herding the party into areas easier to attack. It granted him cover, split up the group, and caused general havoc on the battlefield, or at least it should have if my execution of it had been better on the day. The 2 charge attack created slow-burn areas of difficult terrain, freezing the ground and filling the air with shards of ice that passively damage people who pass through it. Although the situation didn’t necessitate the use of this ability, I thought it would complement the longer battle time nicely.
The idea with these abilities is to allow Aussolex to take actions that weren’t outright damaging, but still interfered appropriately with the party and created a fight where positioning and mobility had a higher value. I wanted it to be valuable and necessary to change location and approach from various angles, and I feel I’d given myself the tools to do so, my poor performance on the day notwithstanding. As the battle lasted longer the terrain would slowly grow to benefit a creature accustomed to its environment, with wings to move around the walls, and the constitution to be unbothered by the shards of ice spinning in the air. I wanted a battle that felt unique and presented unexpected challenges for the players, which at the very least I felt I had succeeded in.
Additional Changes:
The last few changes I’ll address all at once since there’s not a lot to say about the lot of them. I wanted to spruce up Aussolex’s regular attacks as well to make Aussolex himself feel more rooted in the world itself and more varied. Since he’s a younger, more reckless dragon, he’d been infused with the arcane power that would destroy him but grant him tremendous power for the period of time he was alive. During the fight, this manifested in sporadic weather effects in his lair that would change every two rounds (rolled on a d8). His recklessness had given him power, but it had also rendered his body unstable causing him to explode after he died in a 120ft radius. Anyone within 30ft of the corpse when it exploded would have been disintegrated, and the effects lessened the further away you’d managed to run. I also added cold damage to the claw and tail attacks, since his body was so brutally cold it hurt to even be touched by it. The last minor change I’d done was create a detrimental timer, where after 10 rounds fighting in this destructively cold environment, any non-magical weapon was at risk of shattering on impact with Aussolex’s scales, and a monk’s fists and feet would crack and damage the monk themselves on impact. It was a brutal addition I felt would really nail home just how brutally cold the environment was.
My point in all this is simple. I love dragons, they symbolize so universally the idea of a fantasy story. All good fantasy settings have at least one dragon in it, whatever the interpretation is, and it’s disheartening to see them sidelined in 5e as much as they are. The first time a player experiences a dragon it’s a terrifying and thrilling experience, but after years of playing the game, it just doesn’t have the same rush anymore because I know exactly how the fights going to go as soon as a big scaly boy rears it’s head. I want to give dragons some options, spice up their combat a little, and make them the big bag terrors of the skies they’re supposed to be. Cheers.