Dragons are a funny sort of beast- I mean, D&D is literally about them, but you don't want to overuse them and make them meaningless. It's not much fun if you're fighting 1-HD dragons from your first adventure, they just lose the specialness that makes them interesting.
So, how do you make your dragons threatening, and present in your game world but not constantly present in your game? Well, hearing about them in the world is a good way to establish how dangerous they are. If your Player Characters have all just been beaten up by some town guards, if they later hear that ten of those same town guards were killed, and the payroll wagon that they were guarding was set on fire by a dragon attack, they gives your players a metric to work out how worried they should be, and whether this mission might be too dangerous for them. In my current game, my players have taken over an old, damaged, small keep, and they're establishing a thriving village, including a tavern that makes Oat-beer. They've read the accounts of the previous Lord establishing that he used to send knights after a particular dragon in his area, and lost enough of them that he established a compact to just give it tribute of twenty cows a year, to leave the area alone. A lot of this comes down to defining what it is that makes your dragons dangerous, and using that in the way you tell your story, even if it gets chopped up in a few rounds by your heroes anyway. So when a dragon arrives, you can have it sail through the air majestically, where your archers and spellcasters can be throwing things at it for a few rounds before it even arrives. But when it crashes through the roof of your favourite tavern, breathing fire down into the room below and just plain incinerating a bunch of commoners nearby, that's going to give it an entrance worthy of the T-rex from Jurassic Park. When it hits with its claw attacks, describe how it's shredding chain mail with its talons, rings bursting off and flying through the air with the target's blood. When it bites someone, it's hungrily chomping them down or tearing chunks out of them, not just "it hits, <roll> for 22 damage". And when it breathes fire (or lightning, or whatever), let them know that the heat is like a furnace and how wooden scenery nearby is scorched, or how the bricks nearby start to smoulder, or how an iron fence wilts under the heat. This applies to all kinds of creatures, not just dragons, but dragons tend to be one of the things where the game just doesn't quite get things right between storytelling and gameplay balance. The more you use storytelling as the game, and the dice rolls as a way of adjudicating that, rather than the numbers being everything, the better your game will get. Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 16 June 2019. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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