D&D 1E Revised and rebalanced dragons for 1e AD&D

dave2008

Legend
I would tend to think of the 1e approach to breath weapons of them doing damage equal to the hit points of the dragon a 'sacred cow', because for the longest time that is just how it was and people didn't really question it. And departing from it is more than a personal preference. Indeed, you could say that part of the reason that I'm comfortable slaying this sacred cow, is that pretty much everyone that has seriously considered this question has realized you had to depart from it and we are comfortable with butchering that cow because we've since realized that it wasn't good for the game.

I was talking about higher BW damage for more powerful dragons, not specifically damage = HP. However, I don't considered any monster stats sacred cows, they are just not the important (IDT). Perhaps they are a sacred cow to that type of monster, but not the game as a whole.

Here you are suggesting that this is all entirely subjective, and I don't agree. There might not be 'one true way', but there are definitely things that make the game better. When you say this or that "works for you", are you really thinking how it will work for you when you are a 9th level cleric in a real and tangible PC party, having played your character for three years of blood, sweat, tears and laughter? Or is this all abstract and a feeling about what you would like that is untested against the reality of actually playing a game?

I did not intend to imply that it is entirely subjective. However, different groups play different ways and the game, by that very nature has some subjectivity that needs to be understood. So again, what makes the game better for one group, even if that thing is excellent game design, doesn't make it better for all groups.

Now, personally what I was talking about was me as DM and how I like my dragons ;)


Yes. Hence the reason I've been in several threads looking back and trying put forward a theory based on what I knew then, and what I've learned since them. I'm on the edge of running high level 3e play, and I'm looking at 3e and wondering what it might be like had 1e been written better in the first place and had 3e been trying to invent high level play from a better place than it started. At the same time, I'm thinking about both what I did write 30 years ago, and what I just didn't understand. So these are the dragons I wish I had had, and which I wish would have been the templates for dragons going forward into new editions so that we would always have had dragons 'right' and they could have been a bigger or better part of our play of a game that has them right in the title.

Interesting approach. I have never thought to go back in fix 1e as a means to fixing whatever edition I am currently playing.

Because theory crafting at least, I think she's pretty well balanced as is and I don't need to inflate her further to try to impress anyone. The point of her numbers is not chiefly to produce an effect on you when you read the stat block, but to produce an effect on play. And I've said repeatedly that what I'm trying to get away from is the over reliance on offensive punch that inflicts and infects so many 1e AD&D designs, and too many D&D designs period. And I happen to think that that problem in part comes from a conscious or unconscious tendency to want to impress and that typically it is offense and not defense that we deem the more impressive and first reach toward when imagining spectacle because it is the more active and obvious component of play.

Balanced against who then? You just said she could be cut to ribbons in one round. I'm not saying your wrong (in fact I think your right), I just don't kow who she is balanced for. Regarding offensive damgage, I really hadn't thought about damage being to high in a long time. That is definitely not a concern with 4e and 5e where monsters hit very softly compared to PCs.

The more her damage increases, the more any encounter with Tiamat depends entirely on the circumstances of it and the more binary the outcomes are likely to be. The 1e Tiamat is the poster child of that, with a creature whose breath weapons would threaten many gods, but which can be easily permanently slain by a not too optimized party of 6th or 7th level characters. Who goes firsts and under what circumstances is the entirety of the fight, and it all depends on what you call "scheming better", which is really just applying your system mastery against a DM that allows monsters to be passive foes - often because he wants to remove the possibility that he's using his out of game knowledge against the PCs (in that he knows their scheme). When an encounter depends entirely on a scheme, it is ultimately cinematically and narratively unsatisfying, and the soul satisfaction (if there is any) is in the self-satisfaction you have in the scheme. But honestly, after 10 years of that sort of play, even that wears on you, because it's not actually all that clever. It's just applying the gaps in the rules, and the sort of leverage you can get from using ill-thought out mechanics to gain an absolute advantage in a particular situation. After a while, it's sort of like the experience I had playing Half-life II. At first you think you are being clever. But then you realize that all the clever things you are doing are simply what the designers intended you to do and its all a bit of an illusion.

The only scheming I mentioned was dragon vs. dragon, not player vs. dragon, so I am not sure what this rant is about.

If I up the damage on the dragon breath weapons too much, all the implication of that is simply, "Don't fight dragons on fair terms. Figure out a way to win where the dragon can't meaningfully interact with you, because you don't dare interact with it." If the dragon breath weapon does so much damage it might as well be infinite, which is the obvious implication of a question like "why all the fuss about taking her BW damage to 300" (If 300, why not 360? Why not 400? Why not 500?), then the result isn't more of a fight but less of one. The PC's will simply find some advantage that they have over Tiamat which is so great that it might as well be infinite and exploit that.

Why 200? Again, who is the audience for this beast (what level of PC is she balanced for). Ultimately that is the reason for 200, or 300, or 400.

But the ultimate thing that makes that uninteresting is not merely that it isn't as clever as a typical player thinks it is, but that an decent GM holds back from responding in kind. No GM that wants to keep his players plays the game with as ruthless bloody mindedness as his players, because the GM has infinite resources. If you make the way to play what you call "timing", then you as a GM must give up using that "timing" yourself. After all, any DM can arrange to kill a sleeping PC with the greatest ease, yet DMs almost never are ruthless in exploiting the PC's vulnerabilities simply because they can't be. At some point making the game all about commando strikes either excludes the DM from playing the game he is running, or forces the game to depend on illusionism where the DM eases up when he's winning. The drow commandos smashing through the windows of the inn, only to become mysterious bumblers and unruthless if the dice go their way sort of thing.

Your loosing me here. This seems off-topic to me. Again the only clever scheming I talked about was dragon vs. dragon.

I guess what I'm saying, and this probably is arrogant, is that I've played this game at high level and you haven't and I don't really believe you know what "works for you". Someone like Lanefan on the other hand, has been there, and while his answers are different ones than mine, at least I can understand why he's giving them.

No worries, arrogance doesn't bother me. It is a routinely undervalued attribute. I don't know about high level 1e, but I am quite familiar with high level 4e and 5e play, so undoubtedly that flavors my thought process on these issues.

However, when I say: "works for me" What I am talking about is what works for me as the DM/ creator of my game world. I am quite confident I know what works for me in that context in any edition.

Where as your critique seems to be something like, "But red dragon breath weapons being bigger than black dragon breath weapons is a sacred cow! It's always been that way. It doesn't need a reason beyond that." Yes, I know that. But I'm saying that's not necessarily the best design.

Hmm, maybe your arrogance got in the way of your understanding on this one - or maybe I need to be more clear. Your approach is very gamist, my approach is more about fantasy world logic (not sure what to call that). I did not say breath weapon damage was a sacred cow. I said I prefer that increasing damage across types because 1) history, 2) Internal logic/consistency, & 3) makes sense to me in a fantasy game logic (bigger/stronger = more powerful). And to me #2 and #3 are more important to me. Heck, in my games I give the blue dragon the highest breath weapon damage!

PS I am sorry if I have offended you, that was not the intent.
 

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Celebrim

Legend
First of all, let me make it very clear that I'm not offended or angry or anything of the sort. Indeed, I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm a person who is often offensive and difficult and am generally just happy when I'm not making everyone else angry. I am extremely difficult to arouse to anger, and even when I'm giving offense it's not really anger behind that (most of the time).

However, different groups play different ways and the game, by that very nature has some subjectivity that needs to be understood. So again, what makes the game better for one group, even if that thing is excellent game design, doesn't make it better for all groups.

I'm not really sure what you are talking about here. The most subjective part of my rewrite are the ones that are the least mechanical, the slight alterations I've made in draconic culture, ecology, and behavior and the expansions I've made to flavor not found in the 1e entries. All of that I concede is entirely subjective and ought to be ignored or altered as suits the setting the DM desires.

The mechanical stuff is much less subjective. here are probably several viable approaches to solving the same problem that the mechanics try to solve, but ultimately as they are rules, then only per table variation is differences between the rules and processes of play the various tables use. As such, this moves discussion of that impact into a fairly objective area of, "how will this dragon impact the balance of my game given the assumptions prevalent at my table". And broadly, those problems can be addressed around expectations of challenge based on the capabilities PC's of a given level tend to have at your table, which is set by how you assign ability scores, how many players you have, how much you encourage henchmen, how many rules you apply or ignore, whether you've adopted UA rules, rules from Dragon magazine, various homebrew rules, and so forth. And my general response to that is that mostly that just changes which dragons are appropriate challenges at your table, and not whether these dragons are a better choice for you than the 1e RAW or even the 2e rewrite. In my opinion, they are better than both for all tables. And to the extent that they aren't, if for example the 2e RAW rewrite is better for your group, then its likely you have broad dysfunction at your table elsewhere based on inability of the game as a whole to cope with the choices you've made to make the 2e RAW dragons more attractive.

Now, personally what I was talking about was me as DM and how I like my dragons ;)

Yes, I know. And I find that horribly irrelevant, and its the sort of mindset that - back when EnWorld had official House Rule sub-forums - I tended to try to dissuade DMs from having. So many DMs go with some gut instinct because they think it is cool and adopt rules with no real understanding of what they are trying to achieve, much less what the rules that they are adopting because they think they are cool will actually achieve. Quite often in the House Rule forums I'd see proud as punch novice DMs sharing house rules with the expectation of getting approval, when in fact the rules that they thought so cool didn't even do what they thought they would do.

Interesting approach. I have never thought to go back in fix 1e as a means to fixing whatever edition I am currently playing.

As a guy that believes he's been playing the same game over 30 odd years across editions, it's a pretty natural approach for me. After all, I had to 'port' my game to 3e, from a set of rules that was already an attempt at fixing 1e. I moved it to 3e because I believed the designers of 3e had recognized the same problems I was trying to fix and had found cleaner and more elegant solutions to the same problems. As I gained experience with 3e, one of the things I ended up discovering though is that they had gotten the math wrong in some subtle but important ways regarding high level 3e play (something widely acknowledged). So what I play now is a homebrew 3e based on what I learned about 3e, but which hasn't yet gone through the fire of rigorous play testing at high level.

Balanced against who then?

Ideally, against a theoretical high level party in a 1e system that bears a close resemblance to 1e but has been similar adjusted based on lessons learned. More likely, against a theoretical high level party that is more or less balanced and representative of what is likely given 'normal' play in 1e AD&D probably not too dissimilar from the sort of pre-generated characters Gygax presented in 'Isle of the Ape'. More broadly, against the range of power actually present at say 10th to 15th level, and 15th to 20th level, depending on how diligently the DM put his thumb on the scale to keep power creep down and high level play balanced against normal unmodified 1e AD&D monsters. This is a fairly broad range, and I would think you can over most of that range adjust it the way that you are already doing if you are somewhere in that range and it 'works for you' to adjust against the default assumptions of the RAW. So, for example, if you are on the end of the range where a Pit Fiend is a serious challenge to the party at 7th-9th level, then a dragon of the stated challenge rating is also a serious challenge to you and you can use the dragons strictly as suggested (or intended if you prefer). On the other hand, if you are at the end of the range where a pit fiend is a serious challenge to a character of 8th-10th level, and so a party to be seriously challenged needs to be challenged with basically one pit fiend per party member, then obviously you will also need to face off against higher than intended level dragons. Maybe your 10th level party needs to face dragons of level XIV or level XVI to be suitably challenged. But, and here is the big difference between what I wrote and 1e dragons and what I wrote and 2e dragons and what I wrote and what you want me to write, and that is that if you do that, then the dragon will still be well balanced and work for you. The reason for that is that the higher level dragons presented here mostly scales up its defenses hit points linearly (or faster), while scaling up its damage sub-linearly and capping its per attack damage at a particular point. And the reason for that is regardless of which table we are talking about here, they all will implicitly share the same rules regarding how many hit points a PC may have and that in 1e AD&D that is very nearly hard capped by level. What is really varying between groups is mostly offensive punch and only to a lesser extent core defensive capabilities, and so the dragons are designed to scale around that - regardless of how much offensive punch the PC's at a specific table have.

You just said she could be cut to ribbons in one round.

Against a fully optimized post Unearthed Arcana party - absolutely. At which point, you will need to go looking for bigger challenges, as Tiamat alone simply isn't a big enough challenge for your party. The Tiamat I wrote was meant to face a slightly less optimized party (as described above) in single combat probably somewhere around the point the party is 16th-20th level (and she's likely not a hard fight by 23rd level). But my rules fully accommodate even more extreme play precisely because Tiamat is far from the biggest baddest dragon you can design with these open ended rules. She's merely the biggest baddest dragon you are expected to need if you've done your job as a DM more or less like the rules encourage you to. If she's not big enough, then facing Tiamat together with five huge great wrym consorts might well be big enough (and at that point, do you understand why the white and black great wryms shouldn't be too far off the power levels of the red?). And if that's not big enough, then nothing really prevents you from introducing a 10-headed venomous huge red dragon great wrym deity that is Tiamat's inspiration or mother, and is the Ur-dragon across all time and space, or applying these same ideas to some of the other mythic dragons that appear in the Deities and Demigods to create other uber-potent unique dragons, or applying these ideas to dragon species I haven't yet talked about that might be an even more potent starting point than the ones I've yet talked about.

Regarding offensive damgage, I really hadn't thought about damage being to high in a long time. That is definitely not a concern with 4e and 5e where monsters hit very softly compared to PCs.

These ideas are not unrelated! The 4e designers took the game in the direction I'm here talking about precisely because the realized the very things I'm here talking about. The only problem was they took the too far in that direction, swung the pendulum too far the other way, and over compensated precisely because the 3e designers starting from a place where they wanted to go back to 1e and redo it, did not sufficiently take into account this problem so that 3e in many ways only made this glass cannon problem worse. I'm not that familiar with 5e but from what I could see they tried to assimilate the lessons of both 3e and 4e to create something with some of the strengths of both.

The only scheming I mentioned was dragon vs. dragon, not player vs. dragon, so I am not sure what this rant is about.

So why should dragon vs. dragon conflicts, as implied in my write up, be uninteresting in theory. Sure, those off stage conflicts aren't particularly relevant to play, but there is no reason that there shouldn't be theoretical basis of balanced conflict between the 5 chromatic dragon species. Are did you notice that I'd considered the balance between whites fighting other dragons, or blues fighting reds, and so forth?

Why 200? Again, who is the audience for this beast (what level of PC is she balanced for). Ultimately that is the reason for 200, or 300, or 400.

Because much more than 200 implies that even if all saves are passed, the PC still dies with specific defenses against such attacks. This is because the maximum effective hit points a 1e character is likely to have even with extreme abilities is just above 100 hit points regardless of the level of the PC. A 20th level character will only have very slightly more hit points than a 10th level character.

Your loosing me here. This seems off-topic to me. Again the only clever scheming I talked about was dragon vs. dragon.

It's entirely relevant to both on-stage and off-stage conflicts.

However, when I say: "works for me" What I am talking about is what works for me as the DM/ creator of my game world. I am quite confident I know what works for me in that context in any edition.

Well, you may well be, but I don't know what that is.

Your approach is very gamist, my approach is more about fantasy world logic (not sure what to call that).

Gamist? You likely won't find purer simulationist in all your wanderings. I'm a pure process as play sort of DM. I'm a 'rules are physics' sort of guy. What you think is gamist is simply the recognition that ultimately regardless of your intention, the rules will determine the game that is played and the simulated world will evolve to represent the game as it is played, not the game as it is imagined. All of this, everything I designed and everything I've said, is entirely to create a fantasy world that is logical and internally consistent both as it is conceived and as it is actually played. Although I'm not insensitive to balance issues because I want everyone to enjoy themselves even if and particularly if the player brings a gamist aesthetic to play, ultimately the reason I care about balance is that if you don't have it, it implies that if your world has a long history, that (for example) either dragons or humans ought to be extinct and unique dragons like Tiamat should have been permanently killed long before the present PCs came into existence. That is to say, whatever your rules imply, ought to long ago be what your setting evolved to be.
 
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dave2008

Legend
First of all, let me make it very clear that I'm not offended or angry or anything of the sort. Indeed, I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm a person who is often offensive and difficult and am generally just happy when I'm not making everyone else angry. I am extremely difficult to arouse to anger, and even when I'm giving offense it's not really anger behind that (most of the time).



I'm not really sure what you are talking about here. The most subjective part of my rewrite are the ones that are the least mechanical, the slight alterations I've made in draconic culture, ecology, and behavior and the expansions I've made to flavor not found in the 1e entries. All of that I concede is entirely subjective and ought to be ignored or altered as suits the setting the DM desires.

The mechanical stuff is much less subjective. here are probably several viable approaches to solving the same problem that the mechanics try to solve, but ultimately as they are rules, then only per table variation is differences between the rules and processes of play the various tables use. As such, this moves discussion of that impact into a fairly objective area of, "how will this dragon impact the balance of my game given the assumptions prevalent at my table". And broadly, those problems can be addressed around expectations of challenge based on the capabilities PC's of a given level tend to have at your table, which is set by how you assign ability scores, how many players you have, how much you encourage henchmen, how many rules you apply or ignore, whether you've adopted UA rules, rules from Dragon magazine, various homebrew rules, and so forth. And my general response to that is that mostly that just changes which dragons are appropriate challenges at your table, and not whether these dragons are a better choice for you than the 1e RAW or even the 2e rewrite. In my opinion, they are better than both for all tables. And to the extent that they aren't, if for example the 2e RAW rewrite is better for your group, then its likely you have broad dysfunction at your table elsewhere based on inability of the game as a whole to cope with the choices you've made to make the 2e RAW dragons more attractive.



Yes, I know. And I find that horribly irrelevant, and its the sort of mindset that - back when EnWorld had official House Rule sub-forums - I tended to try to dissuade DMs from having. So many DMs go with some gut instinct because they think it is cool and adopt rules with no real understanding of what they are trying to achieve, much less what the rules that they are adopting because they think they are cool will actually achieve. Quite often in the House Rule forums I'd see proud as punch novice DMs sharing house rules with the expectation of getting approval, when in fact the rules that they thought so cool didn't even do what they thought they would do.



As a guy that believes he's been playing the same game over 30 odd years across editions, it's a pretty natural approach for me. After all, I had to 'port' my game to 3e, from a set of rules that was already an attempt at fixing 1e. I moved it to 3e because I believed the designers of 3e had recognized the same problems I was trying to fix and had found cleaner and more elegant solutions to the same problems. As I gained experience with 3e, one of the things I ended up discovering though is that they had gotten the math wrong in some subtle but important ways regarding high level 3e play (something widely acknowledged). So what I play now is a homebrew 3e based on what I learned about 3e, but which hasn't yet gone through the fire of rigorous play testing at high level.



Ideally, against a theoretical high level party in a 1e system that bears a close resemblance to 1e but has been similar adjusted based on lessons learned. More likely, against a theoretical high level party that is more or less balanced and representative of what is likely given 'normal' play in 1e AD&D probably not too dissimilar from the sort of pre-generated characters Gygax presented in 'Isle of the Ape'. More broadly, against the range of power actually present at say 10th to 15th level, and 15th to 20th level, depending on how diligently the DM put his thumb on the scale to keep power creep down and high level play balanced against normal unmodified 1e AD&D monsters. This is a fairly broad range, and I would think you can over most of that range adjust it the way that you are already doing if you are somewhere in that range and it 'works for you' to adjust against the default assumptions of the RAW. So, for example, if you are on the end of the range where a Pit Fiend is a serious challenge to the party at 7th-9th level, then a dragon of the stated challenge rating is also a serious challenge to you and you can use the dragons strictly as suggested (or intended if you prefer). On the other hand, if you are at the end of the range where a pit fiend is a serious challenge to a character of 8th-10th level, and so a party to be seriously challenged needs to be challenged with basically one pit fiend per party member, then obviously you will also need to face off against higher than intended level dragons. Maybe your 10th level party needs to face dragons of level XIV or level XVI to be suitably challenged. But, and here is the big difference between what I wrote and 1e dragons and what I wrote and 2e dragons and what I wrote and what you want me to write, and that is that if you do that, then the dragon will still be well balanced and work for you. The reason for that is that the higher level dragons presented here mostly scales up its defenses hit points linearly (or faster), while scaling up its damage sub-linearly and capping its per attack damage at a particular point. And the reason for that is regardless of which table we are talking about here, they all will implicitly share the same rules regarding how many hit points a PC may have and that in 1e AD&D that is very nearly hard capped by level. What is really varying between groups is mostly offensive punch and only to a lesser extent core defensive capabilities, and so the dragons are designed to scale around that - regardless of how much offensive punch the PC's at a specific table have.



Against a fully optimized post Unearthed Arcana party - absolutely. At which point, you will need to go looking for bigger challenges, as Tiamat alone simply isn't a big enough challenge for your party. The Tiamat I wrote was meant to face a slightly less optimized party (as described above) in single combat probably somewhere around the point the party is 16th-20th level (and she's likely not a hard fight by 23rd level). But my rules fully accommodate even more extreme play precisely because Tiamat is far from the biggest baddest dragon you can design with these open ended rules. She's merely the biggest baddest dragon you are expected to need if you've done your job as a DM more or less like the rules encourage you to. If she's not big enough, then facing Tiamat together with five huge great wrym consorts might well be big enough (and at that point, do you understand why the white and black great wryms shouldn't be too far off the power levels of the red?). And if that's not big enough, then nothing really prevents you from introducing a 10-headed venomous huge red dragon great wrym deity that is Tiamat's inspiration or mother, and is the Ur-dragon across all time and space, or applying these same ideas to some of the other mythic dragons that appear in the Deities and Demigods to create other uber-potent unique dragons, or applying these ideas to dragon species I haven't yet talked about that might be an even more potent starting point than the ones I've yet talked about.



These ideas are not unrelated! The 4e designers took the game in the direction I'm here talking about precisely because the realized the very things I'm here talking about. The only problem was they took the too far in that direction, swung the pendulum too far the other way, and over compensated precisely because the 3e designers starting from a place where they wanted to go back to 1e and redo it, did not sufficiently take into account this problem so that 3e in many ways only made this glass cannon problem worse. I'm not that familiar with 5e but from what I could see they tried to assimilate the lessons of both 3e and 4e to create something with some of the strengths of both.



So why should dragon vs. dragon conflicts, as implied in my write up, be uninteresting in theory. Sure, those off stage conflicts aren't particularly relevant to play, but there is no reason that there shouldn't be theoretical basis of balanced conflict between the 5 chromatic dragon species. Are did you notice that I'd considered the balance between whites fighting other dragons, or blues fighting reds, and so forth?



Because much more than 200 implies that even if all saves are passed, the PC still dies with specific defenses against such attacks. This is because the maximum effective hit points a 1e character is likely to have even with extreme abilities is just above 100 hit points regardless of the level of the PC. A 20th level character will only have very slightly more hit points than a 10th level character.



It's entirely relevant to both on-stage and off-stage conflicts.



Well, you may well be, but I don't know what that is.



Gamist? You likely won't find purer simulationist in all your wanderings. I'm a pure process as play sort of DM. I'm a 'rules are physics' sort of guy. What you think is gamist is simply the recognition that ultimately regardless of your intention, the rules will determine the game that is played and the simulated world will evolve to represent the game as it is played, not the game as it is imagined. All of this, everything I designed and everything I've said, is entirely to create a fantasy world that is logical and internally consistent both as it is conceived and as it is actually played. Although I'm not insensitive to balance issues because I want everyone to enjoy themselves even if and particularly if the player brings a gamist aesthetic to play, ultimately the reason I care about balance is that if you don't have it, it implies that if your world has a long history, that (for example) either dragons or humans ought to be extinct and unique dragons like Tiamat should have been permanently killed long before the present PCs came into existence. That is to say, whatever your rules imply, ought to long ago be what your setting evolved to be.

Wow, another mammoth post. I don't have time to reply now - but I will be back! That being said, I think my next post on this subject (but not this thread) will likely be my last (of course I have said that before). I would rather you spend your time on the good work you are doing here than needlessly responding to my post.
 

dave2008

Legend
First of all, let me make it very clear that I'm not offended or angry or anything of the sort. Indeed, I'm cognizant of the fact that I'm a person who is often offensive and difficult and am generally just happy when I'm not making everyone else angry. I am extremely difficult to arouse to anger, and even when I'm giving offense it's not really anger behind that (most of the time).
Cool - thanks for clarifying.


I'm not really sure what you are talking about here. The most subjective part of my rewrite are the ones that are the least mechanical, the slight alterations I've made in draconic culture, ecology, and behavior and the expansions I've made to flavor not found in the 1e entries. All of that I concede is entirely subjective and ought to be ignored or altered as suits the setting the DM desires.
I am not talking about fluff/flavor at all. Perhaps subjective wasn't the right word. It just seems your whole approach is very mechanical (not the best word choice either), and this response only reinforces that.

Yes, I know. And I find that horribly irrelevant, and its the sort of mindset that - back when EnWorld had official House Rule sub-forums - I tended to try to dissuade DMs from having. So many DMs go with some gut instinct because they think it is cool and adopt rules with no real understanding of what they are trying to achieve, much less what the rules that they are adopting because they think they are cool will actually achieve. Quite often in the House Rule forums I'd see proud as punch novice DMs sharing house rules with the expectation of getting approval, when in fact the rules that they thought so cool didn't even do what they thought they would do.
I think you are misunderstanding again. It is not simply gut instinct. It is about creating a cohesive fantasy world that fits a particular vision. Your dragons don't quite do that (for me), the mechanics don't properly simulate the world I like to create. But, they are a heck of a lot better than the 1e RAW dragons that is for sure!

As a guy that believes he's been playing the same game over 30 odd years across editions, it's a pretty natural approach for me. After all, I had to 'port' my game to 3e, from a set of rules that was already an attempt at fixing 1e. I moved it to 3e because I believed the designers of 3e had recognized the same problems I was trying to fix and had found cleaner and more elegant solutions to the same problems. As I gained experience with 3e, one of the things I ended up discovering though is that they had gotten the math wrong in some subtle but important ways regarding high level 3e play (something widely acknowledged). So what I play now is a homebrew 3e based on what I learned about 3e, but which hasn't yet gone through the fire of rigorous play testing at high level.
I too have been playing the game for 30+ yrs (somewhere in the '87-'88 time frame, had the books and miniatures for several years before that though), but I haven't truely played 1e for about 25+/- years. After about 5 years of 1e my house rules we so extensive that it was a complete different game. About 2 years ago I unearthed my original 36 page document that I gave to my players. It was interesting to see how much of it has been adopted into the game (still not DR though).

Ideally, against a theoretical high level party in a 1e system that bears a close resemblance to 1e but has been similar adjusted based on lessons learned.
Thank you for the clarification!

Against a fully optimized post Unearthed Arcana party - absolutely. At which point, you will need to go looking for bigger challenges, as Tiamat alone simply isn't a big enough challenge for your party. The Tiamat I wrote was meant to face a slightly less optimized party (as described above) in single combat probably somewhere around the point the party is 16th-20th level (and she's likely not a hard fight by 23rd level).
Thank you for the clarification!

So why should dragon vs. dragon conflicts, as implied in my write up, be uninteresting in theory. Sure, those off stage conflicts aren't particularly relevant to play, but there is no reason that there shouldn't be theoretical basis of balanced conflict between the 5 chromatic dragon species. Are did you notice that I'd considered the balance between whites fighting other dragons, or blues fighting reds, and so forth?
They should not, I don't think any changes I suggest make them so. The issue we have been discussing, BW damage just doesn't apply the same way to dragon v dragon battles and thus the need to be scheming is different. The 5 headed daughter, should loose, but it could still be interesting.

Because much more than 200 implies that even if all saves are passed, the PC still dies with specific defenses against such attacks. This is because the maximum effective hit points a 1e character is likely to have even with extreme abilities is just above 100 hit points regardless of the level of the PC. A 20th level character will only have very slightly more hit points than a 10th level character.
That, in my opinion, is one of the best things about 1e, I wish 5e had gone back to that.

Well, you may well be, but I don't know what that is.
What don't you know?

Gamist? You likely won't find purer simulationist in all your wanderings. I'm a pure process as play sort of DM. I'm a 'rules are physics' sort of guy. What you think is gamist is simply the recognition that ultimately regardless of your intention, the rules will determine the game that is played and the simulated world will evolve to represent the game as it is played, not the game as it is imagined. All of this, everything I designed and everything I've said, is entirely to create a fantasy world that is logical and internally consistent both as it is conceived and as it is actually played. Although I'm not insensitive to balance issues because I want everyone to enjoy themselves even if and particularly if the player brings a gamist aesthetic to play, ultimately the reason I care about balance is that if you don't have it, it implies that if your world has a long history, that (for example) either dragons or humans ought to be extinct and unique dragons like Tiamat should have been permanently killed long before the present PCs came into existence. That is to say, whatever your rules imply, ought to long ago be what your setting evolved to be.

I just disagree with you on this one. Your rules don't simulate the world I am looking for, and that is OK. Here is an example: You have a rule for larger dragons to have more powerful BW. That makes sense to me and I want that for my world. However, your rules only simulate that for in-species size, not cross species size. It is more logically consistent (fantasy logic that is) for that to occur across species as well in my world. Furthermore, this small change, if simulated out over the history of my world, would have next to no effect on the history of my world. There would still be PCs and dragons. So I disagree that all of your rules, in particular the BW rules, are "logical and internally consistent both as it is conceived and as it is actually played." If you can't see the inconsistency in that design choice, I am simply not equipped to help you see it.
 

Celebrim

Legend
Let's not argue if we aren't enjoying the debate. If you want to be done, I don't blame you.

I am not talking about fluff/flavor at all. Perhaps subjective wasn't the right word.

Like Tiffany Aching, I am very particular about how a word is used. In fact, I'm in two discussions right now where I suspect that the person used the word 'subjective' improperly. It's a very easy word to misuse, especially since it is thrown around far too often these days. That said, I'm not sure what you mean by 'mechanical' either. Legalistic? Inflexible? I'm not sure what you mean to apply, but since I've at various times born nicknames like 'Spock' and 'Data' contentedly, I'll probably not be upset by whatever you mean by it or why you think my response reinforces that.

It is not simply gut instinct. It is about creating a cohesive fantasy world that fits a particular vision. Your dragons don't quite do that (for me), the mechanics don't properly simulate the world I like to create.

That's certainly possible - you may not want a world with color coded dragons for instance. Many don't. I suspect though that you do, and that your vision for a fantasy world is greatly colored by the tropes of D&D and not necessarily those of some other work of fiction or wholly creative and individual ideas of your own.

Cool - thanks for clarifying.

LOL. That is one of the least clarifying things I could have said, because now you have to know what my preferences are concerning adjusting the balance of PCs in 1e AD&D before you could understand it, and that would require a dozen or so threads at least as complex as this one. Suggesting that you could get some idea of what I have in my head by looking at the pregenerated characters for 'Isle of the Ape' is far more clarifying, and further that I'm assuming that most tables played characters with abilities that existed in some range around that should hopefully get you in the ballpark.

The issue we have been discussing, BW damage just doesn't apply the same way to dragon v dragon battles and thus the need to be scheming is different.

We haven't, but could, go into the great depth about what the above rules imply about how combat between the different chromatic dragon species plays out. Breath weapon certainly does play some role in that balance.

That, in my opinion, is one of the best things about 1e, I wish 5e had gone back to that.

Meh. I don't greatly care one way or the other, save that whichever direction you choose, you need to take that into account. Which way you go doesn't necessarily say anything particularly strong about your world as a whole, in the way that saying that you have adopted E5, E6, E10 or whatever is suggesting something about how you define the available 'end game'/narrative opportunities/place of mortals in the world. The biggest impact in the 1e decision to cap hit dice was mostly in the balance between classes, as it mostly served as a strong nerf on low hit point total classes by forcing them to be squishy regardless of level.

What don't you know?

A lot of things, but for these purposes I don't know what works for you in the context of every edition.

I just disagree with you on this one. Your rules don't simulate the world I am looking for, and that is OK. Here is an example: You have a rule for larger dragons to have more powerful BW. That makes sense to me and I want that for my world. However, your rules only simulate that for in-species size, not cross species size. It is more logically consistent (fantasy logic that is) for that to occur across species as well in my world.

It is not at all reasonable that the damaging effect of a breath weapon holds to some function that depends on size across species. I mean, as long as we are being realistic, it probably isn't reasonable that it depends solely on size within a species. For example, while you would generally expect that the larger the human, the more power they have in their arms - and there is indeed some correlation - you would by experience and reason never expect that holds true as a strict function. Some smaller humans are very much stronger than some humans much larger than them. When you start to extend this general rule across species, it becomes ridiculous! You'd never expect that equal weight cats, chimpanzees, and humans have the same strength, or even that the various subspecies of cats have equally strong limbs and bites for the same size cat despite the very close kinship. So how is it entirely logical that across dragon species, with breath weapons that have different forms and modes of action, that there would have to be be a strictly increasing lethality with the size of the beast blowing the deadly breath? They aren't even breathing the same thing, so why would this relation hold across species! I would strongly suggest that the fundamental basis of you considering that self-evident is that is how it worked more or less (if you don't look at it closely) back in 1e AD&D when potential breath lethality was strictly tied to hit points. But, not to put too fine a point on it, that is all of the sacred cows that I'm slaying here the one I most want to slay!

If you can't see the inconsistency in that design choice, I am simply not equipped to help you see it.

There is no inconsistency here at all. Now, I don't deny you could choose to base breath weapon damage around size and be consistent about it. But there are some consequences to pursuing that approach. But, rather than debating that in a vague way, come up with your own consistent design that bases breath weapon damage strictly on size and we can talk about the consequences of that.
 

dave2008

Legend
That said, I'm not sure what you mean by 'mechanical' either. Legalistic? Inflexible? I'm not sure what you mean to apply, but since I've at various times born nicknames like 'Spock' and 'Data' contentedly, I'll probably not be upset by whatever you mean by it or why you think my response reinforces that.
You seemed to be overly concerned with the mechanical expression / balance of the game.

That's certainly possible - you may not want a world with color coded dragons for instance. Many don't. I suspect though that you do, and that your vision for a fantasy world is greatly colored by the tropes of D&D and not necessarily those of some other work of fiction or wholly creative and individual ideas of your own.
As with many things I vacillate. Lately about every other campaign I switch from typical D&D dragons to something else (which tends to vary). The biggest influence on my concept of dragons was Smaug and to some degree Godzilla. When I started playing I thought 1e dragons were kinda silly, so I didn't use them (when I played 1e all of my dragons could breath fire and exhale poisonous gas. I had mountain dragons, sky dragons, etc.). I didn't really come to appreciate 1e dragons until 3e and Lockwood's redesigns. The one exception was Tiamat - I have always fancied her.

It is not at all reasonable that the damaging effect of a breath weapon holds to some function that depends on size across species. I mean, as long as we are being realistic, it probably isn't reasonable that it depends solely on size within a species. For example, while you would generally expect that the larger the human, the more power they have in their arms - and there is indeed some correlation - you would by experience and reason never expect that holds true as a strict function. Some smaller humans are very much stronger than some humans much larger than them. When you start to extend this general rule across species, it becomes ridiculous! You'd never expect that equal weight cats, chimpanzees, and humans have the same strength, or even that the various subspecies of cats have equally strong limbs and bites for the same size cat despite the very close kinship. So how is it entirely logical that across dragon species, with breath weapons that have different forms and modes of action, that there would have to be be a strictly increasing lethality with the size of the beast blowing the deadly breath? They aren't even breathing the same thing, so why would this relation hold across species! I would strongly suggest that the fundamental basis of you considering that self-evident is that is how it worked more or less (if you don't look at it closely) back in 1e AD&D when potential breath lethality was strictly tied to hit points. But, not to put too fine a point on it, that is all of the sacred cows that I'm slaying here the one I most want to slay!
As a general rule of thumb a larger human, dog, komodo dragon, etc. is more powerful than a smaller one. There are exceptions, but I generally believe the rules should model the typical with possible variations (or let the DM handle them). And yes you would expect animals of similar size, weight, body-type, and health to have similar strength. That is why it is fascinating that pound for pound chimps are about 2x as strong as humans.

There is no inconsistency here at all. Now, I don't deny you could choose to base breath weapon damage around size and be consistent about it. But there are some consequences to pursuing that approach. But, rather than debating that in a vague way, come up with your own consistent design that bases breath weapon damage strictly on size and we can talk about the consequences of that.

Why would I do that? I never postulated that should be the only determining factor. Are you trying to be obtuse or is that really how you interpreted my comment?
 

Celebrim

Legend
Why would I do that? I never postulated that should be the only determining factor. Are you trying to be obtuse or is that really how you interpreted my comment?

My apologies if I misinterpreted you, but you did say, "I said I prefer that increasing damage across types". The effect of doing so would be to create a system where breath weapon damage strictly increased on the basis of size. If I'm mistaken in this, please show me a system that increases damage both by age and by type that isn't strictly increasing by size. Further, you have said things like, "The fact the red does quite a lot of melee damage is another reason, to me, that it needs to do more fire damage." Now, the melee damage does strictly increase by size, so statements like that and others seem to indicate that you think breath weapon damage ought to scale by size as well. And you have said things like, "One of those tweaks would be to mimic the damage progression of the dragons in 1e." And again, if we take size to be a function of HD then the implication of mimicking the damage progression of the dragons in 1e is that it is going to be based on size, since the damage progression of dragons in 1e was based on HD by way of hit points.

So, again, if I misunderstood you I apologize, but you have been saying a lot of things like, "My thinking is that a bigger dragon should have a more dangerous breath weapon, just like its physical attacks are more dangerous." How should I have interpreted this comment?

You seemed to be overly concerned with the mechanical expression / balance of the game.

Such a concern seems to me entirely proper to one that is writing rules.
 

dave2008

Legend
So, again, if I misunderstood you I apologize, but you have been saying a lot of things like, "My thinking is that a bigger dragon should have a more dangerous breath weapon, just like its physical attacks are more dangerous." How should I have interpreted this comment?

It is correct to interpret it as a factor, but not the only factor. It is not one or the other. You can have increasing BW damage and be balanced and have mechanically consistency and have thematic consistency. Perhaps it seems more important from your perspective as that is almost the only issue we have discussed.

Such a concern seems to me entirely proper to one that is writing rules.
Good point :)
 

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