Valid post, and given the scale of DnD dragons I’d say that an adventurer is about the size of a cat relative to an adult dragon. IRL, a cat being able to attack you and successfully kill you would be pretty fucked up even if it’s theoretically possible.

Incidentally however…

A cat in DnD does have the ability to reliably fight and kill a Commoner.

So what I’m saying is that it should actually be a valid plot to put humans in the position of some shitty media’s dragons- once dominant, but through the power of one especially heroic housecat who has exceptionally strong plot armour, we are reduced to a dying race, ancient and forgotten by the new era.

Peak Konsi content, this might not normally be my style of character but I LOVE it when she gets to nonchalantly and completely accidentally upend people’s understanding of reality

WotC and failing to understand their own game, name a more iconic duo

“Roll a death save.”

“No.”

“…No? You can’t just not do that?”

“I don’t care.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Too bad.” Gets back up with 50% HP

This may sound strange, but honestly once you understand the game it’s really the other way around!

The official 5e devs do NOT have any clue what they’re doing in terms of encounter balance and design; almost everything gets crapped on by a good spellcaster or Ranger, and they play it pretty safe and corporate with stories too. Half of 5e adventures are copies of old adventures and it really shows because all the copies of old classics are actually way more respected and generally liked (Curse of Strahd, Sunless Citadel, White Plume Mountain) than 5e originals (Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen). Notable exception being Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. Despite being the smallest original adventure in 5e it’s honestly good.

Still, I really appreciate the meme for our community! You’re the backbone of lemmy with all your posts my guy

Isn’t this the plot of Fire Emblem Three Houses

Young Black Dragon called Gendridd, wasn’t meant to be a major obstacle, his personally is that he’s evil mostly just because he’s having a fantastic time being an asshole and constantly taunting people (to the extent that the first and so far only lair effect he’s got is the ability to heckle people at any location in the lair). Anyways he was fully aware that he’d get one-rounded trying to fight a party of four level 7 PCs, so instead of fighting them stole the party’s unattended bags and sat in a tree to taunt them about it before flying off (he did not consider this might lead to fighting them anyway).

The party’s plan was to ambush him in his own territory, so their plan was to cut through some of the most overgrown parts of the swamp to get behind his lair and set up an ambush, instead of confronting any of his minions. However, between several spellcaster party members who had both completely dumped their strength/dexterity and couldn’t cast spells while drowning, party members wearing full heavy armour that weighed them down significantly, and bad rolls, then two of them fell into a bog, and in trying to rescue them the others also fell in and they all drowned, resulting in the first TPK.

Obviously that wasn’t a super satisfying ending, so for closure I offered to run a oneshot with a level 5 party in Gendridd’s lair, sent to avenge the original party, on condition that I wouldn’t hold back with enemy strategy and tactics (no bullshit with magic, just good enemy postioning, balanced teams that had lots of options in fights, and had actual battle plans). They made it through most of the dungeon pretty well, while constantly trading off verbal barbs with Gendridd who basically ran a snarky sports commentary the entire way through, letting them know how eager he was to crush them when they made it to HIS big boss chamber. Anyways they reached the outside of the chamber and they were just preparing to fight the skeletons who were guarding his door when he jumped out of an acid river behind them and got a Surprise Round, hitting two of them with a breath weapon and then rolling good enough initiative to knock out their fragile backline casters.

After that then he’s become popular/respected enough to get Promoted To NPC.

TLDR: First wipe due to RNGiamat cursing the d20 and a party badly suited to dealing with falling in a bog. Second wipe because Gendridd employed the secret chromatic dragon art of ‘lying to people’.

Can confirm, I run a LOT of dragons and the interesting dragon villains are generally about finding unique takes on their common traits or villains because of their response to their circumstances rather than pure random villainy. We’ve got the red dragon who self-perpetuates her own cycle of violence, we’ve got the black dragon who’s mentally broken because their worldview of being entitled to everything due to their strength collapsed after they lost a territorial struggle, we’ve got the emerald dragon who’s desire not to be bothered by their humanoid allies led them to neglect their promises, we’ve got the silver dragon who loved her friends so much she was willing to fall into necromancy to try and undo their deaths.

Also we have That Bastard With Eight Player Kills.

That said, always remember: To become cliche, something needs to work super well first- so well that everyone does it. It only crosses from great into cliche if everyone does it and forgets why and how it worked in the first place.

Fully intended! Vex helping both explain stuff for new players and make funny jokes about content is straight up aspirational

Thank you <3

She’s a character with the Unholy Ravager class, I use her to spice up my Forgotten Realms games (White Dragoness in a non-snowy area jumpscare)

On the contrary, puzzles can be half the fun, especially if your players are idiots

There is a Young Black Dragon in my world who was literally never meant to be a major issue for any players but currently has EIGHT player character deaths attributed to him, because the first (level 8) party TPKd when they tried to move deeper into his territory to ambush him after he stole one of their bags, and they all drowned in a bog (trying to help each other and the ones who went to help also getting into trouble). Then there was a oneshot where a second (level 5) party went to his lair to avenge the first one and they also TPK’d because he got a surprise round against them.

TieflingMelissa! She’s a pretty significant community figure on Twitter and Twitch, great memes, nice discord server.

She’s very down bad for dragons (same), but honestly she’s actually pretty wholesome; her server doesn’t allow explicit NSFW and she spends a lot of time helping new players learn the rules of the game.

Disguised??? She’s the biggest icon in the community for it lol (and a legitimately great content creator)

God this feels EXACTLY like Azeroth from World of Warcraft. But hey the dragons have some isles and eggs so I’m down for that, love me some dragons that are actually doing well in a setting

Skill Issue

(I joke, of course)

If you have advice for how to reword it so that it’s

-Easily comprehensible

-Does not have loopholes that rules lawyers will exploit

Then I’d be happy to correct any flaws you identify!

And you’re not the first to bring up the Wyrmling point, however tying the power of a player character to their age is a terrible idea because that would make it exceedingly difficult to level up during a campaign.

Oh you must not have seen Vex’s memes! I might not be as funny as them but I do my best; they’re a Lancer (Mech RPG) memelord pretty well known for making memes about the game that were good enough to actually get a significant amount of players into it.

Here, check these out

https://vexwerewolf.tumblr.com/post/701919090911182848/what-if-i-just-posted-all-26-of-the-lancer-mech

While you make fundamentally good points, I think there is a core reason that balance is important to me: DnD is a multiplayer game, not a singleplayer game.

I actually think it’s fine that different classes are strong at different levels! The entire premise of Wizard is that they’re a squishy who will die if they’re sneezed on at level 1, who grows into a reality-warping god by level 20. Having someone that needs to be looked after at low levels and can then look after the team at high levels encourages teamwork!

The reason that I say DnD is so badly unbalanced is because once level 5 comes around? Casters very, VERY firmly become way better than non-casters for two reasons. Casters have AoE damage, and casters have utility. Non-casters have no utility, and because they also really struggle to increase AC, they can’t function in any role except for single-target damage. A good level 5 caster can make the rest of the party feel really lackluster because they can do in one turn what the rest of the party needs 4 or 5 turns to do (HP and AC are much less of an issue at this point too). And this gap only gets wider and wider with every passing level, which rapidly makes it less and less fun to play a non-caster.

Once level 13 hits, anyone who isn’t a full caster is completely irrelevant. That is not fun for anyone who isn’t a full caster. Hell, it’s SO badly broken at this level that it’s almost certainly the reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 only goes up to level 12- and that game already does a huge amount of buffing martials and nerfing casters. A 13th level caster can instantly beat pretty much any encounter not explicitly designed to bully them, and even then there’s a good chance they find a way to solo the encounter on turn 1 anyways.

I mean, even as a DnD player, I appreciate that you DO need to turn a profit as a company, and I enjoy my favourite hobby getting wider attention. I’m actually not opposed to them making this into a bigger franchise because I think that it IS suitable to fill that sort of Marvel role, contrary to the article. It has clearly defined heroes and villains, iconic designs, and very flexible storytelling, all of which CAN be compared to a more mature Marvel. Making a handful of recognisible heroes and villains and promoting them honestly seems like a perfectly sensible and legitimate business tactic.

HOWEVER.

As a DnD player, I also actively dislike the story design in most official content because it’s painfully generic. Everything is made to be very comfortably within the realm of mass appeal and staying within the realms of conventional fantasy. They have unspoken rules and tropes that they simply Do Not Violate and as a result they struggle to craft stories that aren’t predictable. They are noticeably complete shit at having any idea how to make a force for good that’s more powerful than the players that isn’t used as a punching bag to make the players feel like they’re in danger. And my point is that they COULD and should take more risks when doing storywriting and character design, because the nature of DnD is that even if you totally fuck something up, because everyone runs their own worlds a retcon isn’t going to destroy everything- and more than that, writing out a story, while time-consuming and requiring effort, is nowhere near the money sink that a movie is. It’s fine to take risks! Defying conventions is OK! It’s completely fine if not everyone likes each product, so long as it’s well-made on the whole!

Otherwise the game is also super unbalanced (I know this because I have extremely extensively created homebrew for it, I can tell you EXACTLY how and where it is unbalanced), although this isn’t as bad as it would be in a lot of other games because you won’t really notice the balance issues if you’re just playing a casual game with your friends. If one of your friends is trying to play the game optimally though, then they can rapidly make the game unplayable by taking advantage of especially unbalanced parts of the game.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the absolute greatest strength of DnD is the fact that players can do whatever they want. So trying to make stuff that tells players they need to act a certain way is only going to diminish that strength.