Doing Classic Monsters Good: Dragon

 Over the years, I've played a lot of D&D, and thought more about D&D. I wanted to take a real run at making a version of classic monsters that takes what I know about how encounters with these guys tend to play out (both the theorycrafted encounters GMs imagine when they decide to place a dragon on the map, and the actual ones that players have in real games) and using that to apply a rigorous lens to monster design. 

Source: Samantha Mash, I think.

Dragons

HD: 8-12

AC: 20

Movement: Flight as a B-17 Flying Fortress with VTOL capabilities. On land, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex—a bit lumbering, but with long strides.  

Attacks: Two claws and a bite or a tail whip, depending on orientation. Saber-sharp claws deal 2d8 damage each; a bite does 3d6 damage, inflicting an elemental effect on hit if a breath attack was used in the previous rounds. The dragon can forego damage with either of these attacks to initiate a grapple; they can deal damage without fail until the grapple is broken. A tail whip does 1d10 damage.  

Special: Breath attack deals 1d6 damage of the appropriate element per HD, Save for half, usable 3-5 times, depending on type, before needing to eat to refuel—roll 1d4-1 or 1d6-1 to determine remaining uses if encountered outside of lair. Dragonhide is particularly magic-resistant, giving a +4 to Saves vs. Spells—tanned and turned into armor, it is as leather or maille +1 and gives a lesser +2 bonus. A dragon is totally immune to their associated element.

Behavior: When hunting or battling non-dragons, they will fly and strafe using their breath weapon. They will not land and will always attempt to remain at standoff range—this applies regardless of the dragon's intelligence, as they are canny apex predators and do not put themselves in harm's way when unnecessary. 

Against other dragons of the same color, they will land, perform a one-round threat display, and then pounce to display prowess with their claws and teeth. Exposure to elemental phenomena of breath-weapon proportion can trigger those instincts; dragons who have cultivated advanced intelligence may test Morale to master their impulses, but even the coolest mind can be tickled by the right blend of hormones. 

They will generally publicly defer to dragons of superior color, since a fight between dragons who are not immune to one another's breath weapons is a brief and terrible thing. Amongst intelligent dragons, the rare interchromatic disputes will typically be settled by a ritualized display of claw-and-tail combat, with heavy iron muzzle-helms used to prevent breath weapon release; dragons are very sore losers, mostly because of how infrequently they tend to lose.

Dragons, like humans, can advance their destiny by collecting loot from dungeons. This is why you see them in there—most often sables and blues, since they've got the sinuous form-factor necessary to squeeze through narrow corridors. While it's believed that their looting mediates their progression through the chroma, in truth, the vast majority of their XP goes to developing sentience. Rich dragons are also wise dragons—though whether they bend that wisdom to good or ill is just as much left to karma as it in humans.

Colors

They change color as they age, or perhaps as they collect treasure or consume enriched flesh and occulted minerals. Color determines their HD, size, and elemental affinity. 

White dragons are the least of their kin - they have HD 8 and prefer subarctic climes, where it is easier to cool the ferocious internal heat generated by firing their breath weapon. Their breath is a Cone of Cold with 3 uses which strikes in a 30' wide, 80' long cone—roughly 20°. They are chunky and padded, with almost leopard-seal-like heads. 

Black dragons are the ugly ducklings - they have HD 9 and wallow in bogs. Their breath is an Acid Arrow with 3 uses which strikes in a 5' wide and 120' long line, penetrating unproofed solids. Somewhat uniquely, their breath-effect is reversible, like some spells—fen-dwelling specimens have been recorded using Alkaline Arrows instead. They are coal-dark and sleek, fronds of external gills flapping at the edges of their long, dripping, crocodilian maws.   

Green dragons are the first "mature" stage, preferring to dwell in forests and plains - though, in truth, at HD 10 their superiority over their lesser cousins is only a hair's-breadth. Their breath is a Cloudkill with 5 uses which creates a cloud 50'x50' wide and 20' tall. The cloud can drift up to 10' forward per round in absence of wind; it may only damage any particular target once. They are raptorial and fierce like a long-limbed dinosaurus. Their scales finally acquire a more familiar reptilian quality, along with a subtle jadeite luster that make this beast's hide a kingly gift.  

Blue dragons are the most esoteric, and most perplexing to draconologists - they have HD 11 and prefer environments conducive to the accumulation of static electricity - they love dusts, sands, clouds, and odd meteorological phenomena. Their breath is a Lightning Bolt with 5 uses which strikes in a 60' line between two points within 180'. "How can this be,"  you may ask, noticing that their "breath" doesn't have to actually come from their mouth. Well, it's a bit of a misnomer - they actually grow spiraling coppery horns, each serving to designate the origin of one end of the bolt. Besides this, their bodies are indigo and aventurescent. 

Red dragons are HD 12 and shoot Fireballs. 

An Aside

I decided to unify the dragon breaths with the standard range of 3rd-level M-U scaling damage options, taking some liberties of course. Cone of Cold and Acid Arrow are conceptually taken from AD&D; Cloudkill is an existing spell that fulfills a similar purpose (AoE massacre) but with a different mechanic. I don't see any reason why they can't all be unified under a standard Xd6 system. 

Incidentally, I'm very focused on these spells because, with some close examination, it becomes apparent that Fireball and Lightning Bolt are some of the only sources of pure level-scaling damage in some of the old D&Ds. Being able to do 5d6 damage in a B/X type context the moment you get the spell is pretty insane—that kind of damage roll is usually monster territory, and high level at that. I don't think it's bad that magicians get this kind of firepower, but I think this should kind of maybe be the pinnacle of what an offense-oriented mage should be able to bust out at a moment's notice. I also think there's a strong argument to be made that Fireball is much stronger than Wall of Fire in the text, making the latter's traditional higher level perplexing. In any case, if they're already getting that kind of firepower, you might as well give them more spells to choose from so that you're not just seeing the same two big blasts over and over.

There's a lot of oddities around this kind of stuff that is traditionally ignored on the basis that "balance" is for corporate shills and losers or whatever, but I like to think of it more as refinement. It's nice for the system to make sense, and decisions made by the original creators are not always better than the ones we make with the benefit of retrospect. 

That isn't to say that I endorse the whig history narrative of D&D where each subsequent edition is "more evolved"; far from it. I am not saying that Monte Cook or Jeremy Whatever can improve on D&D, I'm saying I can improve on D&D. My sin is hubris, not teleological historiography. 

In any case, were I to use these dragons, I'd also define the spells Fireball, Cone of Cold, Acid Arrow, Lightning Bolt, and Cloudkill as creating an instance of the dragon's breath.

Other Stuff 

Thanks to my childhood playing Runescape and the ubiquity of the dragonfire-resistant shield in that game (though in that case it was because you could get it for free from the Dragon Slayer quest giver and, unlike most shields available to low-level players, had no penalties to missile and magic combat), I tend to think the idea of such a specialty defense is pretty neat.   

Food for thought, and maybe the next post - Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress have proven that games where you fuck around with tunnel-type environments on a square grid are pretty fun. We tend to design dungeons on a square grid. What would a game with more abundant access to map-manipulation look like; it could be as simple as making Passwall and Wall of Stone lower-level spells than they presently are. Honestly, this whole spell levels thing is kind of stupid. I have been applying a similarly critical eye to the spellcasters available in your standard D&Doid thing, and am cooking. Watch this space, I guess. 

Resurrection Magic (GLAVGVST)

 For my lovely Purple.

Having recently finally graduated in the humanities, I find myself experiencing a curious atavistic upswell of my old STEMbrained interests kicking in. Along with trying to figure out how to make Minecraft datapacks (despite the fact that I don't actually play much MC at all and never have—it's more of a hubris thing than anything else) I've been dusting off my old physics education a bit. You may have read my previous brief ramblings on the subject of just how sophisticated the modern basic sciences have gotten and how much wonder and terror can be mined from that. 

Dark Matter Sidebar

 

This was initially a sidebar in a larger post about Hexen arcanophysics and the current state of resurrection magic, but I realized it was far too in-depth to be a functional aside, so I've split it into its own thing. I've recently been having a bit of a STEMgirl renaissance, dusting off my old physics education and catching up on what's new in the inhumanities, and this is me making a post addressing one of my personal bugbears that has been poking at me for years now.

I've heard comparison from multiple people over the years between dark matter and the crystalline spheres hypothesis. A common sentiment I've heard from various people who I respect very much intellectually is that dark matter is probably just the physicists having the math wrong or thinking of the problem in a reasonable but fundamentally flawed way that won't be cracked until some big-brain lady makes the necessary correction. I guess I see the logic, a lot of intractable problems in physics before turned out to be resolved with a big paradigm shift (c.f. relativity, quantum mechanics, etc...). 

The problem with this line of thinking, in my opinion, is that physicists do not claim to know what dark matter is, or even that it exists. "Dark matter" means that we have this system of physics called General Relativity, and it's really good, and it solves nearly all large-scale phenomena we plug into it with stunning accuracy, and where it's wrong it can often (usually? I'm hedging my words here but 'usually' sounds about right) be made to agree with observations by inputting extra mass into our equations that cannot presently be observed with telescopes. This mass behaves like mass in most ways, including being found in different densities and quantities in different galaxies like you might expect physical stuff to be, but our telescopes can't see it. 

We mostly use light in various forms (including radio, infrared, x-rays, etc...) to look at outer space so the notion that there might be some actual physical stuff there that just does not interact with the electromagnetic force (and by extension photons) is pretty popular just by, like, Occam's Razor, but it's not a conclusive claim anyone is able to make. Particle theories of dark matter are popular because particle physics has been remarkably successful in the past century, and particle colliders have been a very successful, albeit expensive, type of experimental setup which opens the possibility that if dark matter really is some kind of particle we might just be able to make it at home and see what it does, and because GR's failure at the particle scale and the Standard Model's failure at the interstellar scale is an open question in physics that everyone wants to solve. But also, it's important to remember that the Standard Model is largely a theory of very very very small things and General Relativity is a theory of very very very big things, so the disagreements are more of a theoretical problem than a pragmatic one, since their areas of strength don't overlap very much. 

So what about the crystal spheres thing? What if the math is just wrong and everyone's barking up the wrong tree? Well, there's physicists who argue that too, and are currently working to try to "correct the math" and find some new formulation of gravity that will account for dark matter without needing to actually posit the existence of extra invisible stuff. The thing is that when someone just says "I bet the physicists are all wrong" on Discord they can just go on with their life, whereas when a physicist says that they have to actually prove it, and unfortunately it turns out that the idea of inventing a new math that explains all our previous results and the "dark matter" observations is very easy to just say aloud and very very difficult to do in a way that stands up to scrutiny. If someone makes a sweeping observation to their friends about the state of the hardest unsolved problems in the field right now they just have to sound right; if you are a physicist making that claim professionally, you actually have to be right. 

There are people working their hardest at that, and I wish them the best of luck, but unfortunately they have yet to succeed in a way that outperforms vanilla General Relativity w/ dark matter corrections—they can explain some stuff, but not all the stuff, and to be able to conclusively say you're right rather than just that your research is promising you need to be able to explain everything - or, at least, everything we can already explain with our existing theories. These guys are usually able to make equations to explain observations from like one or two galaxies, and don't get me wrong that's really cool, but nothing close to a working universal theory of gravitation that does away with dark matter has been invented. Maybe something will come up! Who knows! But the people in the field are by and large not chasing that as the most likely possibility, and it's not because of a failure of imagination. 

I'd bet my bottom dollar that like half of all working theorists have some wacky personal theory of dark matter that they only ever bring up when deep in their drinks and shooting the shit with friends about the big questions, but they also generally have the good sense not to stake their professional reputations on it unless they have a very good reason to believe it's anything other than a hunch. That's not just them being risk-averse and uncreative and refusing to look out the telescope like Galileo etc..., it's a very reasonable precaution against becoming the next cold fusion guys. People come up with zany ideas all the time, it's just that 90% of them get filtered out once you do the back-of-the-envelope calculations, and 90% of the survivors get filtered out once you realize there's no experimental setup that could possibly test it, and then 90% of those get filtered out when people realize that if they talk too much about it in public they run the risk of Twitter picking up some noncommittal statement about their research and running it into a boom-bust hype cycle with a huge media circus around some big breakthrough that predictably fails to produce any usable results because of a lack of applicable experiment or a failure to replicate. 

I probably won't go around posting this on blogrolls and will just keep it in the back pocket for if I ever get into this discussion with someone again. Hope you enjoyed my little science hour :) 

By ESA/Hubble & NASA; D. Carter (LJMU) Acknowledgement: Nick Rose - http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1402a/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30673266