A dragon

My DnD group has a dilemma.  We have been clearing out Gardmore Abbey, slowing wading through hordes of zombies, gnolls, minotaurs, and demons.  The current dungeon is finally clear, with one notable exception:  A dragon.

The other inhabitants of the dungeon told us that the dragon is terrifying and they would never try to attack it, but that doesn't actually tell us a lot about whether or not we can just walk in there and beat it up.

Trouble is, unlike many monsters in DnD, dragons have a vast range of power.  If I am going up against a lich, I know that it is bad news unless we are level ~13 or so.  If we are fighting a gnoll, I am not worried, even if we are all level 1.  But a dragon?  It could be a baby, easy for our level 6 party to wipe out.  It could be a serious challenge.  It could also be so powerful it kills us all on its first action.  No way to know!

In fact, we have had all three types of dragons in my campaigns with Naked Man.  One dragon that ran away after it took a single bowshot for 3 damage, one that was a tough fight at level 4, and one that could have ravaged an entire country if it felt like it.  In all cases though, it was a dragon... and we had to guess whether or not we can take it on.

I wonder if the people who wrote this module thought about this.  Did they intend for 'its a dragon' to terrify us so we give up immediately?  Did they figure we would just walk in and brawl it, thinking of it as a fair and reasonable encounter?  I have no idea what they intended!  I suspect they thought that 'its a dragon' would give us a sense of the challenge of the beast, but it sure left us without a clue.

So now we have to decide if we will be sneaky and try to steal from the dragon, walk in and try to negotiate with it, or go with my favourite - ambush it and kill it before it kills us.  In this module we have ended up fighting every single monster to the death, so I see little reason to imagine that this pattern will suddenly change.  If we are going to fight it to the death, might as well start the fight with a surprise round, right?