Run, a dragon!

In my DnD campaigns over the past few years we have run into a number of dragons.  They have varied wildly in power from baby dragons at CR 4 to legendary dragons at CR 20.  One thing that has been consistent though is that when you run into a dragon it is dangerous for you right then.  Never have I been in a level 8 group that ran into a CR 4 dragon that we could just beat up easily, and I think this is because adventure designers make sure that every time you see a dragon it is set up to be a deadly opponent.

Other creatures aren't like this.  When you are level 1 or 2 an ogre is a dangerous foe, capable of downing characters in a single hit.  By the time you are level 8 you know that ogres are trivial and you can just blast away groups of them with AOE attacks or tear them apart with weapons if you want.

Dragons though, those aren't fixed in difficulty.  Some are trivial, some are terrifying, and they are constantly positioned so that they are a deadly encounter for whatever level the party is at the time.  I think sometimes adventure writers forget how weird this is.  My character knows that they have grown dramatically in power.  They know that previously challenging foes are easy to defeat now.  And yet when we find out that the ruins we are investigating contain a dragon we are supposed to automatically be terrified.  Even if we beat a dragon long ago, this new dragon is definitely something we should be worried about.

It feels strange because our characters know for sure that if we are level 10, there are dragons that we can beat up without worry, dragons that will be a serious challenge, and dragons that will kill us all without trying.  Knowing 'there is a dragon!' tells us almost nothing about what challenge we will face.  Except, of course, that we know that every dragon in an adventure will be a terrifying challenge, because that's how adventures are written.

What I really want to see is an adventure where the characters face a dragon that just isn't a challenge.  Let something else take centre stage, and subvert expectations. 

The actual fight against the dragon this week was an illustration of the issues with the way crossbow characters work in 5th edition.  I am playing a crossbow specialist and my feats allow me to fire crossbow bolts in melee range without penalty, as well as shooting without any attention paid to cover.  We had our two melee characters ready to fight the dragon, and I hid in the far corner of the room behind a pillar.  I could easily blast at the dragon at full strength from there, weaving my bolts around obstacles.  When the dragon flew across the room to bite me, I stood in its face shooting away anyhow. 

When you build a crossbow character your numbers are good, no doubt, but the real issue with the build is how it doesn't care about the fight.  I don't care about distance, terrain, obstacles, anything.  As long as I can see an opponent, I pump huge damage into them.  That is great from a 'be powerful' perspective, but it does have something lacking in the 'fights are interesting' perspective.  I suppose is it still interesting for me to use cover and terrain against my enemies while ignoring it myself, but I think the game might be better if I didn't have all of these abilities to ignore the map.