Thread: Dragon tactics
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Old 09-21-2020, 09:29 AM   #5
Droll
 
Join Date: Apr 2020
Default Re: Dragon tactics

Talents
My thinking may be conditioned by the deprecated capacity I mentioned, in which a dragon could serve as a mental eraser to remove a known talent or spell: sort of a black hole in that regard. It's natural to infer that a dragon's outsized IQ ought to have some gaming advantage, along the lines of that conferred upon demons as similarly irreconcilable foils of humankind, but a dragon's predominating bestial nature seems to militate against it. Just as with the noted Detect Lies facility, they can demonstrate comparable characteristics, but only after a fashion. Obviously, no dragon would lower itself to "sit at the feet of Gamaliel" in order to acquire any recognized talent, but they are considered highly adaptive and supremely cognizant of their immediate surroundings. Tolkien thereby attributes a certain serendipitous ongoing attainment of happy accidents to their growth and longevity. Smaug has essentially garnered a hide of jewel-embedded scales that Turns Missiles, just by an extended rolling around like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin. So regarding a Chemist talent, yes, a particular dragon might be more apt to avail itself of some odd qualities of a strange sump or vein it discovers in its subterranean lair, but as the rules description notes, even though they know of gunpowder, they're opposed to having crude bombs lying around their digs.

Defense
The dragon's two different attacks on the same turn are unique in terms of TFT creature abilities. It's true that I'm treating them as consecutive, so that the delayed claw hit roll can benefit from the adjacent breath effects, and that the fire here is targeted at a single hex rather than being the traditional gout or fan of flame; but since they're two variant forms (stemming from separate sources) and not a single attack type repeated, they can be taken to be concurrent actions, holding the game's mechanic of adjDX order in abeyance. And perhaps even more so - although the dragon description calls them both "attack methods," a note of interest in the Breathe Fire spell says: "like a real dragon, can breathe once per turn while doing other things, including attacking."
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