Fighting a dragon

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Anthony

To some degree it depends on which mythical beast you're going to classify as a dragon, there are lots of giant reptilian monsters that never get explicitly called a dragon until some later scholar goes back and reclassifies it.

Oddly enough, the very things that gave us the actual name of "dragon", the Greek drakontes, (singular drakon, or drakaina if feminine), would not be classified as dragons by a lot of modern fantasy enthusiasts - the drakontes were universally depicted as serpentine beings in Greek art, albeit often with many heads.

You see a lot of folks these days insisting that dragons [i]have[\i] to have four legs and a separate set of wings. This was certainly not the case in medieval artwork, where things they called dragons could have two legs and wings, four legs and wings, six or more legs and wings, two or four or more legs and no wings, or wings but no legs.

The ur example, and one of the most well-known, of the western dragon was Beowulf's bane, giving us the concept of a powerful, destructive, flying, fire-breathing, venomous reptile. However, by the text of Beowulf, the dragon that the titular hero slays and is slain by might have been entirely serpentine save for its wings - its number of limbs is never mentioned. Descending as it was from Norse legends, one could make the argument that Beowulf's bane would have resembled a Norse lindorm, which were typically depicted as serpents.

When English heraldry started getting very specific about classifying things that go on heraldic coats of arms, you start to see them breaking down former dragons into things like wyverns and amphipteres and lindorms, and these classifications seem to have carried over into D&D and from there modern fantasy.

There was a fascinating article I read in Scientific American (now sadly behind a pay wall) that analyzed myths and legends from around the world to identify a phylogeny of myth, tracing diverse stories from around the world back to a common ancestor and developing a family tree of how the story evolved and spread as the people who told it migrated and swapped tales with each other. It analyzed dragon legends from around the world. Going from memory, the ancestral dragon would have been serpentine, with horns, and lived in water. I think they were often associated with floods and storms, but I may be mis-remembering.

Luke

[AlexanderHowl]

The prototypical dragon would have been Tiamet, a creator goddess, who was the saltwater of the world (meaning that she was all of the oceans). If she manifested physical, she would mass around ~2 million trillion tons, around twice as much as Ceres, so she would definitely qualify as unkillable for the vast majority of heroes (Horror has a different interpretation). At best, mortals would attract the attention of an avatar, which would still be a quite difficult fight.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The prototypical dragon would have been Tiamet, a creator goddess

Or Apep. Or a lóng. Or perhaps something like a naga, if the Harrapan civilization dragon legends percolated through to later Indian tales. Maybe even a feathered serpent, if we are just going by the dragon myths of original civilizations. The Proto-Indo-European peoples clearly had dragon tales, as exemplified by the chaoskampf, where the thunder (or sky, or sun) god fights and slays the primordial serpent of water and chaos and forms the world from its remains. Many have suggested that Apep and Tiamat (and Leviathan) were versions of this cosmic serpent that the Egyptians and Semites picked up when those Indo-European folks came by.

Even these ancient dragons would be descended from earlier dragon tales, which are not recorded because their tellers did not have writing.

But note that like Tiamat, Apep, lóng, nagas, and the cosmic serpent are all associated with water (as were many of the cosmic serpent's Indo-European descendants, such as Jormungander, Vritra, and Veles). The Hebrews had some association of dragons and fire, but the idea of dragon as a fire-spewing monster did not really become popular until medieval Europe.

Luke

EDIT: For some reason I can't get lóng to display with an ascending tone mark. So the listed accent is wrong.

[Anthony]

I suspect the water association is originally an analogy between river meanders and a serpent (Eastern dragons are also water associated), and it's also natural to associate serpents with poison. For fire, the concept of a wildfire moving like a snake is moderately common imagery, and lava flows are another possibility. Or it could just be that you already have serpents as the enemy, and you associate other bad things with them.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Plane

That makes me think... for multi-hex figures we should probably figure out which hexes are occupied by the feet, since turning should probably only trample those in the outer edges and not those in the middle.

At some point you'd be taking long enough steps to skip past people too.

Pyramid 3-77's article Combat Writ Large covers this stuff in detail. DF's Monsters 4 covers the stuff that's specifically relevant to dragons in DF games.

Remember also that dragons, unless they're specifically build with a stall speed, can hover above the party, and a large dragon will be able to melee from outside any of the party's reach, and their wingbeats should also be throwing up clouds of dust and grit, ruining visibility and blinding the PCs.

Most of the stuff being discussed is covered in these works, and some of it is also simply in the Basic Set.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Boge

This sentence got me all excited. I've never had a fight like this in Gurps. It's always been my sword, axe, bow, whatever individual weapon. Just thinking of the individual players and NPCs operating ballistae, firing chained bolts to tie down the dragon and then poke it to death with pikes...maybe smash it with giant battering rams or catapults with spiked balls. I need something bigger, more epic like this.

I believe the first time I encountered something like this as a method of fighting dragons was in Two Worlds 2, though the bolts fired there didn't have chains attached to them hitting the dragon would force it to land (I can't remember the specifics, but I believe you had to hit it multiple times).

A similar setup can be found in Dragon's Dogma, where a specific fight also requires you to wound a dragon with ballistae to force it to the ground (again no chains) before you can finish it off. This game has more fights with dragons, but those can often be handled the traditional fantasy way (though they may sometimes attempt to flee if wounded). Still, you will likely fail to achieve anything if you just try to run up to a dragon and bash it with a sword.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

I believe the first time I encountered something like this as a method of fighting dragons was in Two Worlds 2, though the bolts fired there didn't have chains attached to them hitting the dragon would force it to land (I can't remember the specifics, but I believe you had to hit it multiple times).

There's a fight in one of the old World of Warcraft raids where you have to 'entertain' mooks while the dragon bombards you from the air until the harpoon launchers are ready, then use them to pull her down (they had chains) so you can beat on her until the loot falls out. When the fight was fresh, and dragon fire was really rather nasty.

Traditional WoW dragons (the ones that are serious raid encounters, that is) tend to have frontal cone breath weapons, bites, frontal AoE claw attacks, rear AoE tails attacks (often with knockback, knockdown, and/or stun), and that's just when they're on the ground and ignoring whatever 'exciting' gimmick they have. They are probably fairly good inspiration for interesting DF fights.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I suspect the water association is originally an analogy between river meanders and a serpent (Eastern dragons are also water associated), and it's also natural to associate serpents with poison. For fire, the concept of a wildfire moving like a snake is moderately common imagery, and lava flows are another possibility. Or it could just be that you already have serpents as the enemy, and you associate other bad things with them.

There was some supposition that the Hebrew descriptions of fiery serpents referred to the intense burning pain you felt upon envenomation. Or maybe the way that reptiles bask in sunlight gives them a solar association, and solar aspects naturally lead to fire. But your other ideas are also reasonable.

The association with water might also be because of eels, water snakes, crocodiles, and various semi-aquatic monitor lizards. Again, the river meanders you mentioned also seem like a good suggestion.

Around the world, serpents are also often associated with rainbows as well, probably for fairly obvious reasons. I'm not quite sure what powers a rainbow dragon would have - it blasts you with a rainbow spray of colors that do ... what? The Australian aboriginal rainbow serpent slithered around the landscape creating its various features, but that does not seem rainbow-specific.

There also seems to be a common association of dragons or serpents with sacred trees. But the tree's dragon rarely had any tree-related powers.

Luke

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

I'm not quite sure what powers a rainbow dragon would have - it blasts you with a rainbow spray of colors that do ... what?

Unsurprisingly, That Other Game has a rainbow dragon, called a prismatic dragon. Its breath weapon is a prismatic spray - a spell that hits each target with one color at random, the effect depending on the color that struck (and the edition of the game*). Simply building each breath weapon as its own attack, applying Alternate Abilities to the lot, and then stating the attack that strikes each target is random (rather than the dragon getting to choose one breath weapon to hit everyone with) should work. Dividing up 7 colors when using d6's wouldn't be easy; I'd probably borrow a d8 from elsewhere, and just have a roll of 8 be a reroll (That Other Game has an 8 result in striking with two colors instead of just one, but if building it as a power that a PC can get, that's a bit harder to balance).

*Looking it up a bit, I think 5e's version might be best - red does fire damage, orange does acid damage, yellow does lightning damage, green does poison damage, blue does cold damage, indigo slowly turns the target to stone, and violet blinds the target, with a chance to send them to another plane of existence. In 3e, green was an instant-death poison, blue petrified, indigo drove the target crazy, and violet lacked the blinding effect, simply randomly sending them to another plane of existence.

[Rupert]

Or just ditch one of the colours and their effects - acid and poison are thematically reasonably close so drop one of those, or drop the paralysis or the blind/plane shift. That makes it a simple d6 to determine the effect. Drop one more if you want the possibility of getting hit by two effects.