[MUD-Dev] Alright... IF your gonan do DESIESE...

[Matt Chatterley]

[All original text quoted to keep in the right context]

On Thu, 19 Jun 1997, Alex Oren wrote:

> Jeff wrote:
> } The worst part is that D&D dragons usually have a 50 strength or so.
> } This would seem to imply that a couple of good human warriors (18 str)
> } could wrestle one to the ground.  If we assume that strength increases
> } more or less along with size (volume), a 250-ft dragon would have a strength
> } somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million.  (It would be fine if the D&D
> } strength chart wasn't linear, but it just doesn't work this way.
> } Any descently experienced character can expect to live at least one
> } shot from a dragon.  Of course, this goes back to hit points not exactly
> } being equal to your health points, which is yet another bone of mine...but
> } anyhow)
> 
> I've been playing D&D and derivatives on and off from 85 to 96, mostly as a DM.
> The most successful campaigns were those where we declared all rule-books to be
> optional guidelines and established a set of rules that both the players and the
> DM were comfortable with.

This is how it went with the group I used to play with. We ended up with
so many house rules, we unanimously decided "Lets make our house rules the
firm rules, and use the actual books as house rules" kinda thing.
 
> Keeping that in mind, let's discuss dragons...

Heh. Funny this should come up - I was chatting with one of my associates
on Caffeine about dragons the other day, because he wanted to tie in a
dragon-quest with one of the sects of mages.

The first point we noted is that dragons are extremely large. In our
imaginations, a hatchling would be twice the size of a human, and a fully
grown dragon upto 50 times the size of a human (most likely in terms of
wingspan, rather than just height). By virtue of huge size, their relative
strength, toughness and so forth would be enourmous (stats for our players
are more or less static - a 20 is a very very good starting stats),
starting in the hundreds, if not nearing thousands. The vast size, claws,
and of course intelligence associated with them would give them effective
'multiple attacks' per round (or rather, the ability to hit multiple
targets).

Assuming an army were to attack a dragon (A smallish army.. say 50 men):

The dragon is 50 times the size of a human, and can easily be surrounded
by all of them (especially if some use polearm weapons and attack over the
shoulders of the others). The dragon can hit upto 10 of them in the space
of time they can swing at it, and if it hits, will almost certainly kill.

In about 6 swipes, the dragon is going to be enjoying a very nice feast.

Of course, this is a very BIG dragon, and only someone very stupid would
try to attack it without something suitable.. infact, at all.

Has anyone given thought to extending the 'dragonlore' and 'history' from
RPGs into something more?

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"He can't stop us, we're on a mission from Glod!" - Soul Music (Pratchett)