Dungeons and No Dragons; Or, RuneQuest Wins Again

On G+ Jez Gordon remarks:

you know, I've been playing D&D for.... 28 years? never once fought a dragon.

Huh. But he's right - DMs do tend to hold back on the iconic monster of the game. . And this all just illustrates how sometimes "iconic" can be a curse, and how RuneQuest won in the end.

3rd edition D&D represented a wholesale capitulation to RuneQuest design principles - stats for monsters, skills, unified resolution system, damage to objects. Even now RQ is mopping up on the silver coinage standard,apparently to be incorporated in D&D 5th. And another thing it won on was dragons.

In AD&D your first baby dragon would have less than a dozen hit points and you could bag it at 2nd level or so with a few lucky arrow shots, like those Elmore guys I unloaded on last year. Even high level dragons were distinguished mainly by giving and taking large amounts of damage, rather than anything truly amazing.

RuneQuest reached in and grabbed D&D by its second D. Dragons in RQ were demigod-level power mongers and the best you could realistically do was to fight their larval form, the humanoid dragonewts.

Following suit, second edition D&D made dragons more badass, although some of the new abilities backfired - I dare you to think about wing buffets without thinking of Buffalo wing buf-fays. Third edition had hurk gurk colossal great wyrms with their RQ serial numbers filed off.

Not Russ' finest hour.

When the ultimate dragons are Galactus-level challenges, you feel cheap giving the players anything less - kind of like the Firedrake and Ice Lizard in the Fiend Folio weren't popular because they dialed down the value of the dragon brand even further, leaving aside the "Pete's Dragon" influence in their art.

And back to the curse of the iconic. Dragons set up the DM in a double bind. You want your players' first time with a dragon to be special, whereas a minotaur or a manticore can just pop out from behind any old bush. But at the same time there's the nagging doubt that the dragon is also the ultimate cliche, like the skull mountain or idol with giant gem eyes. Both these factors work together to inhibit the dragons from coming out and playing in a lot of campaigns.

The final excuse is that lot of campaigns hover in the low levels, where dragons aren't seen as appropriate foes. The one time I put a dragon in the dungeon it came out of a random room stocking roll on the fly as a party explored the upper works of the Mad Archmage's castle. I think the way I used that dragon - as a self-aware philosophical dilemma - was both suitable to low level players, and broke out of the cliche mold, "the great worm asleep on its pile of treasure" &c. What dragons have going for them is intelligence, which means that old school DMs can drop them in at every level, assuming players are smart enough to grovel abjectly or bargain desperately rather than fight.

Monster Ability Scores on the Fly

As teens we played two roleplaying games: D&D plus variants and Runequest.

Runequest was attractive because it felt more realistic. But it was a pain to create adventures for, which is why we didn't play it all the time. The magic system was restrictively Gloranthan, but worse yet, each individual monster had separate stats that had to be rolled up.

Because it was AD&D, the two systems came off about the same in complexity, but at least in AD&D the DM could create a monster our of thin air, or throw a few ogres at the party without blinking. D&D was a system thrown together from a number of unrelated wargames. Runequest was a system that sought to simulate the world consistently, simplifying some areas (skill resolution) at the cost of others (monster generation).

3rd and later edition D&D assimilated the Runequest mentality with the triumph of consistency over ease. Skills got easier but monster statblocks grew fearsomely big.

D&D Next seems to pare down the monsters considerably but retain the "consistency" approach. Monster saving throws are ability score-based just like characters' and if you want to wrestle a gray ooze, its Strength is a known quantity.

Mike Mearls, to his credit, realizes that this can work out awkwardly in practice and gives the option to just wing ability scores. If your gray ooze's strength is a few points off, that can always be explained away ("He was a big strong ooze, even as a little puddle").

But here's my alternative, on the page of my large-print heartbreaker that explains monster stats. The relevant section lets you compute monster abilities from other parts of their statblock like move and hit dice. I also use descriptive terms like "nimble" and "frail" that should be easy to apply.

 I'm not sure if a simple algorithm for each stat is less unwieldy than just looking things up in the monster book, but at least it can give you some things to think about when improvising monster stats for Next/5th. Me - I'll work toward not requiring ability scores for monsters at all. And anyway, this exercise has got me moving again on the 52 Pages.