Post by donosaur on Mar 21, 2016 7:19:09 GMT
After completing an entire adventure without encountering a dragon, several of my players had begun asking aloud, "wait, it's dungeons AND DRAGONS, right?" We've been running a modified Phandelver campaign that is now headed back to Neverwinter, so the green dragon has been in Thundertree the whole time. Now, ever since I started looking up LMoP tips, I've seen people complain about Venomfang being WAY too deadly to throw at an unprepared party, and the solution seems to be to show them how deadly dragons are before they decide to attack it head on. Well today I managed to run a (IMO) perfect dragon introduction.
The party is enjoying a Mage Festival in Helm's Hold. Some members are enjoying a magic show, one's in a flying object race, and a couple are in a mage competition that has just taken a turn for the worse. Cue dragon. The flying object PC is thrown from their mount, the mage arena gets blasted with poison gas, and the magic show tent gets crushed under the beast.
The sudden terror of the attack and the fleeing masses certainly demonstrate how NPCs feel about the dragon, but what about the PCs? Well, I had my 2 players in the arena roll DEX saves to avoid the breath attack, and the halfling rogue failed. So, I check the breath attack...oh, it's actually a CON save. So I have her roll that and she succeeds. That's when I grab the box full of dice.
Normally I roll behind a screen, but not for this. 12 d6s get fed into the dice tower as the players begin to groan and the rogue begins to understand what is happening. They total 40, and I happily say, "You succeeded, so you only take half." Left her with 2hp.
And now they know how a dragon do.
The party is enjoying a Mage Festival in Helm's Hold. Some members are enjoying a magic show, one's in a flying object race, and a couple are in a mage competition that has just taken a turn for the worse. Cue dragon. The flying object PC is thrown from their mount, the mage arena gets blasted with poison gas, and the magic show tent gets crushed under the beast.
The sudden terror of the attack and the fleeing masses certainly demonstrate how NPCs feel about the dragon, but what about the PCs? Well, I had my 2 players in the arena roll DEX saves to avoid the breath attack, and the halfling rogue failed. So, I check the breath attack...oh, it's actually a CON save. So I have her roll that and she succeeds. That's when I grab the box full of dice.
Normally I roll behind a screen, but not for this. 12 d6s get fed into the dice tower as the players begin to groan and the rogue begins to understand what is happening. They total 40, and I happily say, "You succeeded, so you only take half." Left her with 2hp.
And now they know how a dragon do.
