Here be Dragons

[Reader]

Here are my draft dragon statistics.

Agility Athletics Awareness Endurance Fighting Marksmanship AR Dragonbreath damage bonus

Baseline 5 7 5 7 6 4 6 0
Vhagar 4 9 4 10 9 4 8 2

Dragon breath - close range. Damage as wildfire (7 per DoS, ignores armour). Larger dragons receive a bonus to their dragon breath damage.
May take injuries & wounds
Base damage = Athletics +7
Acts as a unit on Warfare scale (no penalties for attacking units/bonuses to units attacking them)
Destiny - some Dragons possess destiny points.
Size -2 penalty to combat defence as noted in core rules.

Open to thoughts here. Note that they've got a pretty high AR and CD, even allowing for the penalties, but aren't unbeatable.

[Theomore Tullison]

Lacks movement speed.

[Reader]

Lacks movement speed.

Indeed, and skills. This is more to get a general opinion on overall power level rather than share everything. Don't need those details for this level of debate.

They're not unkillable, but they're awesome powerhouses.

[Theomore Tullison]

Hmm, so just to be clear, they count as a unit when other units are fighting them and a character when other characters are fighting them?

[Reader]

Indeed. They don't give a unit attacking them +2D or grant units +20 defence when attacking them.

[Ereth Redwain]

Well I saw this Dragon in the old green ronin forums once if you want to nit pick stuff or their abilities for some ideas.

Agility 4
Athletics 8 (Strength 4B)
Awareness 4 (Notice 1B)
Cunning 2 (Memory 1B)
Endurance 8 (Resilience 4B, Stamina 4B)
Fighting 8 (Bite 2B, Claws 2B)
Marksmanship 4
Survival 5
Will 5

Combat Defense 16 Armor Rating 10
Health 28
Bite 8D+2B 12 Damage Powerful, Vicious
Claws 8D+2B 8 Damage Grab, Impale

Special Rules
Fire Breath: (Greater Action) The dragon breathes a gout of fire that sweeps across the battlefield. In mass combat, this is resolved on a unit scale. In a normal combat, the dragon can breathe in a (endurance) yard wide line that is (five times his endurance) yards long and in this way may hit several targets at once. A dragon’s breath does damage equal to double its Endurance rank as fire damage. This damage ignores armour.
Fire-proofed: Dragons are rarely harmed by heat and even open fire is not very effective against them. They do not make tests to travel in extreme heat (although they still need to drink, they get no sunburns) and fire-damage and related kinds of damage (boiling oil etc.) is reduced to the half.
Impale: A dragon is not disarmed when it impales someone. Until its claw are freed, they do 1/2 damage and loses both the Impale and Grab qualities. He could free his claws with a lesser action.
Swipe: A dragon can use the divided attack against as many adjacent opponents as it chooses with its claws.
Tenacious: Dragons can take Injuries and Wounds to reduce damage to its health.
Terrifying: Enemies attacked by a dragon must make a formidable test (TN 12), or flee in terror. Success means that they may stay and fight.
Though: The health of dragons is increased by a number equal to the number of resilience bonus dices they have.

[Theomore Tullison]

Atheltics, Endurance and Damage should all be high.

Not sure about agility, awareness and fighting, however. Or put another way, a human has likely a better shot at hitting an adjacent human while a dragon probably will find it more difficult. But if the dragon hits, the human probably dies.

[Ereth Redwain]

Fighting 4 for the more violent oriented dragons and 3 for the average dragon then?

[Theomore Tullison]

I think the fighting baseline needs to be balanced against odds of one-shotting an elite cavalry unit. Say CD 5, AR 9, Health 15, so 30 damage needed, which is 3 DoS for baseline dragon, so hitting 15.

That's 44% at Fighting 4, 78% at 5 and 93% at 6.

So a 4 to 6 level depending on experience/training sounds about right to me, Caraxes possibly a 7.

Some consideration should also be given to how they can get killed, Meraxes got taken out with a single scorpion bolt, Vermax crashed into the sea. Stormcloud with one bolt and many arrows (plus exhaustion of flying with all that in his belly, young though). Perhaps simulating by enforcing checks from rider if dragon gets injured...critcal failure with possibly catastrophic results (like falling damage, which is very much lethal in this system). Might consider having it count as a single unit for targeting with scorpions, thus allowing a lucky shot the chance of bringing it down.

[Baelon Drakeson]

If I'm parsing that correctly...

Baseline	| Vhagar
CD 15, AR 6	| CD 15, AR 8
Health: 21	| Health: 30
Standard Attack: (6+)d6k6, 14 Dam/DoS	| Standard Attack: (9+)d6k9, 16 Dam/DoS
Breath Attack: (4+)d6k4, 7 Dam/DoS ignores AR	| Breath Attack: (4+)d6k4, 9 Dam/DoS ignores AR

Hmm. First impression: functionally unkillable.
The Endurance is astoundingly high - a standard dragon can soak 49 damage in injuries and an additional 7 hits as wounds. Vhagar can soak 100 damage in injuries and an additional 10 hits in wounds. Combine with the high CD and AR, and the fact that the incredibly high Fighting and damage means that even after a number of wounds and injuries they can one-hit kill even the toughest of units.

They should be extremely hard to kill, but not to that extent. It makes something like the Storming of the Dragonpit almost unbelievable. A mob of peasants (Peasant Levy units of any training level) cannot get a single DoS on a dragon, and even with a hero attached they top out at 1 DoS. Even if they could somehow get a higher attack, even getting 4 DoS would not get past the dragon's AR. You could throw the entire population of King's Landing at a single dragon and the dragon would win.... and that's just CD and AR.

The CD needs to be lower, or perhaps make them not units but increase their fighting/marksmanship to deal with the +20. Perhaps give them the Tough and Berserker benefits to compensate -  even if a horde of peasants can slowly chip them down, the death toll would be astronomical. It's thematically appropriate for their death throes, too.

[Ser Walton Dulver]

On another hand what for example Wyl's have is laughable for them. Three dragons conquered seven kingdoms while they had 10% of opponent's army in main battle?

[Theomore Tullison]

Treating them like characters sounds like an easier way to balance that fact, yes. Means that it should be vulnerable to mass cavalry kamikaze also. But on the battle scale, it could then take ten actions. Which is not necessarily an unrealistic depiction of what happens to an army facing a dragon.

Still those peasant levies have crap damage, but they'd probably be charging, but even so they'd need a 3 DoS...and therein lies the rub, a dragon cannot have more than 8 CD for a peasant levy unit with +2D to get through AR6. Might not need so much AR with that endurance maybe?

[Theomore Tullison]

On another hand what for example Wyl's have is laughable for them. Three dragons conquered seven kingdoms while they had 10% of opponent's army in main battle?

Yeah, I think elite archers with damage upgrades or elite engineers with a full complement of scorpions could pose a threat to it, probably more than one unit needed though. How many is required depends on how fast a dragon can close the distance.

This sorry bunch under command of House Wyl? Only damage they're likely to be able to inflict to Vhagar is to make his rider overconfident.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Yeah, I think elite archers with damage upgrades or elite engineers with a full complement of scorpions could pose a threat to it, probably more than one unit needed though. How many is required depends on how fast a dragon can close the distance.

This sorry bunch under command of House Wyl? Only damage they're likely to be able to inflict to Vhagar is to make his rider overconfident.

The best an elite engineer unit (say, 6 Warfare) can do is 48 damage in 4 hits of 12, which would put Vhagar at... 2/30 with two injuries. Then Vhagar has 2 turns to kill the engineers - which would probably not take more than a single attack. 9d6-2 against a CD of 5... or 3 if they have upgraded armor. That's something like a 99.995% chance of an instant kill, even if the Engineers have Endurance 5. 99.98% if they have upgraded armor, too.

For that matter, why bother with the engineers? Vhagar can eat the enemy general and more or less call it a day, unless they are a primary character and can take wounds. Even then with so may wounds how likely are they to succeed at giving orders?

And yet, the Targaryans conquered with armies, not just dragons. If a dragon can handily defeat even moderately sized/skilled armies without any real risk, why bother with an army? They are slow and expensive. Easier to just show up with the dragon, cull a few hundred soldiers (or just the general), and intimidate the rest into surrender and servitude.

[Theomore Tullison]

So, elite archers, agility 5, marksmanship 6, upgraded bows, deals 8 damage, everyone readied to attack Vhagar, which means they don't need a commander to give orders, they'll just keep shooting. Space them out so he can only take out one at a time.

That's 6.8 damage per unit per round. 130+10 shots total needed to take him down. 19 shots to wounds starts kicking in, so 30 needed, 8 units should do the job. Allows for commander+4 sub-commanders, so can add in a few more attacks, should be able to bring down Vhagar before he eats all of them. Add 4 champions that might take command as sub-commanders falls and greatly boost damage output and you have a dragon trap.

I think that a warfare 4 commander, 2 sub-commanders and 4 champions with 4 elite archer units should have a decent enough chance of bringing Vhagar down.

Probably why dragons comes with armies. If the enemy can focus fire, the dragon can be killed. If the army also has to deal with opposing troops on the ground, though luck.

[Reader]

This is the kind of analysis I'm up for. Will check baseline dragon against regular archers/siege engines and see what I feel.

Vhagar is the terror of the age, the Greens are outnumbered on Dragons but have the advantage of quality.

[Gwyneth Drakeson]

Arr. I do like how the dragons stats can be massaged to encourage what the books show as the history of the conflicts. Dragons are used very carefully.

Ya gotta figure, even if a dragon like Vhagar suffers a lot of injuries or wounds, that basically means he's 'killed' for the purposes of the next few battles at least. They wouldn't dare bring him back out until he'd had time to heal some.

[Baelon Drakeson]

Hmm. That's a good point. There are no "Dragon doctors", and I'm guessing that their physiology is sufficiently different from human that Milk of the Poppy might not work.

Of course, with 10 Endurance, even 3 or 4 wounds would easily be healed after a week or two of even moderate activity... so as long as you aren't fighting more than one massive and/or well trained army a month, there's little to no risk.

[Gwyneth Drakeson]

And yet, and yet...that provides a window of opportunity, yes?

[Theomore Tullison]

And yet, and yet...that provides a window of opportunity, yes?

That's the sort of thinking I can get behind

[Loreia]

Arrow-fire and shots from a scorpion could force a dragon to land, if we're allowed rolling to call aimed shots to cripple it. Even on the ground though, troops must be wary and always flank it. But they should know that some of them may not be returning home alive, and will be going out in a literal blaze of glory.

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