Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate III by Larian Studios - it's turn-based and isometric, folks

Yep. pick a grenade or a fireball depending the RPG setting. If it can down a group of low level enemies, it felt powerful. If it can only deal 5% of enemy damage, it doesn't feel powerful. That is my problem with PoE. Having 4 casts per rest of Wail of the Banshee is ok, having 4 casts per rest of a non lethal spell is not ok.On D&D, a squad of peasants armed with crossbows can kill a mid level barbarian in one round if the barb is taken by surprise. Combat felt way more lethal. Mainly on 2e where you have way less hp gain past lv 10.

 

Nothing surprises barbarians anymore. Civilized people are capable of any skulduggery.

 

I an not joking. a mid level barb(8) has like 48 to 96 hp on 3.5e depending on the rolls. 8 Peasant crossbowman with heavy crossbows can deal each one d10 damage or 8d10 in total. This not considering poison.. Of course, if not taken by surprise, the barb can kill then easily without even raging.

 

8 peasants would only have about a 5% change to hit a level 8 Barbarian (because AC and Uncanny Dodge), meaning that there is about a 40% chance of even 1 bolt hitting the barb in the first place. After which, the surprise round is over. So, no.

 

I was talking about the barb unarmored and taken by surprise and of course, they hitting. But my point is : I like when you can kill and die fast. Bullet sponge enemies are a huge problem on turn based or real time.

Also, can take out and is likely to take out are two different things. A lv 1 wizard with a finger of death scroll can take out a adult red dragon in one round but is extremely unlike that the dragon will fail his FORT save on 3.5e...

 

He definitely can, but let's see how likely that is. The wizard needs to succeed X separate rolls:
1 - the wizard needs to make a caster level check (with DC 14) to activate the scroll, because his caster level (1) is lower than the minimum required to cast Finger of Death (13);
2 - the wizard needs to overcome the dragon's spell resistance, so that's another caster level check (this time with DC 21);
3 - the dragon needs to fail his fortitude saving throw (he has a +18 bonus and the DC for the scroll is 20).

Since we are talking about our average adventurer, it's reasonable to take the elite array for his abilities (15 14 13 12 10 8). To even try to activate the scroll we need at least Intelligence 17, so we must put 15 into Intelligence AND pick a race with a bonus to that stat (like the gray elf). We can pick a feat and, since our main obstacle is the dragon's spell resistance, we are going with Spell Penetration.

Let's calculate our chances:
- since our caster level is 1, we need to roll at least 13 to activate the scroll (thats 8/20 possibilities);
- to the caster level check to overcome the spell resistance we have a +3 bonus, so we need to roll at least 18 (that's 3/20 possibilities);
- to fail its save, the dragon has to roll 2 or lower (so that's 2/20 possibilities).

To calculate our chances, all these events need to happen at the same time, so that's 8/20 * 3/20 * 2/20 = 48/8000 = 3/500 possibilities. In conclusion, we just need to find around 200 brave level 1 wizards and equip them with 200 scrolls (2,275 gp each) and we can reasonably expect to take down the dragon.
So much for the winged menace.

Of course, we also need a way to reach the dragon and attack him before e breathes, but that's another story.

 

How dare you! Wizards are uber powerful! How dare you say they won't win? Playing a Wizard is an automatic "I win!" button!
I am dramaqueen and I scream out this statement! REEEEEE!!!!!

 

That's not true. You can fail all rolls for all mages or succeed at the first try (first mage). Just because you have 50% at something it doesn't mean you will get 1 success and 1 failure. It's all random.

 

That's why I said "reasonably expect" and not "be absolutely sure". That 3/500 is the probability of hitting al three rolls correctly and it means that 1 in 167 times you can expect to succeed all three rolls. Obviously it doesn't mean that if you have 167 mages you will CERTAINLY kill the dragon.

 

Binomial probabilities don't work like this, it's around 28% for the barb to be hit in any round.

 

I imagined 167 mages preparing for battle with dragon and then one of them says: "I know it probably will be overkill guys, but maybe we should round up our numbers? Let's say find 33 more our brethren and then will try to kill dragon?"
*After spending some time on search*
"Damn it, we found 11 more than we planned, but we can't ditch them for round numbers. I guess it's 250 then"
After some time later, dragon saw in sheer horror how 10,000 mages approach his cave with murderous intentions.

 

And that's what I find unreasonable. Always expect to fail and have a backup plan. When you actually succeed at something, treat it as a nice surprise.

 

I mean, with 200 wizards you should be pretty confident. The probability of the dragon surviving is not that high, because the probability of a wizard missing is 497/500 = 0.994 so the probability of 200 wizards missing is (497/500)^200 = 0.3. With a 70% on your side you need to be quite pessimistic to not go for it.
With 250 wizards, you reach > 75%.
With 1,000, you reach the > 99% zone.
With 10,000 wizards, you can expect to eradicate the entire dragon's lineage.

FR population is around 70.000.000 and the percentage of magic users should be around 1%, so we have to potential for an army of 700.000 casters. How the fuck have dragons survived this long.

 

How many scrolls of finger of death exists?

 

Finger of Death is a 7th circle spell, finding enough mages to industrially create scrolls of it doesn't sound like an easy task. I think people have a skewed understanding of D&D levels at this point. The vast majority of mages aren't experienced enough to have access to the 7th circle. And the dragon has a higher initiative than a lvl 1 wizard, so they are going to be able to breath first almost always.

 

Of course, and the reason is “the blog” TM we must delete any mention of that thing from this site.

 

It's probably easier to feed the dragon lethally terrible cuisine or something instead of rounding up all those wizards.

 

Yeah, the scrolls production represents a relevant bottleneck for the plan, but I guess humans would be able to find a way to mass produce them in order to exterminate a dangerous race.

Scribing a single scroll costs 1,135 gp and requires 3 days. So, assuming an endless reserve of gold, a single level 13 wizard can produce 121 scrolls each year. But he can't keep doing this every year, because he also needs 91 experience points per scroll (11.011 experience points per year). This means he has to kill 11 monsters with CR 10 (a fire giant, an eleven-headed hydra, a guardian naga, a rakshasa or a juvenile red dragon) for each year of production. Now, to lift the "endless reserve of gold" constraint I should open my old FR handbooks and search for some clue on how much money we can expect a small/medium kingdom to spend on this project, but even if I have a lot of time on my hands right now, I don't have THAT much.

A red dragon has +0 to initiative, so we can expect the wizards to beat him (not all of them, sure, so we need to take that into account). He can cast Nerveskitter, but so can the wizards.

Finger of Death is also a very inefficient way of doing this, since a Shivering Touch should be enough (it completely disables the dragon for 3 rounds and has no save) and it costs a lot less (only 187 gp, 1 day to scribe).

I mean, I'm not arguing that all dragons should be dead by now, but their existence sounds like a shady conspiracy and it surely raises some questions.

 

There are also the political aspects to consider. Not all countries/kingdoms are going to be for the eradication of the dragons, so when one of them starts massing scrolls of finger of death it might mean all-out war, especially since those fingers of death can be used for other purposes.

 

Yeah, first we build the Realms Union, then we fight those fucking dragons

 

Finger of Death also does damage (3d6) on a failed save, so if enough mages succeed at casting the spell the dragon is going to die either way. Even a Great Wyrm only has around 540 hp.

 

It'd say that it's unlikely to happen, because you can't expect people to unite on such a scale to get that kind of task done, on top of the usual human inefficiency. Also, statistics don't take logistics into the account. And there is a psychological factor to consider (are we really expecting MAGES to put their lives on the line just like that?).

 

Even within D&D rules, how many ranged attackers with enchanted projectiles would it take to successfully hit once or twice and deal 1 damage each before a dragon is dead? Probably one or two orders of magnitude fewer than what random European shitholes could muster to wage wars for much less legitimate justifications than a potential existential threat sitting on a fat pile of gold, that's for sure.

Even more, dragons are usually felled by parties of 3 to 8 high-level assholes who are only after money and glory. In our world people do tons of boring and dangerous shit their entire life simply because it is the job they are good at; all you need is a handful of such parties to tackle dragon-killing full-time and I doubt you will lack applicants once a concerned king offers a lifetime of gold and underage hookers for the job. In a world where most estimates put the number of dragons in the few hundreds (not all of these dragons being equally dangerous or even adults), the dragons would be purged in a couple of decades.

Sure dragons are fearsome in person, they sometimes possess human-like intelligence and have terrifying powers, but their solitary nature is their downfall. If you are an animal and a human collective has decided that you should die, you're fucked. Humans routinely eradicate entire ecosystems accidentally, indeed have been doing so ever since they realized that sticks can be sharpened to poke at things from afar (remember it didn't take guns and armies to eradicate the mammoths), they ravage entire nations for fun and fuck up their economy to wage total war out of spite, so I get a good laugh each time individual animals are presented as a credible threat.

In real life, megafauna might survive by doing their best to leave us alone and even then they usually die anyway because we kill them just in case, or for sports: almost all animals fear humans because animals that don't fear us are all dead. Some dragons are retarded enough to go out of their way to pick a fight with humans, so combined with the damage they might do when they chimp out that would definitely mark them as a hostile race to be exterminated as soon as feasible. We almost eradicated wolves because they chomped on a few sheep, what do you think we're gonna do to a race of literal citybusters who are deliberately hostile to us?

Very few non-D&D settings taking place in more advanced settings still feature dragons, so we all take for granted that dragons were exterminated at some point; settings like D&D are explicitely taking place at "that time" when there were still some megafauna around, on top of all the other theme park fantasy that makes no sense. It's fantasy, just roll with it.

Real life is boring, we are superpredators with no real competition except ourselves. Of fucking course dragons should be a joke to us.

 

You are trying to talk sense and real life to a bunch of dramaqueens who cry about how things are not realistic in a fantasy game while they play a wizard who hurls fireballs made of bat guano. The only correct reaction to these dramaqueens when they rear ugly their heads is total, utter, unending contempt laced with a liberal dose of sarcasm.

 

FAntasy games NEEDS to have inner consistency. If the fireball in the question dealt COLD damage, it would make no sense. If on Dark Sun, clerics works like on Faerun, it would't make any sense.

Read about sanderson's law of magic