Dragons are the absolute staple monster in Dungeons and Dragons (hell, it’s even in the name). 4th Edition did a great job of breaking these beasts out from the rest of the pack with the concept of “solo” creatures.At level 11 and above, however, dragons become less and less dangerous by themselves compared to the great power PCs wield at paragon and above.
Today we’re going to look at some alternate or additional powers you can use to build powerhouse dragons that keep the threat high and put the fear of the Red Ancient Wyrm back into your PCs.
Ranged Breath Weapon
The breath weapon is the iconic attack of all dragons. Unfortunately, it is often only manifested with a close blast 5 attack. This isn’t bad, but it takes a bit too much threat off of the ranged-attackers. Consider adding a ranged breath attack that shares the same recharge as the main breath weapon. The flavor for this sort of attack is the fireball breath rather than the cone of flame. Some dragons might even take flight and drop one of these on the party as it soars overhead. Here’s an example for an adult red dragon.
Ranged Breath Weapon (standard, recharge 
, this shares the same recharge as Breath Weapon) 
Fire
Area burst 2 within 10; 2d12+6 fire damage. Miss: Half damage.
This attack gives the dragon more options to put the heat (pun intended) on all the characters in the battle instead of only the front line.
Multiple Turns Per Round
Some solo monsters in D&D are given multiple turns per around on different initiatives. For some powerful dragons, consider using this same feature. Here’s an example power:
Frenzy
The dragon acts two times in a round, on initiative counts 20 and 10. It cannot delay or ready actions. On each turn, it has a standard and move action instead of its normal allotment of actions. It can use one immediate action between each pair of turns.
Now your dragon has a lot more mobility and is a lot more active in the battle than it typically would be.
Shake Off Marks
Marks are the bane of solo creatures. A single fighter or paladin has the ability to completely tie down a single solo creature with a well placed and well maintained mark. One way to help control this is to give powerful dragons a chance to shake off these marks. Here’s a sample power:
Refocus (Free action, Recharge 5,6)
The dragon removes any existing marks.
With that, a dragon can occasionally shake off marks before it performs a big and powerful series of attacks.
Give Dragons the Heroslayer Power
The “Heroslayer” power is another great way to counteract marks. Consider giving certain dragons the following power:
Heroslayer
While this dragon is marked, it gains a +2 bonus to attack rolls and a +5 (or +10 if it’s a level 21+ monster) bonus to damage rolls against the creature that marked it.
This gives your defending PCs pause when they place or keep marks on this powerhouse dragon. Now the decision is up to them. This works a lot better than simply making a dragon immune to marks.
Prevent Lock-Down
There’s little more frustrating to a DM than to watch a powerful boss creature become locked-down with a series of stuns and dazes. While a stun is well balanced against a single creature, a stunned dragon is the equivalent of stunning five creatures at once. At the higher tiers of play, it is very possible to stun and daze a dragon every round until it is dead. To prevent this, consider the following power:
Heroic Will
When stunned or dazed, the dragon instead loses its next standard action and grants combat advantage.
This prevents your fancy solo dragon from being pinned down with stuns and dazes the entire fight but still gives players a benefit for having stunned and dazed it.
Add Damage
Sometimes you might feel like your battle is dragging on and your dragon is no longer a real threat to the party. Consider boosting the dragon’s damage when it becomes bloodied with the following power:
Bloodied Rage
When bloodied, this dragon adds +1/2 level to damage.
This is a great way to ensure your dragon’s damage scales way up when it becomes bloodied. If this seems like too much damage, you might instead add +1d damage on all attacks. At paragon and above, most parties have lots of ways to mitigate damage. This power insures that the battle becomes significantly more dangerous later on in the fight.
Not For Everyone
It is important to remember that these alternate powers are not for all groups. Some groups will have a hard enough time fighting a dragon without powering up the dragon like this. Some groups, however, have so many ways to mitigate damage and lock up solos that these tools may become necessary. For them, dragons no longer appear as much of a threat. Give these powers a try and put the fear of dragons back into your game.
Great post, my players are going to hate you for this, this kind of thinking can also be used to enhance other solo’s with appropriate abilities.
Also don’t underestimate what can be achieved by adding traps and scripted events to break up a solo fight into several encounters.
It’s funny, I just ran a Dragon Encounter with my group last night.
They are still in the heroic tier, so I didn’t have to worry about things like the stuns and such, but even at heroic all it took was one “Lead The Attack” from the Warlord and everybody had +5 to attacks against the dragon for the whole encounter.
I actually changed my Dragon Solo a lot beforehand, Instead of just having a flat out normal Dragon Solo I customised mine so it had four “phases”.
Each phase gave the Dragon a different role and powers. So the first phase was a basic tank and spank with the Dragon’s normal abilities, phase 2 he flew into the air, summoned some fiery minions and used area effects, phase 3 he was using flyby attacks and grabbing PCs and phase 4 he was all out damage on the ground.
It was really fun to run as a DM and I think my players really enjoyed the variety.
I changed mine because he was supposed to be a big plot badguy and I didn’t want him to just be a normal Dragon. Still, it’s definitely something I’m going to do again in the future and when my group get into Paragorn I’ll keep a few of these things in mind.
Cheers dude.
I love 4e’s treatment of dragons – unlike Third Edition’s unwieldy creations they’re actually playable and fun to run
This post takes that, and ramps up the awesome. Great work! Bookmark’d.
How would you adjust the Dragon’s XP when you add some of these powers? I think that if I add in some of these powers, my players should be rewarded for facing a greater challenge.
An extra creature’s worth of experience points at that level is probably a boost. I play EXP mostly by ear already, ensuring PCs level every six to ten battles or so, so I don’t worry about it too much.
Good stuff. And timely. I’ve got a dragon on the menu Friday night.
Very good post, lots of neat ideas.
I ran my group through an aerial dragon fight a few days ago. The characters, each mounted on a griffon, took on a dracolich in the air. I tweaked the monster (wish I had thought of some of these ideas mentioned in this blog!). It was a great deal of fun for all, and the fight lasted just long enough and felt dangerous enough without ever becoming a foregone conclusion or a grind.
The new templates for Solo and Elite monsters in the DMG2 are great for Dragon encounters. If anyone has not had a chance to see it yet, check it out- it will spare your PCs a dull encounter. Mike, your article is great!
I like the ideas here, I still struggle with the idea that it is hard to make a single villain that can challenge a party in 4e. I don’t want to rob the players of their cool toys, but they have so many that any solo can feel weak at times. Great ideas here to pull some of that back.
Great article Mike.
When trying to empower a dragon, I use these simple tricks:
- Give them an extra standard action. This makes the dragon more versatile, and consistently ups its damage per turn. This is advice from the DMG 1. This method has the advantage of letting you use the dragon as is, without changing the statblock. A variant of this is giving the extra standard action only while bloodied.
- Give the dragon a minor action attack that does less damage than its claws but creates an effect, such as pushing away that pesky defender. It can be a wing or tail slam, for example.
- change the breath weapon recharge to 4,5,6. More than once I have ended using breath only twice during an encounter.
- Change the double attack so the dragon can make a bite attack in addition to the claws. In my experience, I have rarely used the bite because attacking twice is always better, and opportunity attacks are not that common.
- When bloodied, give it an action point.
The best way (IMHO) to create an interesting encounter with a dragon is to customize it to your needs.
Great article! The iconic dragons have always been there and at some level become so “Blah!” to the powerful party of adventurers….your post shows great ways to re-direct the dragon into a great challenge!
I think something like this would make a great add to a future Monster Manual for an easy up to dragon entries…perhaps 4 each entries for heroic, paragon and epic or link them to (…”is more commonly found among blue, red, and silver dragons”)
I could see this easily being applied to giants, demons, and devils….but dragons really need something like this as a good option!
I applaud your efforts and great thinking!!!
Where in the DMG1 does it talk about giving creatures an extra standard action? I must have missed it but it’s a great tip and very simple to add in.
I love this post! Dragons are truly iconic creatures, so I’m up for anything that can make them more deadly. They deserve it. And I give kudos to Mark/Anlath for playing dragons, IMHO, the way they should be played. As a rule, a dragon encounter should never be ordinary or lackluster.
You can find it on page 185 of the DMG1, bottom page, right columm.
On the same page you can find also advice on elites (giving them an additional attack).
As I said, for me it has worked great.
I’m looking at reactive strikes when the dragon is stunned/dazed. You daze the dragon, you get a free back hand.
Also, I am looking at ways to draw the characters in closer. Any ranged character is going to sit outside the aura zone of the dragon and plink away. Fine for the party, but bad for the dragon (who is supposed to threaten the entire party).
So the following concept: Imagine a hurricane of fire around the dragon with a relative calm immediately about the dragon. Use both auras in conjunction.
Firestorm
Aura 10
Any creature in the aura takes 5 fire damage (adjust by tier)
Eye of the Storm
Aura 5
Any creature in the aura in not affected by firestorm. Eye of the storm must be active if Firestorm is active.
Really great article. I love customizing my monsters to unique needs, and this post has some great ideas! Much appreciated.
Another important thing to remember about solo encounters is that the solo does not have to be the only enemy on the board. On its own a solo, even a higher level solo, tends to get stunlocked, debufffed, marked, cursed, quarried, oathed, etc, becuase its drawing all the fire from every character. Rather than a level +3 solo by itself, a good boss fight is an even level solo with some minions and guards, enough to pull the encounter back to that level +3 range. Things get much more challenging when the defenders have to choose between tanking the dragon and pulling the lurker off the squishies, or the strikers have to choose between focus fire on the dragon or trying to take out some skirmishers/artillery that are scoring serious damage. Tactical comlpexity grows as you add more enemies to the board.
Amazing stuff I am definitely stealing this for my future dragon encounters… or even solo encounters.