This time, I'll be relating the tale of how one of my campaigns was brought to a close through a dragon encounter, and telling of the many things I learned before and during the event. Like most stories about dragon fights, this is a long one, so sit back and enjoy.

DOMINATION AND DRAGONS

Three weeks ago, our party finished a dungeon. We received a crapton of loot and money for doing it, ad we were in very high spirits. Two characters went into happy retirement (well, it may not have exactly been happy at the time, but they did have 'good' endings despite their hardships), and the group was told in no uncertain terms that their next task would be to slay a dragon.

From a character-survival perspective, I was all against this, because dragons are serious business. They have very good stats, impeccable strategy, virtually limitless resources, and as soon as they expose a flaw in your plan, you're dead. But then again, how many players have had a chance to take on a dragon in a straight-up fight? People talk about them all the time, but not many players reach the level or play the campaign in such a way that you can prepare to fight a dragon. So from that perspective, I was all for the encounter. I had never before fought a dragon in a tabletop game (Neverwinter Nights doesn't count), so I jumped into this with gusto.

The party had about 40k gold each to spend preparing for the fight. We knew the thing was a blue dragon, and that it was ruling a small-medium size desert town. We were tasked with going there, finding the dragon's lair, killing it, then bringing back its head. The session then closed, and we had a full two weeks to prepare for the fight - time for us to discuss strategy, do shopping for gear, etc. I opened up a Google Doc immediately for us to share ideas and come up with a plan. Over the next two weeks, I gathered as much information as I could about dragons, and ultimately ended up contributing 97% of the content in our planning page (totaled about 8 single-spaced pages). That should've tipped me off for how this would go, but I still had hope. If you guys would like me to summarize my findings in a separate journal, I can do that, but otherwise I'll just go on with the story.

We finished our shopping and traveled to the desert town. The town had no idea that it was being run by a dragon, and the dragon could have informants everywhere. We had to play it cool. Being the bard, I immediately started playing music and talking up the locals in a tavern, asking for local events, tales, and not drawing suspicion. We got some decent information from that - that some merchant had sighted a dragon recently, and where we could find a good store for high-end food products (I figured that a dragon would want luxury foods, the kind of stuff that it couldn't just find out in the desert, so by finding his source, we could track him down). We slept without incident, and the next morning split up to gather clues. I know, splitting the party is usually a terrible idea, but we figured that we hadn't aroused suspicion yet, and each of our guys individually could handle the usual stuff around town. I thought that it went without saying that we wouldn't go after the dragon on our own. I was wrong.

The party's new wizard and I followed up on the luxury foods idea. We didn't get much info from that place, but we did find out about a local butcher. Figuring that our investigation would take a little while, we resolved to follow up with the butcher the next day, and to wait for the rest of the party at the tavern. The golem barbarian didn't find much and returned to the tavern as well. However, our samurai and monk found something. They found an imp that had been hired to collect dragon parts for his master. The imp and the two party members (samurai and monk) reached an understanding and then departed. The monk returned to the tavern while the samurai investigated one more lead - a goatherd that had apparently seen the dragon.

The samurai successfully convinced the goatherd to take him to the entrance to the dragon's lair. The goatherd asked "Shall we go now then?" The correct response to this would have been "Not yet, let me gather my party before venturing forth." Instead, he said, "Sure, let's go right now." The DM takes him into a private call, and we know it's bad news. We then see a Will save or two appear and collectively groan. By the time the character gets back to the tavern, it's night time, and we're wondering where he's been all day. We immediately know that something's up.

Now I've mentioned this before, but how these games work is through a system called Roll20. It's an online virtual tabletop platform that we use for maps, tokens, dice, and the like. We then have our conversations through a group Skype call. As soon as we ask the samurai where he's been, he responds, in a robotic monotone, that he's fine, and that he's located the entrance to the dragon's lair. It takes us all of about 5 seconds to determine that he's been dominated. However, in-character, our characters don't know this - they didn't roll high enough on their Sense Motive tests to figure it out (by the rules as written, they had succeeded, but the DM figured that, since this is an ancient Blue Dragon, it's had a few centuries to perfect its use of the dominate spell. That makes sense, plus there's the fact that dragons just get to break the rules now and then, so it's all good). But here we have a problem - our characters don't know he's dominated (one guy has a suspicion, but that's it), but out of character, we know for sure that he's dominated. So now we're all going back and forth trying to think of ways for us to tell if he's dominated while remaining in-character. Both the players and the DM realize that this is going to take all night and that it will eventually devolve into a lot of complaining and debating, so we just resolve it with a simple d100 roll. We succeed on the roll and our characters suspect that he's been dominated. The dragon swiftly realizes this, so he has his samurai leave the tavern to go back to the lair. No one is really willing to detain him, so he heads out, and the monk goes after him.

The monk finally confirms that he's been dominated when the two fight. A monk vs. samurai duel. This would have been awesome....except that it only lasted a single round. The monk won initiative, delivered a powerful flurry of blows, and brought the samurai down to less than half health. The samurai responded with an iaijutsu strike....which critically hit. He did enough damage to kill the monk instantly, so that was that. The rest of us hadn't followed them, so we had no idea what happened to the monk, or the samurai. We just knew that they were both gone. It was now 3/5 players against the dragon and 1 player.

Unfortunately, the monk never told us about the imp, and the samurai had never given us good directions to the dragon's lair. So all we had left was my plan of tracking him down via the butcher shop. Turns out, I was right. We had our golem hide under a box like Solid Snake to stake out the butcher shop. That very night, he saw a man leave with several animals and head out into the desert. We followed him and saw the landmarks that the samurai had mentioned about the dragon's lair. Knowing that this was the place, we start casting our buffs and summon some help. No sooner do we finish than the dragon emerges and charges at us. He had prepared well, and we take a decent chunk of HP damage right off the bat. With the dragon are three helpers - the samurai, the imp (turns it that was the dragon's familiar), and a Glabrezu that he had bound. With our buffed up barbarian, we managed to kill the samurai in just two hits. We then realize that we had made two mistakes. The first was forgetting true seeing. I had made a note of this in our planning document, but I had already spent all my money on gear - I was relying on someone else to purchase scrolls for it. Second was that after killing the samurai, the barbarian's remaining attacks went at the dragon instead of its imp. The dragon had Blur and Mirror Image, so we had a very tiny chance of actually hitting him. The imp, however, had no such defenses, but, like most familiars, we ignored it in favor of its master.

We regretted that immediately, as the imp hit the barbarian with Greater Dispel. With the monk and samurai gone, the barbarian was our only capable damage dealer. But after getting hit by a greater dispel, he lost most of his good buffs, including Form of the Dragon 3. The wizard may have been able to do something, but his most damaging spell was a maximized fireball, and the dragon had very solid spell defenses. At this point, I had no choice but to try our secret weapon, a bag containing Dust of Choking and Sneezing. This powerful cursed item causes everyone within 20ft of the user to roll a DC 15 fortitude save or take 3d6 Con damage. Now, at our levels, that kind of save is fairly easy, but here's the real danger: even on a successful save, the victims are stunned for 5d4 rounds! Now, the DM had not considered this item. I had asked him about purposely crafting cursed items, linked him the page containing all of the specific cursed items, and he gave the nod that we could do it. After reading the description, he wanted to allow for a fortitude save against the stunning effect. We ultimately decided that it was fair, because otherwise this thing really was just an "I win" button. Although the save was suitably high, the dragon made it, and I knew we were done.

I immediately suggested that we just call it then and there, since we no longer had any way of killing this thing. The others said that they'd see it through to the bitter end. While they were discussing that, I managed to find an escape route for us. We got far enough from the dragon and had our Astral Deva plane shift us away, eventually ending up in Sigil. The dragon didn't have a plane shift ready, and couldn't tell where we had gone even if he did. We had survived with no casualties (in the fight itself, the samurai and monk were already gone).


Lessons Learned

Dragon fights are team efforts. No question about it. You really need to work with your team and communicate with them in order to have a chance. If you have teammates who don't usually communicate or don't do much planning with the group, the burden is on you to pull them in, if only for this fight. Here are the situations where the whole thing turned south for us:

1) Lack of group planning - during the preparation period, very few people contributed to my planning page. For the most part, people were going to do their own thing, buy their own gear, and just treat this like any other fight. Going into a dragon fight with that attitude is just asking to die. Furthermore, the point of group planning is to make sure everyone knows the plan, so that if the party is separated, or if someone forgets something, you have the rest of the team to pick up the slack or remind them. This became painfully obvious when I forgot about True Seeing, assuming that someone else had picked it up. I should've double checked it before we set out, but I had been considering so many other things that it didn't occur to me. Had we a proper group effort, I feel that someone else would have caught that problem.

2) Splitting the party - I had a feeling we were dead as soon as the samurai went off to find the dragon on his own. We had previously maintained a "never split the party" attitude, but figured that simple information-gathering would be okay. He absolutely should have known better than to go towards the dragon's lair on his own.

3) Failing to kill the familiar - I'm not an expert on familiars. I know what they're capable of in general, but I don't know the full extent of their abilities. I did not plan for the dragon's familiar being able to hit us with greater dispel. I feel that with a proper group effort (as some players are more familiar with certain rules than I), we could have thought of this, and targeted his familiar right away. This may have prevented the dispel, and allowed us a decent shot at the dragon with our buffed up barbarian.

4) The dice - This isn't anyone's fault, but we just had a lot of bad rolls this session. The greater dispel could've failed entirely, the dragon could have failed its save against the dust, the samurai may not have landed a crit and killed the monk instantly....there were a lot of times where the dice just did not go our way. But you can't plan for that, you just have to work around it.

I've learned that when it comes to high level content (and you may want to consider these in lower level content too, if your character is genre savvy), you really need step it up with the group planning. You may be hesitant to pick up teamwork feats because they interfere with your build, but look at them. If it makes you and your buddy work much better together, do it. You also need to talk to each other about your builds. If you're familiar with wizards, talk with your team's wizard. See what spells he has, and what his usual plan will be for combat against various foes. Give him suggestions, or point out the flaws in his plan. You may also want to prepare for domination spells. A pretty easy way to beat them is to just come up with a code phrase unique to each party member. Something simple and innocuous, like "Remember what we had for dinner at the Beggar's Rest?" "No, but the bard was wearing most of it by the end of the night." Or, you could come up with a puzzle, like upon hearing a code phrase, only responding in single-syllable words. In case you have a dominated party member, they wouldn't be able to respond properly. Just do that every night before bed, and you can guarantee domination won't be a problem (unless it's done by another party member, but you've got much bigger problems if that's the case).

Speaking of domination, you really need to be careful when doing it against a player. Keep in mind that (in most cases) they don't want to be dominated, and they want their party to free them. So they will be trying to drop subtle hints that things aren't what they seem to be. Sometimes, like with the robotic monotone, it's not so subtle. If you don't think the player can pull it off, then it's probably not going to go well at all without extraordinary measures, like having the player leave the room and take over for them, or saying that their microphone broke, so they have to type everything. Either way, you really have to prep the dominated player to be sure they'll pull it off right.

I honestly did not expect us to win the dragon fight, no matter how much preparation we did. This was (for most of us) our first dragon fight, and (for a few of us) our first high-level fight. The very fact that we tracked the dragon, engaged it, did decent damage to it, and escaped with no casualties, is a major victory to me. After our surviving party members escaped to Sigil, we called the campaign there. Our group had no intention of returning to the normal world, and my bard in particular would have felt completely at home in Sigil. Everyone was also looking forward to the next campaign (which starts today), so I think we were about ready to let this thing go. A skirmish with a dragon and then a planar journey to Sigil is probably the best end we could have hoped for.