Saturday Morning Gaming: Killing a White Dragon

We had one of the big culminations of a storyline the other night. We’re doing the Tyranny of Dragons storyline and we hit one of the climaxes of Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

Specifically, our group went up against The White Dragon Glazhael. Now, the last time I fought a dragon as part of my gaming group, I was probably in 10th Grade. Which means that we were still in the middle of 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition was a little more than a decade away.

The main thing I remembered from the 1989 fight was claw/claw/bite, tail sweep, and breath weapon. We won but lost half of our party, if I remember correctly. Red Dragons, man. I played a wizard. My wizard was one of the unlucky half. I got him with a couple of good spells, of course… but 2nd Edition wizards were glass cannons.

Remember the Dragonlance books? Well, we were still reeling from the original Twins trilogy following up the original Seasons trilogy. There was never a better time to be 15 years old playing D&D.

Or so I thought.

35 years later, I found myself sitting at the table going up against a dragon that breathed ice instead of fire and I was playing a cleric instead of a wizard.

We had to deal with stuff that didn’t exist back in 2nd Edition: Legendary Actions. These are little tricks that the various monsters can do in response to something that the players do on their own turn. For example, if your Ranger shoots a hail of thorns arrow at the dragon, the dragon can rear back and, with a mighty roar, flap its wings and screw up one of your Ranger’s best attacks.

Wanna hit the dragon in the butt and avoid not only its breath attack but claw/claw/bite? Well, now it has tail swish. It’s a lot worse than it sounds. It knocks you down. So then you gotta get up.

All in all, the dragon is a major pain in the bee-you-tea-tea.

Luckily, I had the best night of D&D in my life.

First off, we had the Rogue pretending to be the Evil Captain taking the dragon’s tribute down to the lair and the rest of the team were “the prisoners” who were carrying it for him. We got stopped by some guards who asked what the heck is going on and the Rogue did a good job of screwing up the persuasion roll. The DM threw us a bone and, instead of immediately attacking us, said that if the prisoners could get 20 on a persuasion check, we could convince the guards.

I rolled a nat 20. WOOOOO!!!!!

We got down to the dragon and, lemme tell ya, the ice weapon is no joke. The DM had one of the best rolls of his life and rolled 50-something on his breath weapon roll (and 12d6 can’t get higher than a 72). Well, I was left with a thimbleful of hit points because I screwed up my save throw. So I hit it with a 4rd level Guiding Bolt and rolled 3 6s, 1 5, and 2 4s. The fight continued, a claw/claw/bite left me unconscious but I had a single healing potion on my belt. The other party members were running around, doing damage here and there (the sorcerer got off a fireball), one of the others got me my healing potion and I spent the next few turns casting healing word on this or that fallen comrade and we whittled and whittled and whittled away (quite regularly being knocked out) until we reached the point where the dragon hissed at us and started running away to escape and I threw my Dwarven Thrower and rolled, like, EIGHTEEN DAMAGE.

Which was enough.

Then the guards came in and attacked us and we all had, like, only a few HP each but the guards were all level one weenies and so we managed to take them out quite handily. Like, we were surprised that we’d hit with a 13 or kill them after only doing 12 points of damage.

Most of the hoard was under ice but… hey. That’s my first dragon since the 80s. And it might have been the best night of D&D in my whole life.

You should start a gaming group. It’s awesome.

(Featured image is a DALL-E generated picture of a White Dragon breathing ice. I would have *LOVED* to have DALL-E back in the 80s.)