Does anyone here have any opinions or anecdotes about the 2nd edition Council of Wyrms setting or the idea of PC dragons in general?
Most people I've talked to about that setting IRL describe great excitement that petered out instantly when trying to think of what to do in an actual session. The power of at-will flight combined with breath weapons seemed to be an especially thorny issue.
I like the idea of playing dragons, but often not in the ways they get written up. There are many many ways to define dragons.
I enjoyed playing the "choose your own adventure" style app/computer game Choice Of Dragons once, but then I tried a second session and it had me start out earlier and I realized it was a forced branching story that had creative descriptions that would tend to happen the same way if you made the same choices, so I lost interest and stopped playing.
GURPS Dragons is full of fairly well-defined options on how to define and play with dragons, and could be adapted to other game systems.
Personally I find it interesting when dragons are very smart and have freedom of action, so having dragon PCs can be quite interesting for a sandbox sim type of game that I like, and an exercise in extreme GM surrender to letting the PCs be very powerful and mess with the world. However it can be not so easy to run multiple PC dragons due to their speed/power/freedom if you want time/space consistency and want to keep all the players having something to do. Also, something I've found about dragons in the systems I've played is that they seem to either wipe out and rout their foes, or get suddenly killed off, even sometimes by random scrubs. In TFT & GURPS strength tends to lie in numbers, so cornering a dragon with a bunch of fighters, or hitting them with a strong missile volley, and/or managing to cripple a wing, can end a dragon. Which is part of why I like them to be very smart and clever and survival-oriented, so that their main strength and danger is about how careful and smart they are rather than brute strength. When dragons are allowed to be wizards, that can become even more true and extreme.
Never played or ran Council of Worms, but I have run many sessions of one of my own games which allows dragon PCs. I had a great time running it, and the players didn't have any problems figuring out what they wanted to do.
Haven't done it. Seems like it could be fun in a political backstabby way. Game of Thrones but the dragons are running things.
What I found was frustration at the growth of a PC dragon among players. (If I remember correctly) The Dragons got different powers as they leveled up (I can't remember the "How"), and the limited power made it easy for an NPC dragon to take out a party playing dragons.
It was fun after a few home rules...
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937464Does anyone here have any opinions or anecdotes about the 2nd edition Council of Wyrms setting or the idea of PC dragons in general?
Most people I've talked to about that setting IRL describe great excitement that petered out instantly when trying to think of what to do in an actual session. The power of at-will flight combined with breath weapons seemed to be an especially thorny issue.
1: CoW worked because it was themed around the dragons and their generational minions. It tends to NOT work outside such restricted settings due to the disparity of power levels unless you are willing to really tone down the dragons or everyone else is on a comprable scale. CoW set down rules and limitations that worked within that particular setting. Its akin to playing BECMI at the I stage. You have to gear the adventures and the dragons are adventuring with to fit.
Example in 5e a Brass Dragon Wyrmling is CR 1. About equivalent to a 1st level PC. While a Young Bronze is CR 8 is able to take on a party of four 2nd level PCs and ding them up but probably not win. Or think of a Dragon PC as a Druids wildshape and how even low level CRs can be strong in one situation and DOA in another.
2: I GMed it for about a year and it worked pretty damn well. You just need to give the players some incentives to get out and do stuff and interact with the setting and NPCs. About the same problems of any RPG except here its a different level of power. There was ALOT of political intrigue going on between the PC dragons and the dragon NPCs and oddly enough the players hardly ever used their NPC minions other than the occasional locale they couldnt fit. Or just keeping tabs on each generation as time skipped forward. Alot of the conflict came from dealing with the giants and other dragon scale threats.
Thinking about stories I've heard some more, I notice that one issue is the way GMs feel the need to simply crank up the overall threat level of campaign enemies and NPCs so players rarely get the "fantasy Godzilla but with banter" vibe that the premise promises*.
Player: Cool, my dragon PC is going to battle entire units of soldiers alone and be a feared and sometimes tragically misunderstood badass!
GM: Alright, now that we're done curb stomping the duke's men in session one, here come your actual opponents: demigod illithids. Here's the oversized dungeon you'll be assaulting between sessions of socially interacting with nothing but stronger dragons.
If this is a problem, the solution might be ensuring swarms of humanoids and their grounded machinations stay a legitimate threat/interest throughout a campaign. This would require the setting to truly adapt to the threat of frequent dragon involvement: Lots of highly skilled archers, ballistae ammunition designed to work as anti-aircraft measures, wing-snaring nets and glue, fortresses designed against aerial assault, armor that provides some (but not total) breath attack protection for special elites, weaker flying mounts that allow pursuit and dogfights (pegasus, giant eagle, whatever), melee weapons designed to punch through scales, tactics for luring dragons into confined spaces, teams of assassins that try to catch dragons sleeping and confused, etc.
Opponents that are actually equal in personal might to a dragon PC would be kept rare and therefore high-impact in this model, letting the players get more of that "Godzilla stomping tanks" joy but with some level of tactics required.
NPC interactions and adventure design would focus on the advice usually reserved for high-level D&D play. Most NPCs should be wary and solicitous of PCs, make them feel strong. Most objectives should be things that force the players to engage in some finesse: defend this large area from a horde of enemies, protect this fragile person from a variety of threats, defuse a situation without property damage or loss of life, etc.
Watching 'real robot' style mecha shows for plot and setting ideas might be a good idea: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealRobotGenre?from=Main.RealRobot
* I think this is similar to what happens in many World of Darkness games.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937658If this is a problem, the solution might be ensuring swarms of humanoids and their grounded machinations stay a legitimate threat/interest throughout a campaign. This would require the setting to truly adapt to the threat of frequent dragon involvement: Lots of highly skilled archers, ballistae ammunition designed to work as anti-aircraft measures, wing-snaring nets and glue, fortresses designed against aerial assault, armor that provides some (but not total) breath attack protection for special elites, weaker flying mounts that allow pursuit and dogfights (pegasus, giant eagle, whatever), melee weapons designed to punch through scales, tactics for luring dragons into confined spaces, teams of assassins that try to catch dragons sleeping and confused, etc.
Naomi Novik had a series of novels on Napoleonic-era warfare with dragons that might provide good inspiration.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937464Most people I've talked to about that setting IRL describe great excitement that petered out instantly when trying to think of what to do in an actual session.
That was our experience. It's an interesting setting, but we couldn't get a handle on what to actually do with it.
I always liked the dragons in World of Warcraft... divided into factions with loads of minions, going about disguised as humans, and playing a much bigger/longer game than most of the playable races.
If I were to run Godbound I might aim to mimic their feel to some extent... which, now that I think of it, I suppose I already have with the naga in my homebrew setting... but up till now those haven't been available as PCs, less because of power levels than because they know too many secrets about the world I'd rather not spill yet.
Maybe I'll find a way around that...
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937658Thinking about stories I've heard some more, I notice that one issue is the way GMs feel the need to simply crank up the overall threat level of campaign enemies and NPCs so players rarely get the "fantasy Godzilla but with banter" vibe that the premise promises*.
Except thats not what Council of Wyrms promises.
Quote from: Omega;937769Except thats not what Council of Wyrms promises.
I was talking about the general premise of playing dragons, not just the specific implementation of CoW (see the slash in the thread title). I'll hazard a guess that that's what most players instantly imagine when you pitch them the concept, and if CoW doesn't really deliver that, it might be perceived as a deficiency by many.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937803I was talking about the general premise of playing dragons, not just the specific implementation of CoW (see the slash in the thread title). I'll hazard a guess that that's what most players instantly imagine when you pitch them the concept, and if CoW doesn't really deliver that, it might be perceived as a deficiency by many.
CoW presents itself as Dragon PCs dealing with usually dragon scale situations. Godzilla vs (insert monster here) rather than against armies. It was never sold as that.
Same with Sragonstorm really. You play a dragon, or unicorn or whatever. But are in no way an army beating monster. (Though boosted Dragon form did make you pretty formidible.) You could still be beat even by low class threats if massed if you didnt pay attention.
In fact I've never had any players thinking that Dragon = army stomping machine.
Quote from: Omega;937848In fact I've never had any players thinking that Dragon = army stomping machine.
Well then we have different sets of anecdotal data, and yours baffles me a bit, though I don't question it. In standard campaigns (humanoid PCs versus the occasional dragon enemy) dragons have a crystal clear reputation as serious threats, the kind of thing you need a team of highly equipped elite heroes to deal with, practically symbols of destruction and individual power. It would seem quite intuitive for an RPG that reverses the player roles to simply reverse the power dynamic and make a few adjustments to enable it, and I don't blame anyone for having that expectation.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;937464Does anyone here have any opinions or anecdotes about the 2nd edition Council of Wyrms setting or the idea of PC dragons in general?
Most people I've talked to about that setting IRL describe great excitement that petered out instantly when trying to think of what to do in an actual session. The power of at-will flight combined with breath weapons seemed to be an especially thorny issue.
We found it (using the CoW rules to play as dragons in general) was kind of like rolling up 15th level characters, giving them a slew of magic items (and this being back before 3e codified how much magic items you should have when starting at high levels, or much internet usage where we could compare to other groups), and
then starting your adventures. It sounds fun, but... you've already gotten the stuff you were supposed to accomplish with adventuring.
The CoW adventure proper was an interesting political adventure, and it was interesting thinking "okay, now we're playing the human retainers of the dragons we're playing on every other week." That said, it was still just a prepackaged political adventure and the fact that you were playing as dragons and dragon retainers was rather secondary.
Quote from: Naburimannu;937667Naomi Novik had a series of novels on Napoleonic-era warfare with dragons that might provide good inspiration.
The Temeraire books mostly* had each dragon paired with/imprinted on a human "captain"; capturing the dragon's captain would generally lead to the dragon surrendering to assure the captain's safety. That would lend itself to more interaction with less high-powered NPCs (i.e., ordinary human society) and perhaps an Ars Magica style shifting among different kinds of PCs.
* depending on the human/dragon culture in question.
Quote from: Naburimannu;937667Naomi Novik had a series of novels on Napoleonic-era warfare with dragons that might provide good inspiration.
Novik's Temeraire series was the inspiration for my game. :D