Re: Fixing Disintegrate

Mark Blunden wrote:

"Darin McBride" <dmcbride@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Lorenz.Lang@xxxxxx wrote:

House rule alert:
Maybe dragon scales should provide part natural and part
deflection bonus???

Why? What is there about a dragon the size of a barn that should make it
harder to point at than the proverbial broadside of a barn?

Dragons have SR to make up for this. And it is GOOD SR. Foiled our
and cleric a few times in that last combat. The natural armor foiled the
ranger a couple times, too.

Dragons are hard. They way they're supposed to be. Not sure they need
to be made harder.

That's a fair point, which would be pretty airtight except for the
introduction into 3e of the various Orb spells. Targeting touch AC and
ignoring SR, these are now the achilles heel of most dragons, and they're
not even a particularly expensive or specialised choice for a spellcaster.

That's not entirely true. They're only a bit worse than normal fireballs
and the like which don't even need a touch attack.

fireball orb
no touch attack touch attack
SR no SR
save for 1/2 save for 1/2
multiple targets single target

It definitely comes out in the orb's favour when you only have a dragon to
deal with. Not so much when the dragon has friends.

Further, when fighting things that don't have an SR (or evasion for some
spells), the fireball (and lightning bolt and ...) definitely come out on
top. This makes them somewhat expensive or specialised - unless it really
is every day that you fight high-SR creatures.

The idea that dragon scales could actually deflect targeted spells as well
as resist them is rather nice, flavour-wise. It might even be sensible to
give them a deflection bonus against spells and spell-like abilities only.

I'd want to offset that with a reduction in SR... but that'd make them more
vulnerable to fireballs.

I actually think it makes sense that dragons are easy to target, but simply
ignore most spells (SR), and even high-level (compared to the dragon's SR)
wizards frequently find they're doing less damage than normal (saves).