Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Wait, are you saying Raistlin / Fistandantilus didn’t Life/Soul suck her? That is REALLY not the way I remember it, unless your maybe replying to someone else or something?
Based on the fact that she's still a going concern in the multiverse and there's a loose degree of continuity across the novels, yeah. I mean, it was still a power move, but the end result was a KO, not a Fatality.
I'm not really sure what event you're referring to. There were only two incidents I recall of Tiamat dying in Dragonlance:
First during the Bad Future in the Twins trilogy when Raistlin killed all the gods and then destroyed the world because he was evil and "evil can never create, only destroy." (Never mind that Tiamat was functionally Dragonlance's Satan and had been responsible for creating quite a bit of the setting and the life in it.) That was all undone by time travel.
Second when the other gods finally returned to Krynn after over a century of absence (revealed to be because Tiamat had hidden the world away from them after the defeat of Chaos in the War of Souls in an attempt to claim it all for herself). All the other gods declared that she'd gone too far and had her stripped of her godhood and one of the people in the audience gave her a trip to Stabby Town. That only applied to Dragonlance and had no impact on the rest of the D&D Multiverse.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Like everyone has said, Tiamat would win Easily. Max twenty rounds, and in dnd that's like 2 minutes.
However, which would be a more lethal challenge to a party of PCs? Assume a rounded party of 4-6 very high-level characters. (Also assume it's the Aspect from Fizban's and the Vecna from Eve of Ruin.) Tiamat has huge HP and damage, but Vecna's spells are downright brutal against PCs....
(I'm genuinely curious because my party is going to have a campaign-ending battle where they will have to fight one of these two stat blocks.)
Tiamat. Even ignoring the difference in CR, Vecna's stat block is a trainwreck, his low base hit points and reliance on healing means that he's unkillable against a party with low damage output but a high level party has a good chance to just spike him down in one round.
In terms of threat against a high level party:
Vecna has a base damage output of 148 on his turn (33 from afterthought, 96 from rotten fate, 21 from vile teleport) and probably does another 9 from ongoing damage (afterthought) and 31 damage from reactions, for a total of 188. With a +13 to hit and a save DC of 22, actual dpr against a high level party will be significantly reduced. Also, his damage is very heavily biased towards necrotic, and getting multiple characters with necrotic damage is not hard.
Aspect of Tiamat has a base damage output of 105 on her turn (multiattack is 86, breath is 71 vs multiple targets so valued at 142 but only triggers 1 round in 3) and another 69 with legendary actions for a total of 174; with +19 to hit, save DC of 27, and many damage types, getting resistance is harder.
Tiamat (RoT) entirely breaks the CR scaling -- sure, the multiattack is only 76, but if she uses red dragon breath, blue dragon breath, and a bite, that's 404 damage value for a total of 480.