You would actually need 10 dynamites attached to each other to do it in, they would have to overestimate or else waste their entire time to destroy the gem, destroying the gem's the easy part, getting to it is a literal suicide mission. If the dragon's scared that humans may get close, they would create zombies, ghouls and wights to guard the insides of the cavern, maybe even create some magical traps and cave ins and… we just made a literal dungeon with a dragon in it, huh, guess they really are the best way to hide stuff.
Establishing a kill zone above the cave would be the best idea, shredding it before it gets to a populated area would be their only option that isn’t diving into the vilest cave to ever exist, although WHEN the dragon exits would be a tense as hell scenario, which may be completely ignored by the dragon slamming their head into the stone until they dig up another area.
"Vilest cave to ever exist" =/= the few dozen wights/weaker creatures a dracolich can create (within reasonable time) that aren't even under its control. Those monsters could easily be defeated using guns and grenades. They would obviously go in before the dragon has been revived, or while it's far away, and what are you going on about with a dragon digging a tunnel via headbutting a cave ceiling???
Vilest by most disgusting, mainly because there’s not that much air ventilation and your nose would have to withstand the profound funk of a rotting corpse in a cave, the undead aren’t supposed to kill the soldiers, just make it harder for them to keep going, you would need expert cave divers that are able with guns and explosives, a week's worth dive into the cave (a mile deep isn’t even that bad, some are in the double digits) and have the supplies to ensure they manage to get down and navigate through everything.
Sure soldiers are good with dealing with stress in a fight, but being forced into a tight, damp and smelly cave where no one may ever find you, where you can't tell if a drop is a meter or 10, along with having to deal with random corpses of dead comrades running and biting at you is a recipe for getting loss. Also using a grenade in a cave is a profoundly stupid idea for many reasons.
Also counterpoint to military going in before the dragon returns, they have no idea what their searching for, unless they manage to contain a dracolich and figure out it has a soul gem that reconstructs it, they may just suspect that the cave it comes from has been cursed by it. Even if it’s destroyed, the dragon could create a new one and toss it in the middle of nowhere. The dragon has a 10 day variable before reforming, meaning that they would have to hope that it takes longer than a week to reform, that the team doesn’t get lost by multiple factors and that they even survive and find which specific area the gem is, all of that before the exhausted team loses against the clock and they have to deal with a very angry dracolich bomb-rushing up the surface.
You would actually need 10 dynamites attached to each other to do it in, they would have to overestimate or else waste their entire time to destroy the gem, destroying the gem's the easy part, getting to it is a literal suicide mission. If the dragon's scared that humans may get close, they would create zombies, ghouls and wights to guard the insides of the cavern, maybe even create some magical traps and cave ins and… we just made a literal dungeon with a dragon in it, huh, guess they really are the best way to hide stuff.
Establishing a kill zone above the cave would be the best idea, shredding it before it gets to a populated area would be their only option that isn’t diving into the vilest cave to ever exist, although WHEN the dragon exits would be a tense as hell scenario, which may be completely ignored by the dragon slamming their head into the stone until they dig up another area.
"Vilest cave to ever exist" =/= the few dozen wights/weaker creatures a dracolich can create (within reasonable time) that aren't even under its control. Those monsters could easily be defeated using guns and grenades. They would obviously go in before the dragon has been revived, or while it's far away, and what are you going on about with a dragon digging a tunnel via headbutting a cave ceiling???
Vilest by most disgusting, mainly because there’s not that much air ventilation and your nose would have to withstand the profound funk of a rotting corpse in a cave, the undead aren’t supposed to kill the soldiers, just make it harder for them to keep going, you would need expert cave divers that are able with guns and explosives, a week's worth dive into the cave (a mile deep isn’t even that bad, some are in the double digits) and have the supplies to ensure they manage to get down and navigate through everything.
Sure soldiers are good with dealing with stress in a fight, but being forced into a tight, damp and smelly cave where no one may ever find you, where you can't tell if a drop is a meter or 10, along with having to deal with random corpses of dead comrades running and biting at you is a recipe for getting loss. Also using a grenade in a cave is a profoundly stupid idea for many reasons.
Enlighten me which dragon-accessible caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which dragon accessible caves are over 1000 feet deep..
You would actually need 10 dynamites attached to each other to do it in, they would have to overestimate or else waste their entire time to destroy the gem, destroying the gem's the easy part, getting to it is a literal suicide mission. If the dragon's scared that humans may get close, they would create zombies, ghouls and wights to guard the insides of the cavern, maybe even create some magical traps and cave ins and… we just made a literal dungeon with a dragon in it, huh, guess they really are the best way to hide stuff.
Establishing a kill zone above the cave would be the best idea, shredding it before it gets to a populated area would be their only option that isn’t diving into the vilest cave to ever exist, although WHEN the dragon exits would be a tense as hell scenario, which may be completely ignored by the dragon slamming their head into the stone until they dig up another area.
"Vilest cave to ever exist" =/= the few dozen wights/weaker creatures a dracolich can create (within reasonable time) that aren't even under its control. Those monsters could easily be defeated using guns and grenades. They would obviously go in before the dragon has been revived, or while it's far away, and what are you going on about with a dragon digging a tunnel via headbutting a cave ceiling???
Vilest by most disgusting, mainly because there’s not that much air ventilation and your nose would have to withstand the profound funk of a rotting corpse in a cave, the undead aren’t supposed to kill the soldiers, just make it harder for them to keep going, you would need expert cave divers that are able with guns and explosives, a week's worth dive into the cave (a mile deep isn’t even that bad, some are in the double digits) and have the supplies to ensure they manage to get down and navigate through everything.
Sure soldiers are good with dealing with stress in a fight, but being forced into a tight, damp and smelly cave where no one may ever find you, where you can't tell if a drop is a meter or 10, along with having to deal with random corpses of dead comrades running and biting at you is a recipe for getting loss. Also using a grenade in a cave is a profoundly stupid idea for many reasons.
Enlighten me which dragon-accessible caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which dragon accessible caves are over 1000 feet deep..
Well I wasn’t betting on double digit miles, but Veryovkina cave of Georgia exists, not Europe but such a cave can exist.
Gouffre Berger, while not a double digit mile cave, is more than enough, it’s a large cave located in France, as you can see, there’s massive amounts of space, the most dangerous threat is actually drowning, it took a exploration team 13 days to go from down to back up, but if you add the need for guns and high grade explosives, along with the threat of undead mauling you, that’s enough time for it to be impossible to find the gem, especially if the dragon just dumps 5 feet of dirt and rubble on it.
Dracoliches are undead, not dragons. They're not part of the original challenge.
And if the Dracolich has to resort to hiding deep in a cave, that's not exactly winning.
Well it has the soul of a True dragon and the (undead) body of one, so its still a dragon, it hasn’t gotten possessed by an Elder brain nor warped beyond comprehension, so its still in the game.
Creatures in the dragon category but are things like wyverns, half dragons or kobolds have not been included for scenario’s sake. The dragon typing doesn’t necessary make it a True dragon, something that was once a chromatic, metallic, crystal (or any of the spelljammer ones if they somehow got in Faerun).
Also Vietnam was on a constant defense because they had zero ways to actually attack America, yet they were still considered a war, so I think putting your spawn point in a hard to reach area is valid.
Why? If a dracolich fits into the cave, it's not at all a challenge for a team of marines/commandos to fit into the cave. But also, how is the dragon finding this cave? Dragons aren't going to have access to the internet or maps or any knowledge of the geography of our world. They'd be lucky to find a river or a coastline before being blasted out of the sky. They certainly don't have a few decades to search out and located the perfect cave to hide in.
Why? If a dracolich fits into the cave, it's not at all a challenge for a team of marines/commandos to fit into the cave. But also, how is the dragon finding this cave? Dragons aren't going to have access to the internet or maps or any knowledge of the geography of our world. They'd be lucky to find a river or a coastline before being blasted out of the sky. They certainly don't have a few decades to search out and located the perfect cave to hide in.
Well it doesn’t matter if a cave is large. Steep paths, floods and hard to navigate areas are to be expected, it’s not exactly the type of environment that commandos are trained for, even if it’s superficially similar to certain environments (check how long it took people to actually navigate the cave, it’s much harder to go spelunking than one would expect).
The deeper you go into the cave the less likely people would have actually set things up for you to get to that depth, I’m very sure that the deepest parts are underwater trenches of sorts, so the gear needed would weigh the commandos down a good bit. If it became a Draco-lich's lair, it would actually become even harder to traverse, since it would have constant fog and every time the commandos try to sleep, they would possibly gain exhaustion, add that with undead servants actively sabotaging any ropes or checkpoints.
Dragon stat blocks are considered a baseline, with modifications and changes depending on the individual, so seeing that draco-liches are smart enough to workout lichdom, they may have spells that would get them in contact with other dragons that are capable of hiding among humans.
Draco-liches are practically immortal, so all they need to do is lodge their gem deep into a river or sea, return back to the surface and try to gather as much intel as possible, seeing that they are in a extremely hostile continent, they may act as meat shields for their mortal allies and distract the military by being abnormally aggressive in order to attract millitary attention away from those trying to find a half decent lair.
Dragons capable of transforming into humans are still in a terrible position. They have no ID, they have no money, they have no bank account, they have no address, and they have no idea how the world they are in works. They are worse off than most homeless people. What are they going to do? Tell the dracoliches they found a soup kitchen?
Meanwhile the dracolich's gem is getting eroded by waves / currents, while the draco liches die over and over and over again once they military discover their spawn point, and set up a base right next to it. And that's assuming a few thousand bullets & artillery shells fired at their spawn point don't accidentally destroy the gem eventually. AC 20 isn't actually very high, with even mediocre skills that's a 1/4 chance to hit it, when you're firing 10,000 bullets at it you're surely going to destroy it.
Dragons capable of transforming into humans are still in a terrible position. They have no ID, they have no money, they have no bank account, they have no address, and they have no idea how the world they are in works. They are worse off than most homeless people. What are they going to do? Tell the dracoliches they found a soup kitchen?
Meanwhile the dracolich's gem is getting eroded by waves / currents, while the draco liches die over and over and over again once they military discover their spawn point.
Their gem regenerates constantly, so the waves are mute, also, when have you been asked for your ID outside of border control or owning something important?
Metallics and other dragons capable of shape shifting would probably get together in a group and support each other, maybe have someone go out and catch a large animal and eat in a forest? Greens would thrive, doesn’t matter how clueless they are, they are by far the most capable in understanding modern humanity, they could just commit some light terrorism near a rich person, knock him out, kidnap him and cast Geas on him, and bingo.
The person is forced to follow his commands and if he snitches or does something to say he’s in danger, he just drops dead, green dragon doesn’t even need to be near, ancient ones could just wipe their memories of anything unpleasant, shapechange would allow any dragon to just take their places after they force a man to tell everything and do some researching.
And boom, ID, a bank account, and a really cool magic box that keeps telling them about women who are interested in them. If anything goes wrong, asking the gold dragon to word of recall them all to a safe site would be really easy, especially when multiple dragons have control weather and could just make it so the jets have to deal with freezing storms with fist sized hail while it’s in the middle of summer.
Why? If a dracolich fits into the cave, it's not at all a challenge for a team of marines/commandos to fit into the cave. But also, how is the dragon finding this cave? Dragons aren't going to have access to the internet or maps or any knowledge of the geography of our world. They'd be lucky to find a river or a coastline before being blasted out of the sky. They certainly don't have a few decades to search out and located the perfect cave to hide in.
Well it doesn’t matter if a cave is large. Steep paths, floods and hard to navigate areas are to be expected, it’s not exactly the type of environment that commandos are trained for, even if it’s superficially similar to certain environments (check how long it took people to actually navigate the cave, it’s much harder to go spelunking than one would expect).
The deeper you go into the cave the less likely people would have actually set things up for you to get to that depth, I’m very sure that the deepest parts are underwater trenches of sorts, so the gear needed would weigh the commandos down a good bit. If it became a Draco-lich's lair, it would actually become even harder to traverse, since it would have constant fog and every time the commandos try to sleep, they would possibly gain exhaustion, add that with undead servants actively sabotaging any ropes or checkpoints.
Dragon stat blocks are considered a baseline, with modifications and changes depending on the individual, so seeing that draco-liches are smart enough to workout lichdom, they may have spells that would get them in contact with other dragons that are capable of hiding among humans.
Draco-liches are practically immortal, so all they need to do is lodge their gem deep into a river or sea, return back to the surface and try to gather as much intel as possible, seeing that they are in a extremely hostile continent, they may act as meat shields for their mortal allies and distract the military by being abnormally aggressive in order to attract millitary attention away from those trying to find a half decent lair.
Dracoliches take an average of 10.5 days to resurrect. Maybe they could do that a few times before all other dragons are dead and the military focuses exclusively on them.
What about the fact that the average intelligence of a dragon is like 19, while humans are like 10. If we are humans, then whatever the best idea that we can come up with to beat the dragons, the dragons will have an even better more in-depth 100% win rate plan. Right? And anything anyone says will just prove that the dragons are even smarter because if our INT equals 10ish, then the dragons will have a plan at least twice as good.
Haha! I got you to click here! I'm an Evoker who loves D&D, roleplaying, and Magic. My characters might "accidentally" kill yours. Consider this an advance warning. If a vex randomly spawns in and starts attacking you, it's probably me. Also, the Minecraft devs really need to add Illusioners to bedrock.
Great, now that you have clicked the spoiler, you know all about me! See you in the PbP thread. :)
your ID outside of border control or owning something important
- Getting a Job - Getting a bank account / Credit card - Getting a phone plan - Buying any controlled substances - Collecting mail delivered to the post office - Getting on any plane - Getting an appartment, staying at a hotel, or using AirBnB - Driving a car - Accessing any government service - Voting
A disguised dragon has less access to modern society than a homeless person does. They'd be begging on the streets for the cash to get a bus/train fare.
LOL, have you read Geas? It is nothing close to mind control, it punishes (doesn't even prohibit) one specific action or makes them do one specific action, what is casting Geas on someone going to do for a dragon?
Also how are they finding a rich dude? You can't just kidnap someone off the street without people noticing. And rich people aren't just walking around the street to get kidnapped. They could only replace some poor sod the authorities don't care about, which still leaves them pretty useless. Even with magic a dragon ain't getting close to a world leader or anyone of real importance. Shapechanging doesn't give you any of the memories of the person, so pretty quick people will notice when dude X suddenly doesn't know how to drive a car, or how to check their e-mail, or the pet name for their romantic partner.
Dracoliches are undead, not dragons. They're not part of the original challenge.
And if the Dracolich has to resort to hiding deep in a cave, that's not exactly winning.
Well it has the soul of a True dragon and the (undead) body of one, so its still a dragon, it hasn’t gotten possessed by an Elder brain nor warped beyond comprehension, so its still in the game.
Creatures in the dragon category but are things like wyverns, half dragons or kobolds have not been included for scenario’s sake. The dragon typing doesn’t necessary make it a True dragon, something that was once a chromatic, metallic, crystal (or any of the spelljammer ones if they somehow got in Faerun).
Also Vietnam was on a constant defense because they had zero ways to actually attack America, yet they were still considered a war, so I think putting your spawn point in a hard to reach area is valid.
The mods don't like us discussing modern political stuff, so all I'm going to say is that the Vietnamese forces were getting considerable outside aid from other communist countries. A dracolich hiding in a cave gets nothing.
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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.
Hello all! I'm finally back! (DDB wasn't working for a while...)
So! We're talking about caves! For some of the smaller dragons who are lucky enough to find them, they'll be great lairs. But for a dracolich? It's Gargantuan, right? How are you gonna find a cave that can accommodate such a large dragon (while also being secure enough for all of the dragon's things and weird enough to make it hard for the dragon's enemies to enter?). That's a lot of constraints that the cave has to fit under, and again, like some have voiced, the dragons don't know our world. They don't know where all of the caves are, for heaven's sake. In reality, there's going to be maybe one or two lucky dragons that find caves suitable for them. You can't really make your own cave, either, right? The dragons don't really know how to work our explosives, and Fire Breath doesn't do much against rock. A pure ten-plus feet of rock.
Additionally, would humans really care if a sole dracolich went and hid in the ground (assuming they're part of the challenge?) I think they wouldn't, especially if they've knocked out the rest of the dragons. They outnumber it (I'll account for some casualties in the human-dragon war) 7.5 billion to one, and it's powerful, but it's going to die - we will nuke that area after telling people to evacuate. And its minions? "Oh, no, a zombie with 20 hit points! We have a thousand commoners with rifles! Gee, I wonder who's going to win..."
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Plus if we are talking about nukes, the one place people would be ok with nuking is down at the bottom of a deep cave. Down at the bottom of abandoned mines is pretty much the only place it's acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the current climate. That little gem would get liquified.
Plus if we are talking about nukes, the one place people would be ok with nuking is down at the bottom of a deep cave. Down at the bottom of abandoned mines is pretty much the only place it's acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the current climate. That little gem would get liquified.
Exactly! The radioactive effects might spread through the water, but it's okay! (A simple guide on how to create No-man's-land)
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Religious frisbee player, writer, goofball, and nerd. Some may say professional for the latter two.
Extended sig here. Send me a PM if you want to chat.
Plus if we are talking about nukes, the one place people would be ok with nuking is down at the bottom of a deep cave. Down at the bottom of abandoned mines is pretty much the only place it's acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the current climate. That little gem would get liquified.
Exactly! The radioactive effects might spread through the water, but it's okay! (A simple guide on how to create No-man's-land)
According to britannica:
Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)
So! We're talking about caves! For some of the smaller dragons who are lucky enough to find them, they'll be great lairs. But for a dracolich? It's Gargantuan, right? How are you gonna find a cave that can accommodate such a large dragon (while also being secure enough for all of the dragon's things and weird enough to make it hard for the dragon's enemies to enter?). That's a lot of constraints that the cave has to fit under, and again, like some have voiced, the dragons don't know our world. They don't know where all of the caves are, for heaven's sake. In reality, there's going to be maybe one or two lucky dragons that find caves suitable for them. You can't really make your own cave, either, right? The dragons don't really know how to work our explosives, and Fire Breath doesn't do much against rock. A pure ten-plus feet of rock.
Additionally, would humans really care if a sole dracolich went and hid in the ground (assuming they're part of the challenge?) I think they wouldn't, especially if they've knocked out the rest of the dragons. They outnumber it (I'll account for some casualties in the human-dragon war) 7.5 billion to one, and it's powerful, but it's going to die - we will nuke that area after telling people to evacuate. And its minions? "Oh, no, a zombie with 20 hit points! We have a thousand commoners with rifles! Gee, I wonder who's going to win..."
Such caves already exist and legend lore would probably cover it if they don’t have any other spells or dragons don’t use a free computer somewhere to search it up. Also blue dragons take offence to that, it’s not a cave, but it’s gonna be hard as hell to detect, especially as it collapses on itself, also stone doesn’t have fire resistance, so in theory the dragon could actually melt through the stone against the threshold, they could also just repeatedly hit the stone until it chips, grab it with their mouth and spit it out of their burrow, acid dragons could this easily.
Also we’ve all mentioned it’s only Europe's Military so it’s actually only a couple million, maybe 10, which is significantly smaller than a billion, with Europe not even having that many people. What’s stopping a dragon being in a civilian population from just… I dunno, shapechanging and just go with the crowd, especially if they took someone’s identity, congrats, you wasted a nuke and a entire town, and the dragon is nowhere to be seen.
Also, why are you people so obsessed with the military being this hyper omnipresent being capable of surrounding anything the moment they detect its presence? Europe has tons of forests and all sorts of cover, terrain and the likes, 1000 soldiers being able to completely surround a dragon from all sides with it being completely flat sounds more like a premade kill zone, not an area where you would actually find a dragon. Same with a zombie, I feel like you just say “oh humans win” with zero assumptions that the zombie could do anything, my bringing up of zombies implies that the zombies would be made deep in a cave to defend a soul gem, a zombie would be scary due to the fact that you can’t just immediately surround it in a cave with zero flat terrain, you have no dark vision and the thing can’t even die from headshots and keeps coming back unless it just gives up, now add a couple dozen of them, all who are very much dead civilians, and put them everywhere in the cave, now you have to deal with figuring out of that corpse is actually a corpse.
Europe can’t even feed every civilian properly in a war, let alone be this hyper efficient even after uniting temporarily to fight dragons.
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Vilest by most disgusting, mainly because there’s not that much air ventilation and your nose would have to withstand the profound funk of a rotting corpse in a cave, the undead aren’t supposed to kill the soldiers, just make it harder for them to keep going, you would need expert cave divers that are able with guns and explosives, a week's worth dive into the cave (a mile deep isn’t even that bad, some are in the double digits) and have the supplies to ensure they manage to get down and navigate through everything.
Sure soldiers are good with dealing with stress in a fight, but being forced into a tight, damp and smelly cave where no one may ever find you, where you can't tell if a drop is a meter or 10, along with having to deal with random corpses of dead comrades running and biting at you is a recipe for getting loss. Also using a grenade in a cave is a profoundly stupid idea for many reasons.
Also counterpoint to military going in before the dragon returns, they have no idea what their searching for, unless they manage to contain a dracolich and figure out it has a soul gem that reconstructs it, they may just suspect that the cave it comes from has been cursed by it. Even if it’s destroyed, the dragon could create a new one and toss it in the middle of nowhere. The dragon has a 10 day variable before reforming, meaning that they would have to hope that it takes longer than a week to reform, that the team doesn’t get lost by multiple factors and that they even survive and find which specific area the gem is, all of that before the exhausted team loses against the clock and they have to deal with a very angry dracolich bomb-rushing up the surface.
Enlighten me which dragon-accessible caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which caves are in the double digits of miles. Enlighten me which dragon accessible caves are over 1000 feet deep..
Well I wasn’t betting on double digit miles, but Veryovkina cave of Georgia exists, not Europe but such a cave can exist.
Gouffre Berger, while not a double digit mile cave, is more than enough, it’s a large cave located in France, as you can see, there’s massive amounts of space, the most dangerous threat is actually drowning, it took a exploration team 13 days to go from down to back up, but if you add the need for guns and high grade explosives, along with the threat of undead mauling you, that’s enough time for it to be impossible to find the gem, especially if the dragon just dumps 5 feet of dirt and rubble on it.
Dracoliches are undead, not dragons. They're not part of the original challenge.
And if the Dracolich has to resort to hiding deep in a cave, that's not exactly winning.
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.
Well it has the soul of a True dragon and the (undead) body of one, so its still a dragon, it hasn’t gotten possessed by an Elder brain nor warped beyond comprehension, so its still in the game.
Creatures in the dragon category but are things like wyverns, half dragons or kobolds have not been included for scenario’s sake. The dragon typing doesn’t necessary make it a True dragon, something that was once a chromatic, metallic, crystal (or any of the spelljammer ones if they somehow got in Faerun).
Also Vietnam was on a constant defense because they had zero ways to actually attack America, yet they were still considered a war, so I think putting your spawn point in a hard to reach area is valid.
Why? If a dracolich fits into the cave, it's not at all a challenge for a team of marines/commandos to fit into the cave. But also, how is the dragon finding this cave? Dragons aren't going to have access to the internet or maps or any knowledge of the geography of our world. They'd be lucky to find a river or a coastline before being blasted out of the sky. They certainly don't have a few decades to search out and located the perfect cave to hide in.
Well it doesn’t matter if a cave is large. Steep paths, floods and hard to navigate areas are to be expected, it’s not exactly the type of environment that commandos are trained for, even if it’s superficially similar to certain environments (check how long it took people to actually navigate the cave, it’s much harder to go spelunking than one would expect).
The deeper you go into the cave the less likely people would have actually set things up for you to get to that depth, I’m very sure that the deepest parts are underwater trenches of sorts, so the gear needed would weigh the commandos down a good bit. If it became a Draco-lich's lair, it would actually become even harder to traverse, since it would have constant fog and every time the commandos try to sleep, they would possibly gain exhaustion, add that with undead servants actively sabotaging any ropes or checkpoints.
Dragon stat blocks are considered a baseline, with modifications and changes depending on the individual, so seeing that draco-liches are smart enough to workout lichdom, they may have spells that would get them in contact with other dragons that are capable of hiding among humans.
Draco-liches are practically immortal, so all they need to do is lodge their gem deep into a river or sea, return back to the surface and try to gather as much intel as possible, seeing that they are in a extremely hostile continent, they may act as meat shields for their mortal allies and distract the military by being abnormally aggressive in order to attract millitary attention away from those trying to find a half decent lair.
Dragons capable of transforming into humans are still in a terrible position. They have no ID, they have no money, they have no bank account, they have no address, and they have no idea how the world they are in works. They are worse off than most homeless people. What are they going to do? Tell the dracoliches they found a soup kitchen?
Meanwhile the dracolich's gem is getting eroded by waves / currents, while the draco liches die over and over and over again once they military discover their spawn point, and set up a base right next to it. And that's assuming a few thousand bullets & artillery shells fired at their spawn point don't accidentally destroy the gem eventually. AC 20 isn't actually very high, with even mediocre skills that's a 1/4 chance to hit it, when you're firing 10,000 bullets at it you're surely going to destroy it.
Their gem regenerates constantly, so the waves are mute, also, when have you been asked for your ID outside of border control or owning something important?
Metallics and other dragons capable of shape shifting would probably get together in a group and support each other, maybe have someone go out and catch a large animal and eat in a forest? Greens would thrive, doesn’t matter how clueless they are, they are by far the most capable in understanding modern humanity, they could just commit some light terrorism near a rich person, knock him out, kidnap him and cast Geas on him, and bingo.
The person is forced to follow his commands and if he snitches or does something to say he’s in danger, he just drops dead, green dragon doesn’t even need to be near, ancient ones could just wipe their memories of anything unpleasant, shapechange would allow any dragon to just take their places after they force a man to tell everything and do some researching.
And boom, ID, a bank account, and a really cool magic box that keeps telling them about women who are interested in them. If anything goes wrong, asking the gold dragon to word of recall them all to a safe site would be really easy, especially when multiple dragons have control weather and could just make it so the jets have to deal with freezing storms with fist sized hail while it’s in the middle of summer.
The Veryovkina cave is less than 1.4 miles deep, and there is no way a dragon would get even half way down.
Dracoliches take an average of 10.5 days to resurrect. Maybe they could do that a few times before all other dragons are dead and the military focuses exclusively on them.
What about the fact that the average intelligence of a dragon is like 19, while humans are like 10. If we are humans, then whatever the best idea that we can come up with to beat the dragons, the dragons will have an even better more in-depth 100% win rate plan. Right? And anything anyone says will just prove that the dragons are even smarter because if our INT equals 10ish, then the dragons will have a plan at least twice as good.
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- Getting a Job
- Getting a bank account / Credit card
- Getting a phone plan
- Buying any controlled substances
- Collecting mail delivered to the post office
- Getting on any plane
- Getting an appartment, staying at a hotel, or using AirBnB
- Driving a car
- Accessing any government service
- Voting
A disguised dragon has less access to modern society than a homeless person does. They'd be begging on the streets for the cash to get a bus/train fare.
LOL, have you read Geas? It is nothing close to mind control, it punishes (doesn't even prohibit) one specific action or makes them do one specific action, what is casting Geas on someone going to do for a dragon?
Also how are they finding a rich dude? You can't just kidnap someone off the street without people noticing. And rich people aren't just walking around the street to get kidnapped. They could only replace some poor sod the authorities don't care about, which still leaves them pretty useless. Even with magic a dragon ain't getting close to a world leader or anyone of real importance. Shapechanging doesn't give you any of the memories of the person, so pretty quick people will notice when dude X suddenly doesn't know how to drive a car, or how to check their e-mail, or the pet name for their romantic partner.
The mods don't like us discussing modern political stuff, so all I'm going to say is that the Vietnamese forces were getting considerable outside aid from other communist countries. A dracolich hiding in a cave gets nothing.
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.
Hello all! I'm finally back! (DDB wasn't working for a while...)
So! We're talking about caves! For some of the smaller dragons who are lucky enough to find them, they'll be great lairs. But for a dracolich? It's Gargantuan, right? How are you gonna find a cave that can accommodate such a large dragon (while also being secure enough for all of the dragon's things and weird enough to make it hard for the dragon's enemies to enter?). That's a lot of constraints that the cave has to fit under, and again, like some have voiced, the dragons don't know our world. They don't know where all of the caves are, for heaven's sake. In reality, there's going to be maybe one or two lucky dragons that find caves suitable for them. You can't really make your own cave, either, right? The dragons don't really know how to work our explosives, and Fire Breath doesn't do much against rock. A pure ten-plus feet of rock.
Additionally, would humans really care if a sole dracolich went and hid in the ground (assuming they're part of the challenge?) I think they wouldn't, especially if they've knocked out the rest of the dragons. They outnumber it (I'll account for some casualties in the human-dragon war) 7.5 billion to one, and it's powerful, but it's going to die - we will nuke that area after telling people to evacuate. And its minions? "Oh, no, a zombie with 20 hit points! We have a thousand commoners with rifles! Gee, I wonder who's going to win..."
Religious frisbee player, writer, goofball, and nerd. Some may say professional for the latter two.
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DM: Westeros - A Homebrew D&D Campaign, Liquid Swords - A Historical Wuxia Campaign
Player: Marcus Aquillus Arcade (Quil) - 1st Rogue - Pax Romana
Plus if we are talking about nukes, the one place people would be ok with nuking is down at the bottom of a deep cave. Down at the bottom of abandoned mines is pretty much the only place it's acceptable to test nuclear weapons in the current climate. That little gem would get liquified.
Exactly! The radioactive effects might spread through the water, but it's okay! (A simple guide on how to create No-man's-land)
Religious frisbee player, writer, goofball, and nerd. Some may say professional for the latter two.
Extended sig here. Send me a PM if you want to chat.
DM: Westeros - A Homebrew D&D Campaign, Liquid Swords - A Historical Wuxia Campaign
Player: Marcus Aquillus Arcade (Quil) - 1st Rogue - Pax Romana
According to britannica:
Such caves already exist and legend lore would probably cover it if they don’t have any other spells or dragons don’t use a free computer somewhere to search it up. Also blue dragons take offence to that, it’s not a cave, but it’s gonna be hard as hell to detect, especially as it collapses on itself, also stone doesn’t have fire resistance, so in theory the dragon could actually melt through the stone against the threshold, they could also just repeatedly hit the stone until it chips, grab it with their mouth and spit it out of their burrow, acid dragons could this easily.
Also we’ve all mentioned it’s only Europe's Military so it’s actually only a couple million, maybe 10, which is significantly smaller than a billion, with Europe not even having that many people. What’s stopping a dragon being in a civilian population from just… I dunno, shapechanging and just go with the crowd, especially if they took someone’s identity, congrats, you wasted a nuke and a entire town, and the dragon is nowhere to be seen.
Also, why are you people so obsessed with the military being this hyper omnipresent being capable of surrounding anything the moment they detect its presence? Europe has tons of forests and all sorts of cover, terrain and the likes, 1000 soldiers being able to completely surround a dragon from all sides with it being completely flat sounds more like a premade kill zone, not an area where you would actually find a dragon. Same with a zombie, I feel like you just say “oh humans win” with zero assumptions that the zombie could do anything, my bringing up of zombies implies that the zombies would be made deep in a cave to defend a soul gem, a zombie would be scary due to the fact that you can’t just immediately surround it in a cave with zero flat terrain, you have no dark vision and the thing can’t even die from headshots and keeps coming back unless it just gives up, now add a couple dozen of them, all who are very much dead civilians, and put them everywhere in the cave, now you have to deal with figuring out of that corpse is actually a corpse.
Europe can’t even feed every civilian properly in a war, let alone be this hyper efficient even after uniting temporarily to fight dragons.