| Mod | Save | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| STR | 30 | +10 | +10 |
| DEX | 10 | +0 | +7 |
| CON | 29 | +9 | +9 |
| Mod | Save | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| INT | 18 | +4 | +4 |
| WIS | 15 | +2 | +9 |
| CHA | 27 | +8 | +8 |
Legendary Resistance (4/Day, or 5/Day in Lair). If the dragon fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead.
Multiattack. The dragon makes three Rend attacks. It can replace one attack with a use of Spellcasting to cast Scorching Ray (level 3 version).
Rend. Melee Attack Roll: +17, reach 15 ft. Hit: 19 (2d8 + 10) Slashing damage plus 10 (3d6) Fire damage.
Fire Breath (Recharge 5–6). Dexterity Saving Throw: DC 24, each creature in a 90-foot Cone. Failure: 91 (26d6) Fire damage. Success: Half damage.
Spellcasting. The dragon casts one of the following spells, requiring no Material components and using Charisma as the spellcasting ability (spell save DC 23, +15 to hit with spell attacks):
At Will: Command (level 2 version), Detect Magic, Scorching Ray (level 3 version)
1/Day Each: Fireball (level 6 version), Scrying
Legendary Action Uses: 3 (4 in Lair). Immediately after another creature’s turn, the dragon can expend a use to take one of the following actions. The dragon regains all expended uses at the start of each of its turns.
Commanding Presence. The dragon uses Spellcasting to cast Command (level 2 version). The dragon can’t take this action again until the start of its next turn.
Fiery Rays. The dragon uses Spellcasting to cast Scorching Ray (level 3 version). The dragon can’t take this action again until the start of its next turn.
Pounce. The dragon moves up to half its Speed, and it makes one Rend attack.
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Posted Feb 5, 2025Imposing art, but a surprisingly tame spell list. Well, nothing a little addition or two can't fix!
Heat Metal (level 3 version) seems sufficiently cruel for a red dragon's tastes. It might be an At Will spell, perhaps as an alternative option to Scorching Ray (level 3 version) during Multiattack.
Seeing as how they lair up in mountains and apocalyptic ruins, Earthquake at 1/Day might be cinematic, especially if the dragon takes to the air and hurls Fire Breath down at the now-disoriented party. Slow-roasted adventurers at the bottom of a pit, Kalua-style, anyone?
And, for the truly devious DM...
Imagine an Ancient Red Dragon feared for having truly invincible scales, who can cast Invulnerability at 1/Day... which they always do just before flying into melee! Watch the mortals' fear as their pitiful spells and weapons bounce right off. The shock! The awe! The drama! Be the red dragon every other dragon dreams they could be! Die, insects!
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Posted Feb 6, 2025Perfection, absolute perfection.
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Posted Feb 14, 2025Those suggests would definitely make a more powerful red dragon, but I wouldn't recommend making one of the strongest monsters in the MM substantially harder to kill (the red greatwyrm from Fizban''s already provides a nigh-unstoppable version of the red dragon). I think your players will find this stat block provides quite a bit of "shock" and "awe." Consider that it has an AC of 22, high saving throws, over 500 hit points, and the ability to deal on average 114 damage each turn (not including spells or Fire Breath). Even a group of level 20 characters will not have an easy time fighting this monster. If you're looking for ways to make a dragon more distinctive or overtly impressive, I suggest looking at the specific features discussed in Fizban's addressing that.
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Posted Feb 15, 2025Not to be that guy, but according to the DMG you are wrong. This guy and a lich combined is a hard encounter for a level 20 party of 4. So saying your party will not find it easy is questionable since according to DMG this is literally just an average hard encounter, not even close to an awesome boss fight.
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Posted Feb 15, 2025Not to be that guy, but according to the DMG this is quite literally going to be a medium to high medium difficulty encounter for a level 20 party. So if it is not an easy fight for level 20s, I am kind of confused by the metrics. He doesn't even take up the encounter EXP budget even inside of his lair for the standard 4 person party. This guy and a lich combined is a hard encounter if not in their lairs, so if you wanted it to be the final climactic fight, based on DMG you would actually have to make it much harder or throw a few encounters in first to make sure the party is going in weakened. Not saying the dragon is bad in any way, just saying that the original poster was entirely justified making a stronger version since most Ancient Red Dragons would be a boss fight for high levels, and this guy is literally calculated at below a high difficulty fight. So the original poster was pretty justified by making changes to have this become a good final boss battle for a level 20 party.
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Posted Feb 15, 2025I'm having a hard time confirming your XP calculations. A High Difficulty encounter for a level 20 group (4 characters) is anything over 52,800 XP (all monster CRs are calculated for four player groups). Here, the Ancient Red Dragon is a 62,000 XP encounter alone and outside its lair. Inside its lair, the Ancient Red Dragon is a 75,000 XP encounter. Both are High Difficulty encounters for a group of level 20 characters.
You are meant to read the table in the DMG as a range. For a level 1 group (4 characters), a Low Difficulty encounter is 0–200 XP, a Medium Difficulty encounter is 200–300 XP, and a High Difficulty encounter is 300–400 XP. The way the DMG describes it is: "Multiply the number in the table by the number of characters in the party to get your XP budget for the encounter" (emphasis added). The language "budget" means that to stay within that given Difficulty category, the XP/character ratio should not exceed that value. This is reinforced by the following section that reads "[s]pend as much of your XP budget as you can without going over" (emphasis added).
So what does it mean to go above the recommended High Difficulty XP value for your group? It means you're creating an encounter suited for a group at a higher level. Since 20 is the highest level, I'll call these higher levels "virtual levels/virtual groups." For example, at level 20 the XP budget for a High Difficulty encounter is 88,000. So, a 96,000 XP encounter is either a Low, Medium, or High Difficulty encounter for a group of virtual level 21 characters. This pattern continues on such that a virtual level 24 group's encounter with an Ancient Red Dragon will be Medium Difficulty. The easiest way to see this is looking in reverse. Take the Lamia for example. The Lamia is a CR 4 creature worth 1,100 XP. Divided amongst 4 characters, that gives 275 XP per character, which constitutes a Medium Difficulty encounter for a level 4 group. That's what CR means: a group whose average level equal to that CR will face a Medium Difficulty encounter when fighting that creature by itself.
I hope this clarifies things. I understand this aspect of things can be confusing, but the examples in Combat Encounter Difficulty help. (And complications like this is why I recommend DMs not alter monster stat blocks without due consideration!)
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Posted Feb 16, 2025The thing we also must consider is that every level 20 party of 4 is not like every other level 20 party of four. And maybe we need to adjust the stat block up or down based upon that specific party of 4. If you have kept throwing successively tougher opponents at them and they simply wade through them, then it may be time to tweak that BBEG to make them go, OOPS, we might be in trouble. Simple arbitrary tables can not handle all circumstances.
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Posted Feb 17, 2025Here, the premise is not whether a specific change would be appropriate for a particular group. Rather, we are talking about changes made to a monster's base stat block outside the context of a specific group. I refer you back to Sigilavox's first comment, lamenting a "tame spell list." I couldn't agree more to your point that a DM is responsible not for the average result (described by CR) but for the result for their specific group. That is exactly why I recommend against changing stat blocks absent the context of a specific party. DMs can easily inadvertently change a monster's difficulty when altering a monster's stat block (I examined one such change under the Ancient Silver Dragon if you'd like an example). What is important is that a DM fully appreciates the changes they make.
The following sections of the DMG help DMs tinker with monster stat blocks and avoid or address situations where their party faces an unexpectedly difficult encounter:
Keeping Combat Moving
Monster Behavior
Minor Alterations
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Posted Feb 18, 2025IDK, spamming Command on players to get them to skip their turns seems pretty good...you might be able to get the party's martials to sit out the entire combat if they can't make a DC 23 Wisdom save.
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Posted Feb 18, 2025Lovely sourcing and good points. I can really tell that you do your research and your reasoning and advice are sound additions to these pages as a resource for DMs who bought the 2024 MM!
I think that in hindsight, my original comment's use of "tame" was more strongly worded than I actually felt; on the contrary, it can't be undervalued how much weight 2 free DC 23 Command spells every round holds in a fight against a typical party of four PCs. Reading my original comment, it should hopefully be clear I come from a place of excitement rather than lamentation!
You’re absolutely right that a casting of Earthquake massively changes the conditions of the fight. The Fissures it makes alone would separate a party, deal a lot of damage, and generally bump the CR by a fair bit. Assuming 3 Fissures, that’d be like ~15d6 points worth of fall damage (average of 50 ft deep) and a resulting split party would cause the party damage uptime to drop massively…
Although I did give the qualifier "for the truly devious DM" with respect to Invulnerability, which I would hope reflected that it should not be used absent the context of a group that can handle it. I would also hope that most DMs who looked at my suggestion might look up what exactly the spell does (and how it can be overcome) before incorporating it. They might consider foreshadowing it, or even using the presence of that single spell as inspiration to build an entire adventure around taking it down, which was the primary reason I shared the thought!
As for XP Tables, great resource in 2024! I think I still had the 2014 XP Table in my head which (in my experience) severely underplays what a party is capable of doing. In a no-homebrew adventure where monster stats were kept as is and all rolls were public, my party's five 20th-level characters kicked the door down and absolutely rolled a 2014 MM force of 4 Archmages, 3 Liches, an Adult Red Dragon, and an Ancient Black Dragon in the same room; a total of 183600 XP compared with their "2014 Deadly Budget" of, uh, 63500 XP.
I haven't gone back and done the math on that one using the 2024 XP Tables yet, but I expect the 2024 balancing would pan out much better as-is, as you say. Especially since not only is the XP Budget higher, but all four of those particular stat blocks are much stronger in 2024 than they were in 2014.
Basically, I think you helped me realize my biases there! As a DM and as a player, I've just come to expect that a 10th-level party has some way to fight CR 18+ creatures on fairly equal standing, and a 16th-level to 18th-level party can and does routinely overcome what the 2014 DMG considers to be CR 28 to CR 30 creatures, with 800+ HP and ~300 optimal damage/round. Finding a way to overcome Invulnerability would not be an issue for my groups, but I recognize that's not valid reasoning to slap Invulnerability on a table-neutral stat block without proper consideration, as you've made clear!
Let's keep improving these pages as DM resources through discussion and deliberation!
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Posted Feb 19, 2025Good suggestions if you wanted to hike up a Red Dragon as a BBEG or similarly extra tough big boss!
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Posted Mar 19, 2025Ok, so except if everyone has high wisdom, two members of the party will be sitting duck. Use that if you want your players to hate you (and they would be right). A creature whom best strat is to turns party members into useless sitting ducks without them being able to do anything against it is a bad designed monsters, and anyone who use that correctly will use it that way, turning 4V1 into 2v1. The party might win, but the players who have been able to do absolutly nothing that whole time will be really, really upset.
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Posted Apr 8, 2025You, good sir, took the perfect monster, and perfected it. Bravo
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Posted Apr 10, 2025Love the new version, but I feel they should have kept its Wing Attack, Detect and Tails and Claws instead of just Rend, it's more immersive and adds variety, imho.
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Posted May 25, 2025With a min-max level 15 PC, I've killed him but I agree with your over all point