How to Build a Better D&D Dragon

With Wizards of the Coast releasing Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons, and Cryptic Studios putting their free to play MMORPG Neverwinter onto a dragonward trajectory with the Echoes of Prophecy battle pass, dragons are officially in.

And as such, we can now check out this io9 interview with Fizban’s Treasury co-author James Wyatt and Neverwinter’s lead designer Randy Mosiondz that’s all about dragons, their digital representations and lasting impact on the fantasy landscape.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

io9: Dragons can be big, big encounters for a tabletop party. What does the WOTC team try to keep in mind in navigating the scale of creatures like dragons when writing new rules around them, as major characters in campaigns, or just as part of the D&D monster manual lexicon?

Wyatt: The trick in combat encounters is making sure we don’t overwhelm the Dungeon Master! Dragons can be pretty complex, and we wanted to explore a range of options in this book without making the DM’s job impossible. For that reason, the new mechanical options for existing dragons are pretty minimal. There’s some simple traits and actions you might add to a dragon’s stat block, there’s some additional lair and legendary actions you might add or swap in, there’s some options for dragon spellcasting. But those additions are all pretty low-impact.

What’s more interesting to my mind are the ways we tried to help DMs bring dragons to life during an encounter. There’s a lot of space devoted to roleplaying dragons, developing their personalities and goals and such, so the DM can have a clearer idea of who this enormous draconic person is and what the dragon is thinking. There’s also a table of encounter complications that can help liven up a single fight with a dragon, with entries ranging from “the dragon really isn’t particularly interested in fighting” to “the dragon loves combat and appreciates the cool tricks the players are pulling off!”