Is Force 20 is ludicrous for a great dragon?

No?

Do the math using the crunch and find out what happens.

Dragons have no problem surviving the Drain we use at our table. *shrug*
Especially since it is Stun for Drain. *shrug*

What force are your dragons summoning?
How much magic do those dragons have?

We have no dragons in our game (they are not PC material after all), but the canon examples would not even be bothered. *shrug*

*Facepalm*

Pretty simple really...

The Game has a Drain Mechanic...
We use Edge to Resist Summoning/Binding, which possibly increases Drain.
At the Rates you say are common (Force 20 Spirits apparently); and since that Force (20) is below all canon examples of the Great's level of Magic that I have seen, the Drain is Stun Damage and those Dragons could easily survive that Drain.

I base this on the premise that was touted above of Typical Force 20 Spirits.

Therefore, Dragons have no problems surviving the Drain we use at our table. What is so hard to understand?

It's the "always" using Edge just because of the spirit's Force that is the issue. That Force 8 spirit suddenly goes from a challenge to successfully summon (let alone bind) to possibly becoming an instant brain melter. Drain is not that easy to get more dice to resist, and if someone goes to the trouble to sustain Increase Attribute spells for their Drain stats they're either suffering -4 to the summoning and/or binding or they have to have invested significant resources into appropriately powered Sustaining Foci for those spells.

And that is certainly a valid opinion. I happen to disagree with it. If you are capable of summoning a Force 8+ spirit casually at our table, you have EARNED it, not been created with the ability to do so out of the gate. *shrug*

And if you've gone to that kind of preparation (which is what it takes to do that all that casually due to Drain issues), you have earned being able to.

AS I said... So, The Edge expenditure should not bother you then. *shrug*

It still does because if they're always spending Edge to resist, then there's a pretty good chance that even that level of preparation won't help because while the preparation helps with the Drain, the summoning/binding pools aren't any better and suddenly with the Edge expenditure the spirit blows the summoner's pool out the water. Basically the Edge expenditure if done too much can make taking the Drain for no real benefit--failing to successfully summon the spirit--more likely. That is the problem.

Uh.

Great Dragons, by RAW, have Magic 12.

Check the Friends and Foes section of the core book.

I think he's trying to say Lofwyr and Hestaby represent the majority of Great Dragons in Magic rating... *facepalms at that thought*

Also, a GD only has 26 dice to resist drain, which if you're facing down 26DV worth of even stun drain, you're facing down 17 boxes of damage (pro-tip: GD's by the book have 15 boxes on their stun track).

And that's just summoning. For binding you'd have to drop Force down to 10 and face the same amount of drain.

Oh, and that's before the spirit adds edge to any of these tests.

Which adds up to deep fried Great Dragon brains for dinner just because they tried to summon a spirit. (Lofwyr and Hestaby notwithstanding, those two might be able to handle it, but I wouldn't bet on it)

Hestaby maybe not but Lofwyr's Initiate Level could easily be taken as average.

Slight correction:
The 26 DV was after Edge, but only on a summoning for a F20. 31DV if I account for average number of additional successes from exploding 6s. Only ~13DV not including edge.
Binding would average out to about 46 DV (including edge & exploding 6s).

Which does pretty much work out to "dead or unconscious dragon."
(46DV resisted by 26 dice on average works out to "3 boxes shy of overflow" assuming it was all stun)

Except that the "average" Great Dragon is printed in the Friends and Foes chapter of the SR4A core book. Both of those two would be rather exceptional even among Greats.

Yeeeeees.... the Great Dragons in the core book have magic 12. I think this was propaganda put out by the GDs (Probably Hualpa) themselves to get everyone else to underestimate them. It is ludicrous in my mind that a being that's been around, actively doing stuff for hundreds or thousands of years to have never initiated.

Lofywr is in the 20s, Hestaby in the 30s, and I would imagine some of the others above even that. Dunno about the rest of them, but 12 seems a bit low, even if it is RAW, to base any assumptions on GDs on.


*Not to say that a force 20 spirit wouldn't be a drain, but certainly not melting faces. Hestaby has a Great Form force 20 after all, that sources say she uses to mix cocktails.

Correctamundo.

Dragons are already granted initiations (normal dragons have MAG = ESS and ESS = 6+1d6). Oddly great dragons are not granted a random factor, it's simply ESS = 12.

All of the named ones have more than 12, sure. Look at it this way, the dragons that have just achieved Great Dragon status (which precludes any of the ones named so far in the stories) probably do have stats pretty close to those in the core book, but that isn't the point. The point is that TJ's house rule causes brain melting on anything up to and including the Great Dragon in the core book.

Fair enough.

Their Essence is 12 and Magic is 12 without Initiation. Dragons continue to grow as they age, at a certain point they are deemed to be Great Dragons. There is no indication of Initiation anywhere in the entry in the Core Book.

True, there isn't. Although it seems odd that dragons are the only critter which have more than 6 essence.
I've always treated it as a shorthand for initiations, due to the relationship Essence, Magic, and Initiations have.

Any Great Dragon is by its very nature going to have a name. TJ's house rule is essentially a matter of RAI vs. RAW. People always cry about high force spirits ruining their game, well making a spirit automatically resist with edge under certain circumstances solves that problem. As to a Great Dragon having difficulty, sure if he is allowing those sets of circumstances to rule or if he chooses not to use Twist Fate and negate the edge use.