Dragon challenge, Taking down a dragon, SR4 style Options

[Talia Invierno]

Time for another dragon hunt :)

This isn't post-by-post roleplaying or gaming, but a fully cooperative exercise to test what is and isn't possible in SR4 dragon killing. Anyone can jump in at any point.

Object is to kill a higher-end non-great western dragon. (I'm making one up now.) The dragon's not planning on coming out of its lair: you have to go in after it.

I'm creating the dragon, and its lair. (After all, it's no challenge to kill anything you know completely.) Anyone accepting this challenge is making up the team to try to kill it.

First task is to make up the team. Average team, give or take, is six individuals. They shouldn't be starting PCs, so let's take the 400 bp build with standard limit gear, and then upgrade as follows:

+200 karma
+1 M :nuyen: in equipment, maximum availability 20 (pulled that from wired reflexes 3).

Note that if you are using the upgrade to upgrade existing 'ware, you have to first purchase the original 'ware and then the replacement as well.

Equipment, spells, abilities limited to what's published in the core book and Street Magic only. I'll bind the dragon by the same limitations.

After the team is more or less solid, I'll declare it frozen -- and then the tactics and combat begin in earnest.

Oh -- one more proviso. I'm not going to require finding the dragon's lair -- that's a true run unto itself, and that means it's beyond the limits of this thread -- but at least one of the PCs should have the abilities to shake out very high-level information, both electronically and socially. Cover that, and I'll assume the lair found -- but the team won't be able to find out what the dragon's got set up in there without actually going.

Edit (from p.12): So that luck won't be a factor in the outcome, I'm going to use the 1:3 ratio for hits, always rounding up (ie. if you have only one or two dice in the pool, you'd still get one hit). That will give you utterly predictable results for the numbers part of the challenge.

Have at it!

[Jaid]

a team of 6 advanced runners vs a non-great dragon? the dragon is toast if it gets into this situation.

the only challenging thing is to get to that point where it's the team actually facing the dragon.

[Talia Invierno]

I've been reading the discussion in The art of shadowrunning thread. Isn't this a good way to prove a point, one way or another?


Much later edit, based on p.12 and 13. For newcomers to the thread, the hard-core mathematics has probably been completed betwen pp.11-13 -- and now we return you to your regularly scheduled roleplaying challenge, already in progress.

[toturi]

I tried this as a mental exercise as I lay on a hospital bed recovering from a fever. A dragon should be a Prime Runner(ok), Superhuman or higher(there is no "higher" in canon, but still ok), but there is no BP costs for being a dragon. So how the hell was I suppose to build a Superhuman Prime Runner Dragon? OK, how about skipping the BP creation part and grabbing the templates and cramming in the karma? That should work. But wait... is there an Attribute/skill cap for the dragons?

Nevermind that, I'd just pump the Magic, but... Magic = Essense. Does that mean that Essense is also equal to Magic? So if I pump Magic, the dragon's Essense goes up too? Can a dragon get implants? (drools...) And speaking of implants(and our favorite Awakened Negative Quality), does a dragon have Positive and Negative Qualities?

*deep breath* breathe... got a fever... doesn't pay to get worked up like this... Alright, so we have our dragon with his karma(which I have absolutely no f--king idea how to spend it), then the next question hit me - what is the initial value of a dragon's Magic? 1, 2, 6, 12? Do we choose any Metamagic from all the Metamagics? I suppose we can, the book doesn't elaborate on that... damnit, the next best source is DOTSW but that's 3rd Ed! grrrr...

Nurse!!!

[James McMurray]

[Jaid]

the only point you can prove is that a dragon is going to use it's brains to avoid ever getting into a situation where it is vulnerable to attack.

it has already been shown that it isn't hard to damage a dragon using a sniper rifle, or one of the rockets. it's simply a matter of hitting the dragon a few times with those weapons, and it is toast. and the dragon simply does not have enough ability to dodge that many attacks (by the time the last person attacks, you're looking at -11 to the test, assuming no one uses drones or spirits)

with good use of drones/spirits/whatever, you could very well be looking at 30+ attacks from such a group.

and heck, we don't even need the sniper rifle, we can make it an LMG firing wide bursts.

[FrankTrollman]

Taking out a Dragon in one round really isn't that big of a deal.

Get yourself a couple of snipers and a mage who specializes in Mana Static and Counterspelling and you can lock the dragon down. Really not much of a challenge, his abilities aren't bigger than any vehicle or combat mage BBEG you might encounter.

Even the challenge of "getting to the dragon" is not much of one. Dragons do stuff. They wander around the world and most of them don't even have masking. Every time they throw down one of their vaunted Force 8 spells they leave a trail for hours. It's just not that hard.

Reaction 8, Body 15, 8 points of Armor - crazy good, but not better than a cybertroll is going to be rolling up on you with.

Agility 7, 10 point death attack in melee - crazy good, but not better than a street sam with a sniper rifle.

Sorcery 8, Magic 9 - crazy good, but not something you can't overcome with a magic lockdown artist.

It's all hardcore. Every part of it is good and it has no weaknesses. But while it ca do anything that any member of a team of runners can do (except hack and drone control), it's still only doing one thing at a time. And in Shadowrun, that means that it is less than the sum of a four man team. In Shadowrun, one "prime runner" always gets his ass kicked by a team of normal runners unless he can hide the whole time in an alternate world like the Matrix or the Astral and take on one of the team members at a time.

Dream Team:

1 Street Sam with a Sniper Rifle.
1 Elven Face Adept (also does sniper rifle backup)
1 Hacker/Rigger with a pack of drones.
1 Mage with an Adversary Mentor and a good Mana Static.

It would be an interesting game, but it would probably be over in one session.

-Frank

[toturi]

[Talia Invierno]

Reiterating, since perhaps it wasn't clear enough from the opening post:

I'm creating the dragon, and its lair. After all, it's no challenge to kill something you know completely about.

The challenge is to create a team that can kill it.

I'm not making anything overly labyrinth-y -- it's not a run, after all -- but I'd be stupid indeed not to make my environment work for me: and a basic dragon's Logic and Intuition are both 8 -- above even the expanded [meta]human maximum. I intend to play it accordingly. Translated: this might not be a straight-up fight unless the runners can manage to make it so.

[Jaid]

but the dragon never actually being fought merely shows exactly what we've pointed out: the challenge of beating a dragon is in setting things up so that the dragon is alone, facing a runner team.

if the dragon wins in any other way than a straight up fight, it's basically just proving the point that the main danger of dragons is not that they are powerful directly, but that they are powerful indirectly and they have the brains to back it up.

[Talia Invierno]

[FrankTrollman]

[hyzmarca]

It really depends on what Anchors the dragon has. A smart dragon would have an absurdly high force Stunball with the maximum number of possible successes triggered and targeted by a Detect Enemies spell, as well as an armor spell. Snipers are out of the question, since it is in its lair. This leaves us with drones for getting close. An all-rigger team would be ideal in this situation.

I'd also like to ask if mundanes are allowed to buy a Spirit Pact (for the Six-Samurai Counterspelling Team) with karma and if Awakened characters are allowed to take Threat metamagics and traditions.

[toturi]

[Talia Invierno]

Everyone here has the book stats, and I'm not going to change those. That gives you a known range. I'll only be fiddling with the very few things that we're allowed to fiddle with: for example which spells are known, which individual powers it has.

I'll even limit its resources. I gave each of the PCs 1 M :nuyen: apiece. I'll give it 2M, and not one dime more.

Everything allowable for PCs in Street Magic is allowable. That includes mundanes buying spirit pacts ... although I'll suggest that only one PC does this. It doesn't include Threat metamagics and traditions.

And I will use it tactically, definitely. (Amazing how a few simple tactics quickly make hash of math theory.) Sniper rifles are only useful if you get to use them: and we'll assume this particular dragon has seen Enemy at the Gate.

Edit: I suddenly have a cartoon image of a shadowrunner holding up a calculator to a dragon, with the caption: "See? You're supposed to be dead!"

You're on the offense, peoples. You're the ones insisting you can take down this dragon easily -- but it's being perverse and choosing not to come out and fight in a stand-up fight where it can be quickly shot dead in a single Edged shot. You know for an absolute fact that it's holed up in its lair. We'll even say that based on external assumptions of cross-section, it can't be all that large: probably just a couple of tunnels and a couple of rooms.

Oh -- let's make this a western dragon, just because. I'll change that in the opening post.

[toturi]

Then using Divination, we could ask is the dragon coming out between [day X] and [day Y]? We can be perverse and find out when it is coming out and die in a stand up fight.

[Talia Invierno]

It's not. You can safely assume that it has summoned outside reinforcements, however.

[Jaid]

... and once again, we see that it isn't the *dragon* itself we're afraid of, it's the dragon's *indirect* power and influence that's the problem.

in any event, i propose a team of 5 mages and an adept healer.

summon 5 spirits, send on remote service, healer repairs stun, repeat as needed.

heck, if we really wanted, we could have them all start with multiple high force bound spirits, summon one extra high force spirit, and release the hounds. the dragon, being dual natured, can be attacked from the astral.

[toturi]

[Ravor]

Question, how big of an explosion can I get by combining *edit*six*/edit* million dollars worth of explosions into one big bomb using a teamwork roll with everyone having maxed skill? :cyber:

[kzt]

In a lair? So 35K each for the Bulldogs, and 102K for the ton of commercial explosive in each. Say 5 of these, with clever guidance. Plus a team of guys to lay down cover fire and deal with the things that stopped the first van. A series of 30 point explosions should get far enough into just about any building to make it exciting.

[FrankTrollman]

Indeed, the challenge would be structurally identical if it was "there's a corp guy who has thrown down seven figures into his defenses - take him down!"

The fact that there's a dragon on the other end is completely irrelevent - seriously it could just be a guy in a car or even a guy in a wheelchair and it wouldn't matter.

-Frank

[Talia Invierno]

So long as that corp guy is using only his own abilities to work that defence, sure. The average corp guy doesn't have a million to throw into defence, however: and he really wouldn't know how to use it.

It's the dragon and its own abilities only that you're up against. A part of those abilities is the mental attributes as well as the physical. I'm not including any of its contacts here and now, except to keep this from becoming a siege. (After all, sieges went out of style with the Middle Ages, for a reason.) "Reinforcements coming" is simply by way of stressing the immediacy of the battle, both ways. I don't plan on bringing them into the immediate scenario, unless the runners decide to turn this into a siege.

But really, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible while still taking into account all attributes and abilities, not just the physical. (After all, if you consider only the physical, no tech or non-natural weapons, no runner should survive a single turn either. You get to use tech, it gets to use tech. Did you want to drop the tech entirely on both sides? Or are you saying it shouldn't be smart enough to use tech?) The runners have to kill the dragon to survive. Similarly, the dragon will want to kill the runners if they penetrate into its lair, but sees no percentage in coming out after them.

You can buy a lot of explosives with that much money :)

[Ravor]

Aye, that is my point, you don't have to "face" the dragon in order to kill it assuming that it's going to stay in it's lair, all you have to do is level the lair.


It's basically the same advise I gave to the runner team a while back who were trying to save a loudmouth teamate from some vampire chick who kept summoning Force 10 Spirits at them when they tried to assualt her lair, simply level the entire building and have the buddy make a new character who knows enough to keep his mouth shut this time. :cyber:

*Edit*

Because I know that none of my characters would ever willingly enter a dragon's lair without a really fragging good reason, because there are just too many nasty things anyone can do with home security, dragon or not.

[Talia Invierno]

If you want to take the explosives route, go ahead and try. :) Combat turns, please.