Hard to do, though, when you are in the air and being attacked from all sides. The karma warping ability is the only thing that I see allowing it, and even then, I think it's preposterous for a dragon to go one on one with the concentrated firepower of a modern military. First, because even a great dragon should get turned into burning chunky bits in that kind of situation. Second, because a great dragon wouldn't be dumb enough to get into such a situation to begin with.

Even if it was capable of winning (which it shouldn't be), I still don't see a great dragon revealing that much of its power. They have a nice place in modern society - they are movers and shakers, master manipulators. The humans are mere pawns, but only if they don't start looking at dragons as a threat. Why risk that?

What if you're Ghostwalker, and you use your Spirit Affinity: Everything to help you channel a force 25 great form spirit? Then you get hardened armor 50, which should stop everything short of a nuke.

Deflect, Spirit Channeled Hardened Armor and a few Spirit interceptors, Physical Barrier, Imp. Invisibility and Double Image, with a mere 50 Karma Pool and then triggered Heal spells as needed. If we're asking how a prepared Great Dragon could destroy a mundane city, such as Aden or Hualpa, then the answer is: very easily. If we're asking how Ghostwalker took down Denver, well... Home Ground, Potency and Regeneration.

Potency?

Remember.. Ghostwalker has initiate grade in the high double digits.. and when you channel, if they have the "armour" modification for initiate grade, that applies to you as well..

So really, channelling a force 25 great form, with +30 armour, at LEAST, really means Ghostwalker has Hardened Armour 100. Minimum.

Even most AV weapons aren't power 50.

Like I said, he probably channeled a really high-force spirit.

MMU Ghostwalker has had 20 000 years AWAKE to learn how people operate
and this isNOTthe first Air force he has gone up against
The last air forces had bigger guns too

There has to be something at the top of the food chain, and the best SR enemies are the ones you never go toe to toe with. This includes faceless corp bosses, and yes dragons. If we follow the line of reasoning that dragons should be killable in normal SR game context we should also expect rules to bring down megacorps such as Ares or Renraku, maybe even whole countries. Part of what makes SR into SR is the fact that your characters are drops in the ocean and trying to eek out survival, otherwise you're looking at D&D with guns and cars. They're not heros, they're (meta)humans.

And if runners can dodge bullets on the ground what's to say a dragon in the air with all the space to move in can't? Aside from the normal dodge abilities what's to say he doesn't have something like the adept powers which warn of impending attacks? Or anything that would in SR4 give extra initiative passes?

I could definitely see a dragon going on a rampage if it's the best way to get what he wants. Violence is a manipulative tool as well, and in the case of the big scaly ones a damn huge one. Do they care if (meta)humanity sees them as a threat? Dragon rampages are rare at best, and unless they were hell bent on wiping out life on the planet (well, by force anyway...) the governments won't tempt anything. Neither would anyone else who wants to keep all his limbs attached. Plus each named Great Dragon has its own agendas, noone would tarnish them all with the same brush unless they had a personal grudge.

The UGM-188 Sea Saber missile in Rigger 3 does 24 Deadly Naval, which translates to 120D (AV) + 26 boxes of overdamage. A basic Western Great Dragon with Immunity to Normal Weapons at Force 36 would still take 62D + 26 overdamage after both the Immunity and Hardened Armor. If a dragon went insane and really attempted to wage conventional war against a modern (SR) military, it would suddenly find itself the target of dozens or hundreds of these, and other weaponry that's at least as capable of reducing any fauna to a bloody mess.

they're CR 27. they'll eat a single 20th-level PC, yes, but a party of PCs should be able to manage it handily.

A party of 20th level PCs (and even more so NPCs) is meat against a CR 27 creature. CR 27 creatures are made for ECL 27 characters, which do exist as part of the standard setting. I don't have my ELH with me, but IIRC Mordenkainen is somehwere between 25th and 35th level.

Harlequin (the module, not the guy) said it best: if you give ti stats, it can be killed. If you don't want something killed, don't give it stats and fudge, fudge, fudge. If you do want it killable, give it stats based on how hard you want the task to be.

Depends on the party, obviously. Not all 4-character 20th level parties are equal. Some can slaughter great wyrm goldens with ease, some will get their asses handed to them by an ancient. Elminster is a 35th level character with a CR of 45, but a great wyrm red could quite feasibly kill him with a single round's worth of physical attacks (pre-ELH, at least).

Well, at least in SR3, if a dragon is hit by a SSM its chances of survival are quite a bit lower than they would be in D20 Modern.

Then again, there's always the question of whether or not a dragon really is on your side. Things such as friendships and alliances are rather ambiguous in Shadowrun...

"The enemy of my enemy... Could still be an evil, bad@$$ muthaF***'er"

"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, nothing more and nothing less."

Words a Shadowrunner will live or die by.


For what it's worth, I don't think a Shadowrunning team should be able to kill a GD unless it's the scope of the entire campaign, and they do it by assassinatorizing him while he's in human form. On the other hand, a Great Dragon needs to realize that despite what some people might say, it is not a Superpower unto itself, and if a full First World military gets ticked off enough to declare war on it, it should go and hide under Antarctica until the heat dies down in about a few centuries.

Then there's Lofwyr, who does have a Superpower (more or less) at his disposal, as well as himself. Busting Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries and/or Lofwyr would be pretty damn hard.

How powerful do you think Saeder-Krupp as a whole is in comparison to countries?

Depends on the Country. I'd say S-K on the whole is more powerful than most countries in the SR world, only bested by the likes of the UCAS, CAS, Japan, Britian, and other such nations.

Economically it beats them all individually. Militarily S-K should be rather lacking in comparison (though in my game I gave lofwyr his own personal carrier group in the atlantic and an actual army at his disposal, rather than a highly-trained security force). Influence on people? S-K's more powerful than any single nation in the world.

What would happen if he died randomly? What would this "power vaccum" I hear about look like?

Ya know, you all are forgetting that GD's now follow 4th edition rules. They been sorta nerfed since the maximum initiation they could get is 12.

Until I see canon 4th ed. stuff saying otherwise they are bound by the same rules as anybody else! They do have canon exceptions for skills beyond 7, but that's it!

Of course, this is why our dragon killing missiles include an astrally percieving hellhound brain as part of the guidance package. Sure the missiles are hard to maintain, any you need a rigger to play with all of the hell hound brains on a near constant basis, but the look on the dragon's face as the missile ignores his invisibility and blast him into small chunks is worth every penny.

And the fortune you reap on "salvage" is certainly going to pay back about a hundredfold.

Even if you could hit Ghostwalker with a missile, his army of force 20+ spirits could run over pretty much anything short of the Ghost Dance.

No one is arguing that draongs should be easy to kill. Same thing with, say, sinking a modern aircraft carrier, at the center of an escort group. Sure it's difficult, but it is doable.

The communication disconnect that is occuring is that plently of people are putting forward weapons that should be able to kill a dragon. The fact that it might take X such weapons all fired at once plus a few other hoops to be jumped through first to get the job done does not change the fact that dragons are not invulnerable.

No one is untouchable, this is normally a genre convention of cyberpunk. This is why people tend to get so pissed about the fiat powers of IEs and the dragons. They violate the genre conventions. SR is a combination of fantasy (where you kill dragons all the time) and cyberpunk (where major corps fall all the time). To have some things in the world that are untouchable walks all over that.

Leonardo?

And I'm unhappy that the only "Big, Invincible Entities" that've been crushed have been AI's. Lofwyr must die!

You know, that's one of the things I hate about IEs. I hate when they go through history turning all of the famous people into IEs.

People, people, people! Don't you realize that the best way to kill a dragon is with another dragon?

There's nothing wrong with cutting a deal with a Dragon...

Just be 200% CERTAIN you are ready, willing and able to throw your 120% behind said dragon's agenda, 'cause it has one, and furthering your agenda means you owe it the kind of favors you're gonna keep oweing for the rest of your life.

So for me, basically the only GD I'd cut with is already dead. Maybe Celdyr, 'cause you know he's deep into tech and stands against Lofwyr pretty often. Dunno about Hestaby, given what Bright Eyes said in Dot6W, she may be making a few too many of those "difficult calls", which suggests they've become easy. And when the difficult calls become easy, they ain't the difficult calls anymore, you're in trouble.


And I don't believe that even were a Great Dragon to awaken and attack today, that it could defeat the armed forces of a first-world military. He won't know Trid Phantasm, because that spell will obviously not have been developed yet (No mechanical sensors in the 4th world == no reason to fool them), and that means he can't hide. And what you can track, you can kill - and if you're a huge reptile in the sky, you're a very obvious target.

The reason is simple. It will simply be overwhelmed by a hailstorm of missiles launched from every concievable platform. AEGIS-equipped cruisers which can fire a ridiculous number of surface-to-air missiles. F/A-18, F-22, and F-35 aircraft which can attack from ridiculously improbable angles of attack that the dragon won't even consider, and at ranges that it just can't percieve at. He'll run out of his ablative layer of "take-the-hit" spirits sooner or later, and since a full-scale engagement with missiles and aircraft falls well outside the range of "normal weapons", those spirits will be dieing pretty fast, too.

And of course, there's the trump card. If he evades all of those and lands somewhere, messes up a city and says it's mine, we might just say "No it's not. Do you like tomahawks?" And no, I'm not talking about the conventional weapon of a Native American Brave.

Heh, I love how they've changed the spell's effects to justify its fucked up Drain Code.

Anyway, all this discussion of spells to affect an actual combat situation is pointless if we go by the assumption that the dragon (or other big baddie) in question has already neutralized every single potential threat to itself beforehand. By the same token, James Bond can beat the mundane, pre-magic US Armed Forces ca. 2006.