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 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!

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

... 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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

*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.

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

Partly true.

The challenge is intended to test the runners' abilities directly against the dragon's abilities. If the runners choose not to try to kill, they have acknowledged that an intelligent dragon is more than a match for them.

The idea of reinforcements coming also demonstrates that the dragon is by no means neutralised, just because the runners have it cornered. Why should it be? It probably wouldn't have a Matrix connection -- much game history behind that -- but there's no reason there shouldn't be many other kinds of communication which the runners won't be able to intercept.

But to wait and try to fight off those reinforcements instead of choosing to tackle the dragon still doesn't resolve the basic question: can a team of runners, played to the fullest of their attributes and skills and tech, take down a dragon, similarly played?

Hmm,

Here's my assumptions about the lair:
I has a secure 'campus' of several hundred acres. Thia may be a mountain, a private island, or just an owned section of land somewhere. So you can't just walk/drive up the the actual lair.

The lair is located is surrounded by relatively neutral territory, such that an assault upon it is not likely to trigger an immediate response from the local national armed forces/etc. (Or just assume that they have been bribed/suborned by the runner's principal). While the runner's can't take more than say, 24 hours, to take the dragon out, the fact that they have started letting off huge bombs, spirit packs, or whatever else they might use will not be commented upon.

The actual lair is bomb resistant. While it would be trivial to crack it open using something like a GBU-28 the runner team will not have access to one. However, this means that just setting some explosives off on the surface are unlikely to do much. In addition, crashing hijacked jets, sub-orbitals, etc into the lair, while they might kill the dragon, will not be a sure thing.

What other general limitations should there be? For example, is using your pornomancer adept to subvert a cult of several hundred and then have them all commit mass-suicide on the lair site to raise the background count a legal move in the contest?

This is completely off topic, but if someone were to try and get their hands on a nuclear warhead, what would the cost/availability be?

Prep time to the actual battle? 24 hours sounds reasonable enough. That probably won't be enough time to raise and/or subvert a cult for the purpose.

An implicit limit might be that runners, almost by definition, are not going to have better relations with the "host" country than the dragon, even if it's not a great dragon. The country might not step in to help the dragon, but it's certainly not going to help the runners either.

Unless the runners include some very high level contacts in their builds and make the appropriate rolls (including the "available to receive your call" roll), odds are the country might even object to the runners pulling out too much ordinance on its home turf -- but depending on how quickly the runners finish, the country might not be able to react until long after it's all over.

For the sake of keeping this a playout of a hypothetical scenario and not turning it into a full run, I'm very much limiting the size of the lair.

You'll have to flesh things out a little bit more. For example presumably the lair wouldn't be someplace a van can drive. Also one has to presume that some very very nasty wards are up.

Also please tell me that between the books, the errata, and the FAQ that they haven't left a magical way to make drain go poof. In that case when players are casting spirits that have a reasonable chance of punching force 12 or higher wards they are going to suffer.

Really in my opinion it's really really going to come down to tactics. And there is the reason why usually I groan when GMs do stuff like this, they play them wrong.

But, without a little fudging, playing a dragon "right" would be very hard.

A dragon is smarter than you (you're capped at 7 after all ), and it's had a lot of time to think about it's defenses. You probably spent an hour. It knows nearly every spell and power and all their nuances. You have to look up some stuff (meaning you aren't so skilled at using it).

So maybe a GM would have put a lair on the ground where it's easy(er) to blow up.

Or maybe the GM would have forgotten to put magesight fibres all over the place so the dragon can give the runners remote hell. Or to invoke the dragons collection of spirits.

Also there is the bit about dragons being prime runners. Now part of that is just giving them seperate damage tracks and all that. But it typically also implies extra karma for the prime runner as the players level.

This extra karma is sort of how I rationalize the fact that dragons should really be initiates. Otherwise a not too uncommon mage would have an edge over old Lofwyr, who, unable to purchase other skills like basic finanace etc, must have someone else in the shadows running his corp.

Deal with that as you wish I guess. I'm inclined to say that in practice it should be up to the GM to hand wave as they will, which really works better.


If you want to get into the details I would say the base stuff is for a "created" dragon. Advancement works as normal for a prime runner.

Thus for a superhuman prime runner dragon against 200 karma players you would add 400 karma unto the dragon.

In my opinion that (along with all the optional powers plus 12 essence) would squarely make the thing a "higher-end" non-great dragon.

This actually won't totally change the dragon as it's skills and (presumably) stats are all maxed out to start. So you'd just be putting the karma into things like initiation. (hmmm maybe that accounts for the varaible magic? Maybe a magic 12 dragon is functionally a level 6 initiate.)

Anyway I guess the OP has to decide how they want to handle dragons and initiation. It's a huge decision though. If the PCs are all level 4 initiates going up against a non-initiated critter the tables start turning significantly.

(sorry for the bold, I just realized this post is too long, and the OP should make a call on that).

Dragons should be initiates but the problem is what Metamagics are they supposed to get and what spirits do they get to summon(ie what "tradition"). You see Dragons are Magicians(ok), but the rules for Magicians are written for metahumans. Do Dragons follow the same rules or no?

Tal: What I mean is that both the dragon and the runners want to engage each other only when 1 side is at a disadvantage. The key to this is while the runners are willing to engage the dragon as long as it is not in its lair and it holding all the cards, whereas the dragon is likely to be disadvantaged if it faces the runners without its Home Lair advantage.

Its not that people are saying its the only acceptable way, they're saying that its no longer a fight against a dragon at this point. As someone said, you could put a dude in a wheelchair or something at the end of the dungeon, and it would count for as much.

I think the issue is the massive importance of tactics.

A bunch of runners in a straight up fight can nuke a dragon. Especially when they're level 4 initiates and the dragon isn't.

Ah but what happens if they didn't see one of the magesight goggle fibre ports? Suddenly AOE spells are raining down on them.

Also if they go inside the lair the dragon could now detonate a big pile of explosives while its around a couple bends and reinforced blast doors.

I'm going with the previous statement that the dragon's lair is underground and in the wilderness somewhere, and secure against explosives.

My team is four summoning specialist mages, with counterspelling as their secondary area of expertise (so still horribly good at these prices), and summoning focuses. Remainder of team are two samurai hacker/rigger types.

Team arrives at lair, summons four force 6 earth elementals, invokes them. All use Earthquake power at the same time. Underground lair collapses as do all access tunnels in the area whether known or unknown.

How ironic. I was just digging up your quote from the other thread, knasser, as being the quote which first challenged the early presentation of SR dragons as being something that no one should want to tangle with:

Okay, back-replies, because I missed about five or so posts between the ones I wrote.

First, the scenario remains the dragon against the runners. Period. If the runners get tech (including weapons), the dragon gets tech. Do note that a dragon, in and of itself, can't use the Matrix -- so its lair won't be wired.

@ sunnyside:

Exactly. Tactics are the thing. I can't represent an 8 intelligence, so the best I can do is to play it intelligently to the best of my abilities, assuming that those playing the runners will do the same. I'm abstracting as much as I can.

Here's (pdf file) something interesting to throw into your games.

Who says a dragon cannot use Trodes now in SR4 or AR?

Also stuff like this would probably lead to a serious of rules threads.

For example is quake blocked, to any degree by magical means. If not what is happening where the intensity doesn't drop off with radii like a grenade?

Also again if the party shows up they'd have to be really using that counterspelling hard if and mage fibres are around. Plus the dragons high force spirits could pose a real problem for the lesser invoked spirits. True the mages could hypothetically try and invoke/cast their own high force spirits, but that will likely not end well if they go over magic(and even then.....).

Also there is a cat and mouse game possible in the astral if you are in the "spells can attack at range in the astral" camp as oposed to the "it says no ranged attacks in the astral, so spells are short ranged" camp. Most, I think, are in the former until it bites them in the butt. But in that case any mages supporting their dual spirits in the astral risk getting nuked by the dragon hiding in some trees far far far away.

And as that's a surprise situation, depending on how you interprite some stuff, they likely will not get any counterspelling, meaning the PC(s) are dead. The dragon can then relocate, especially if they don't know where the spell came from.

Actually can a dragon even bind foci without karma?

But Big D's will and such was mostly closed per Sinner when he said that the old SR3 plot threads were closed off. And with no matrix how is most of anything going to get out. Wireless is everywhere. I see no reason as to why a dragon could not make use of AR with Trodes or Nanopaste.

I'd help to have a bit more concrete info about the dragon lair, since that will greatly effect what you can and can't do.

For example, attacking a dragon he holed up in the Wieliczka Salt Mine will be considerably different from attacking a dragon holed up in a purpose built concrete and steel bunker on his own private island.

[edit]
heh, even a nifty semi-map of the tourist sections of the mine.
[/edit]

It seems to me like the easiest way to go about this would be to make a standard six-man Shadowrunner team with the starting BP and cash (an adept super-Face, say two drone riggers for big machinegun-toting robots, and a trio of mages with one specialized in offensive magic, one in summoning, and one dedicated to spell defense type stuff)... and then take the six million nuyen and invest in mercs (with the Face handling negotiations) and heavy weapons (sniper rifles, HMGs, rocket launchers).

I bet the dragon'd lose.