Why not? There's an ever increasing body of magical knowledge. Some of those being born today might, in the 80th and 90th years, find themselves with 13 magic and a will to do something with it. Miles Lanier (I forget his name. Featured in Dunkelzahn's will) probably would have gotten there easily if he hadn't gotten shredded in the Eurowars. I can't imagine many dragons exactly need a "mailed fist" in the vein of Darth Vader but they've all got servants. They would probably recruit someone with promise, exchanging utmost servitude for financial support and magical training. Like the Benandanti, if they were trained by Schwarzkopf rather than having money flung at them willy-nilly.

And it doesn't mean your bank account will swell after you kill one, but you will have a gigantic pile of meat, telesma, alchemical ingredients and radicals. If you somehow do it in it's lair and it is a more traditional dragon, you might even find some valuable memory crystals. Or art.

I think people overplay the 10,000 year old thing a bit.(unrelated but not all GD are 10,000 years old)

Really look at most peoples lives, how much of your life is dedicated to constant improvement and how much is dedicated to getting by as a slacker. I suspect virtually everyone is in a place where the vast majority of there time is spent not in self improvement or spending karma to be a more bad ass whatever. Why do people always assume once people become immortal they get some super drive tony robins whispering in there ear thing and become stupidly powerful at everything. Quite frankly I suspect there rate improvement stagnates even faster. Once you are in the yeah I'm bad ass and i don't have to even try to get by stage, why are you busting ass to improve yourself all the time. Also who says they did any magic at all or any significant practicing of magic during the down times. On top of that I suspect what they can do is limited to the current magic level so even if in the height of the 4th age they were mega mages of justice they probably can't pull even half of that out of a hat. Anyways, I'm rambling, but to sum up I have faith in laziness and while I would think they would be much more talented than mortal mages etc. I don't think they would be nearly as smart/powerful etc as people imply because there 10,000 years old.

When we play our characters, usually GMs insist that the adventure/session/whatever-you-wish-to-call-it poses some sort of challenge before we are actually awarded much karma. At the level of GDs, I think that it would be very rare to find anything that can sufficiently challenge a GD and thus while they may live a long time, they aren't getting much karma for most of the time.

In fact I would speculate that GDs spend much of their long lifespan in "downtime". Even for Lowfyr and Alamais or Lung and Ryumyo, the rivalries do not provide 5-6 karma a "session" but more like a low but steady trickle of karma (maybe 2-3 karma per time unit of measure).

So while they live a long time, they do not actually have comparatively that much more experience than a metahuman.

Well going by the history fluff, they are active for ~5000 years at a whack. I don't know about you but if I was active for 5k years, I'd have a fair chunk of Karma stored up... a lot more than your average runner simply due to the timeframe involved.

This becomes more true when you take into account metahuman lifespans. ~80-100 years for a baseline Human againt an entity that dies only to violence / suicide / disease.

That is a REALLY bad idea. If you have read about Big D's will it caused all sorts of issues because in Draconic society the DRAGONS divide up the personal possessions of the dead dragon. They might have taken out one stupid suicidal dragon, but the rest will want what they consider theirs.

They (non-dragon dragon-killers) could probably get away with whatever they could carry at the time. Odds are the rest of the dragons won't know the full inventory of the dead dragon's hoard, even if they put their respective heads together they probably couldn't account for every last gold coin.

I was thinking of anything "Interesting" that they might get. And I'm sure that dragon's keep their gold in places where they can leverage it or trade it easily. Anything over 1 million the other dragons probably know about.

Even 1 item for the group valued at 500,000 would be quite a reward, financially.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm AFB right now and I'm posting this based on my recall, but ain't there two "levels" of Dragons? Great Dragons and non-Great Dragons? And only GD have the Twist Fate power?
Because if so, the OP never mentioned which kind of Dragon was and a normal Dragon could even be taken down this way (although said Dragon was clearly drunk or somehow inebriated and not thinking right...)

You are right, but wrong.

Fair enough, that's what happens for posting when I've read only the first page.
Then, yes, it doesn't make any sense, it is worse then putting your neofite vampire players fighting an Elder Ahroun Silver Fangs who won't spend Fury points nor use any gifts of 2nd rank or higher...

I'm loathe to start a new thread, and this one's already not only gotten derailed, but grown wings and flown to the moon. What DOES a dragon look for in a servant? What would they look for when just waking up in the teens and going "Okiedokey, tail, check, wings, check, legs, check, not a horror construct trapped in the prison of my own mind, check, just stick my head out the door and.. WHAT THE BLOODY HELL?" Just snag the first person who came looking for them and molded them into what they needed? What about later on in the cycle?

Drakes. They look for their servant race of drakes.

- Talent
- Sane, or insane in a way that can be directed in a constructive way; reliabiity
- Lifespan; when you scheme on the scale of centuries, people who die after 50 years are really annoying. It takes time to promote a pawn to a better piece.
- Loyalty
- Compatible with the dragon's own personal hangups ("He's not allowed to like the color red...")

- Has a thing for predicament bondage.

Er, wait. I am not allowed to ruin another topic.

Not necessarily. Daviar is an elf, yeah, but Ghostwalker's translator is an ork, and their life expententcy in SR is what, 40 years? 50?

Fact is, the problem with serving a dragon is the same problem that, say, the Ancients have. When your upper level leadership is too strong/skilled to be killed off and don't grow old and die naturally, then someone's just armored the glass ceiling. Rolf Bremen was SK Prime's top knee-breaker and as close to a number one guy that Lofwyr has probably ever had, but he's still just human, so the chances of him doing anything to supplant or remove Lofwyr are slim to fragging none. Therefore, I see serving a dragon as one of two things:

1.) An act of loyalty. Somewhere along the lines, the dragon has done something to make its servants unswervingly and unquestioningly loyal to it.
2.) An act of stupidity. You're just in it for the perks, without realizing that you'll never quite reach the top.

I seem to remember reading something about PC's risking being turned into drakes and removed as NPC's for excellent service. And in regards to lifespan, there's always the possibility of a dragon, say, surprising a valued servant and waking them up with a "oh hi, ur immurtal now lolz". They did it to the elves. Especially if it was a valued servant who was unshakably loyal while still unable to threaten them. Or just make that immortality conditional upon service.

You'd need that "fair chunk" of karma when nearly all of your Attributes are in the double digits.

I don't know about you but if I was a powerful ageless entity, I'd not have a fair chunk of karma stored up, simply because the GM in the sky won't be giving me all that much karma unless there is something that awesome that can challenge me. If I am ageless, why am I risking my immortal ass on higher risk karmic payouts, when I can get the same at much lesser risk over the next hundred years? I can sit in my lair playing draconic chess with my pawns or playing low risk power poker for much safer and just as effective results.

That was vampires. To be a drake you either spend 60 BP on the Drake quality or you spend 5 BP (and a huge karma later) for Latent Dracomorphasis.

Depends on whether the Dragon still remembers the Alter Life spell from back in Earthdawn days.

Assuming, of course, that Earthdawn is Shadowrun.

Let me see if I can explain this better:

E-A-R-T-H-D-A-W-N

S-H-A-D-O-W-R-U-N

It is my mathematics that the above words are 22.2(repeating) similar, but the similarity of the spelling of the words is not indicative of the similiarity of the content. Even then, the similiarity of the content is not indicative of the relationship of the object (most biologists are still having problems with this).

The point is, when you're 10,000 years old, you have access to things that nobody alive has even dreamed of.

Like it or not, the two are part of the same timeline, they refferance eachother and contribute to an overarching mythos.

Only up until 3E or so, at which point Earthdawn and ShadowRun were bought by different companies and both have ceased to make references to each other beyond continuing to use material that is/was a reference.

From what I've heard about it, Dawn of the Artifacts makes some heavy references to the 4th World and artifacts (who would have guessed) from that time...

Another thing that seems to be lost in the discussion, sidetracked by a player perspective of the sky is the limit so long as I have the karma, is that of potential. There is talk of this mage or that mage having study time enough to get ZOMG POWR LULZ, but everyone has a limit. No matter how much I work out, I will never have the massive muscles of a body builder, it is just not in my potential (excluding muscle augmentation or the like).

An example is also the guy mentioned in Dunkelzahn's will, who I can never remember his name. He is mentioned as the most powerfully magical person in the world. Straight up. So no matter the amount of study and training, no one in SR canon can exceed, or even equal, that. At the time anyways.

Also, how much karma do you think Dragons have to spend just fixing themselves up after a 5,000 year nap? Muscle atrophy and brain malaise probably kick after a only a few centuries of sleep. So would the dragons, know another nap is coming, save up karma to get a head start out in the next phase, or just spend all of it and hope to gain enough after awakening.

Or, as exceedingly magical beings, do they even suffer from muscle atrophy during their sleep? After all, not all of a dragon's physical abilities are derived from its physical Attributes. Example: western dragons don't actually use their wings to fly.

Better example: eastern dragons don't have wings and still fly.

Yes, thank you. I was trying to avoid the blindingly obvious.

Harlequin, the IMmortal Elf. A nd you can have the muscles of a bodybuilder, incidently. You won't have 22 inch biceps and 38 inch thighs, but you can get it nicely in proportion for your body and large. It just takes the right training program and the right diet.

Well, I could have gone and looked up the math that showed that a dragon over 5 meters long would be incapable of flight, due to the fact that in order to have enough wing surface area, the bones would snap under the weight.

Slack really is the ultimate treasure to hoard.

I....am going to forward that to someone, who uses the signature "The true gold of a dragon's hoard is wisdom."

Exactly. I can and do work out, but my maximum muscle mass is not enough to bench 300 lbs, and never will be, I do not have the physique for it. Which is the point that you also make as well. No matter what, there is a maximum threshold that I can not exceed. Shadowrun as a system tends to ignore this, but this discussion long ago left the realm of what the system accounts for.

Magic atrophy then? As the mana level drops significantly as well.

Magic is just the ability to handle it. Channel, if you will. And you can bench "300lbs" with the right amount of effort and training. I squat 240kg for 6 reps - I'm only a little over six feet, I do not take steroids, or any of the other crap and I'm nowhere near my "genetic potential". I am not some monster with GIGANTIC QUADS, HEAD FOR THE HILLS BEFORE THEY EAT US but it is the upper limits of human potential that you need to worry about which "300lbs" is nowhere near.

We seem to assuming that dragons stay in the "advancement cage"; the limits and rules that make sure PCs can't advance too easily, without working hard for further improvement.

But what if dragons find an escape from the "cage"? Something like a Steal Skills spell, that allows them to take experience from others for themselves. It would also give them even more reason to employ lots of proxy agents, putting them in harm's way to make sure they earn lots of karma to nibble off. Don't deal with dragons.

Or bargaining with free spirits that can transfer karma. I'm sure dragons can offer people something worthwhile (survival, protection, wealth..)

Maybe those memory crystals are a workaround; by storing part of your mind in a crystal, you make enough space to stay mentally agile and fresh.

Or studying really really hard; with their intellect, they could take a shot at staying completely up to date on all technological development.



It gets harder when they're trying to study something like Magic, where they themselves are so far ahead that there's no one else left to teach them anything. But there's always the Metaplanes.. *Cue the Plot Device theme music*

Won't many dragons, especially GD's have worshipers? Isn' t that a magical karma fountain? Fly over a primitive town, have 100 natives worship you for an hour or two, perform sacrifices in your honour and walk away with 100 karma?

I don't see Karma as anything more than a game mechanic which helps with advancement. Skills and knowledge skills would be broken up in the millions to really reflect reality so we cannot expect a simplified game mechanic to apply everywhere. Karma is for players not for NPCs.

As for the stupor of sleeping for 5000 years, if I was a Dragon or GD, I would insulate my hibernation home with something that would sustain me. There would also make sure there was some kind of stasis spell in place.

---

Edit:
Personally I think there are two major camps.

Camp A: that believes that dragons are basically deities for shadowrun, and unless you are running an epic campaign where you have a team 2000 karma each with 20 int /will you won't be touching them.

Camp B: believe that dragons are just a powerful sentient race with resources. They are killable, but because of their wealth are very difficult to reach.

I am in camp B that think that too many game mechanics like "twist fate" have been put in to overpower Dragons. What boggles me is why. Personally I don't think that any shadowrun team would be getting to someone like Damien Knight without some other major player use them as pawns. So why would dragons be any different?

I like your Camp B, but I'd like to offer a defense of the Twist Fate power.

Dragons are smart. Really really smart. They've prepared for everything. So much so, that they anticipated nearly any use of Edge or success by a PC, and have some counter-plan. I wouldn't use Twist Fate as a random fuck-you ability then; come up with a way the dragon's Crazy Prepared ability was used to frustrate the PC's success. Some pre-set defense, or special unexpected maneuver the dragon pulled off to counteract things. Since you can only do that so many times before even your Crazy Prepared defenses and surprises run out/cease to surprise, it costs Edge.

So why do it that way? Because as a GM you're fighting a mental battle against the players, and there's more of them, trying to outsmart you. It's hard to play a being with mental attributes in the 7+ range, since by definition we don't have those. Twist Fate and such allow you to insert things as needed, to reflect things the smart dragon would have known but you didn't.
Also, because a GD isn't supposed to die too easily, and a lucky shot by a player can still do that. It's okay that the group can defeat a dragon, with planning and luck, but it's wrong if they have any Edge remaining by the end of the fight, or if one or two lucky shots are all they need.

It's somewhat the same with Elders in Vampire, or uber-smart NPCs in any game really. They need a generic ability to pull a countermeasure out of their ass for whatever PCs throw at them. Maybe some sort of Logic+Intuition check to have prepared something for that particular circumstance (that you as GM never imagined, but a smart dragon would.)

In Vampire, this issue is harped on again and again; the Elders are prepared for anything.. except cutting edge tech. In such a setting, you could let the NPC make an Intellect+Skill check against whatever the PCs are using; successes indicate level of preparedness.

I really appreciate the insight. Your point is well worded. I guess my issue is with what I am interpreting with twist of faith. I guess that I have learned the hard way, that no matter how smart you really are, and I have worked with at least 5 people with IQ's over 160 is that you can't think of everything, and I am cynical about GM's defaulting to twisting fate instead of letting a brilliant plan being a possibility a dragon would not have seen coming. Since I don't have 4e, I can't guess at what the power is, and I am assuming the worst from GMs. I do like the idea of a "Logic+Intuition check" before a twist of fate, but I guess I see GD's as just really cool and powerful NPC's an not integral plot devices.

If for instance, somehow PC's got their hand on a thor shot, and managed to get it around defenses to nuke a limo that Damian or (Dragon meeting a dignitary) was in, I am not sure if I would allow twisting of fate. I would have a dragon have multiple quickened spells at least force 8 on him/her, spirits up the wazoo, satellite/drone surveillance, and roll an intelligence gathering roll every time the PC's mentioned the targets name, to see if anything gets back to the dragon along the way, but if the PC's get a face to face, and I don't have anything on paper/in my mind for preparations I would let the dragon die. Then heap on the pressure as 1000 follower zeolots now work to avenge their object of affection after the fact.

By the book, Twist Fate lets a dragon do two things:

- Spend a point of Edge to cancel the effect of a point of Edge spent by someone in LOS, but the burning of permanent Edge
- Spend a point of Edge to force someone in LOS to re-roll all the dice on a check that scored a hit

This is of course just the mechanical effect; in your example, the dragon can't use it to stop the Thor shot (no LOS). He can still use Edge to escape/resist damage somehow. (Alamais)

How you implement the actual use of Edge/Twist Fate is another matter; maybe he just flew off that moment, taking him out of the ground zero area, so that he could survive, albeit wounded.

In face to face confrontation, you can represent Twist Fate as the large piles of powers dragons have that haven't been written down/discovered, as well as contingency plans and extraordinary abilities of improvisation.

Some examples:
- the dragon used it's frightful presence to distract the character for a moment, causing his focus to falter
- the dragon used luck-altering metamagics to counteract your sudden lucky shot
- the dragon is used to people trying to hit it with last-ditch efforts, and knows how they behave. It could see your effort from a mile away.


However, more emphasis is really needed on how to showcase the dragon's level of smartness, experience and preparation. Hence the Intuition and Logic check idea. Hits would enable the dragon to:
- Guess the PCs' plan, from the way they're moving and looking around
- Know them by name, because it's agents have been monitoring these potentially dangerous people for a while now
- Determine their physical and mental condition
- See their weaknesses
- Spot random events in advance, that it can then use against the PCs
- Know what to say to cause them doubt and confusion, anguish, emotional pain, triggering of any Negative Qualities you can think of etcetera
- For large amounts of hits: he knew they were coming, and has seeded the area with traps/allies that the PCs couldn't reasonably expect to be there
- For large amounts of hits: he knew they were coming, and he's left quietly, leaving a Secret Lair Self-Destruct running, with about a minute on the timer; it'll detonate in half that time
- Take any precaution commonly mentioned in Evil Overlord Advice lists you can find on the internet
- Explain to the PCs how they've always been working for the dragon, even now, because they're helping it fake it's own death for a while
- Explain to the PCs which enemy of the dragon really manipulated them into wanting to attack the dragon in the first place

Any of these explanations can be true or not; if you simply decide at the drop of a hat that it's true, just retroactively make it be true all this time along. Rewrite history to suit the dragon.


You do need to be careful with this of course; if you go overboard, it'll be like railroading and invulnerable enemies all over again.

Heck, we could even say that Twist Fate is a metamagic ability (great dragon only). Some of its uses require the dragon spend a simple action in order to use, so the dragon has to have don something in a measurable amount of time that causes the effect.