I've shared this with most of my friends but I'd like to share my favorite dragon moment from playing ttrpgs. Feel free to rebug with your own or jump into the comments. But while my story is about a dragon- it also talks about one of the dumbest systems of D&D/Pathfinder and why it saved the day.
We were playing the Jade Regent adventure path. While there is a lot of shit that isn't great there, the conceit is fun because the idea is you need to get a noble on their throne by crossing the globe. So a decent portion of the game is crossing the icy north. And having a game that focused on travel was novel.
So out party had recently made it to a northern town, contronted an obviously evil leader there who turned out to be a powerful wind mage, and scared him off. Now we just needed to deal with the dragon. Fun thing here, I talked with the creator of this adventure on the forums after these events first happened and he told me he designed this dungeon like this just as a bit of fun, not knowing how deadly it would wind up for us. See most times with dragons you descend into their caves horizontally... walking in. This white dragon had made its home in the side of an icy ravine. We had to descend the chasm, sneaking as best we could, and get into the clawed out rooms: because if it attacked us on the ropes we were fucking dead. The drop here was some incalculable amount of damage, it was bad. But we get down there, we start exploring- very quickly we fail our stealth rolls and the dragon wakes up and takes to the skies... so the dragon is fucking... flying, yeah? Out on the open of the ravine while our party is in an ice box just waiting for its breath attack.
Somehow we drop the thing, but we are fucked to hell... and then that goddamn wind mage flies down the chasm. He starts casing spells that push and pull us and my bard is IMMEDIATELY flung into the pit after the dragon.
Say it with me kids: this is why we always take feather fall.
I throw down some light and see that I am surrounded by the dead dragon and the skeletal remains of its long dead mate.
And its at this point we need to talk systems. Because, D&D and Pathfinder have long since abandoned their dungeon crawling roots. No one needs a 10 foot pole anymore. What they are in many ways, are video games... and that includes the amount of loot you pick up. A common thing with these types of games is pausing for a minute to look through all the shit you have picked up and forgotten, seeing if you have a key for the specific problem at hand. There are so many times a player has died because they forgot to check their fucking inventory. And don't tell me you would have remembered Gary, I've seen you forget where your glasses are while wearing them.
It's a really dumb system. But I honestly love it. It's video game nonsense but I do love looking through the various knick knacks of my adventures and going, fuck where did I get this potion again? But as I turn over my sheet I find a powerful scroll I'd kept around and never sold.
ANIMATE DEAD
I look to the scroll. I look at my use magic device score. And I look to the dragon corpses. I pull out my bestiary to grab some stats and make sure I can legally do this. Originally I had wanted to use the mate, it was a larger dragon, more powerful... but it was only bones and i needed wings to get out of here. While it might seem like this was a clever way of turning the battle, I'd like to point out that while I survived the fall I would very likely die if left down here. The rest of my party but one gets blasted down the hole, feather fall can be cast as a reaction- I save them but run out of spells. I roll my use magic device.
Up top, the only party member not getting blasted away is our dwarf, because you can't fucking move those. But he is a fighting a wind mage, in the air, with a wall of wind blowing away projectiles... and he is a melee fighter. The rest of his party fucking just died.
And then we come roaring up the chasm on the back of a zombie dragon, and yes games are fucking good sometimes! I command my creature to bite the mage, and the party jumps down to meet with the dwarf. The mage is wounded he doesnt have much left.... and I command the dragon to stop flying. With the mage in its jaws, they both plummet to their doom.
One of the best moments of fantasy wargaming I have ever done. It was a moment so completely unplanned that came about because of the weird dumb systems. Sometimes they can be really good!
Anyway, that character died the next session when they got dragged into a tar pit and couldn't make a grapple save.
