How To Kill An Ancient Red Dragon At Level 1

OK, so a lot of people talk about how weak the enemies in this edition of D&D are, that combat is simple, boring, easy, and mostly safe. To this I say poo-poo. If you can't drop a single player to 0 with the first encounter in LMoP, you aren't implementing your monsters very well. Likewise, people who complain about the difficulty guidelines given in the DMG being too gentle, again I have to say that if you're pulling your punches, no guideline can match up to your incompetence. (No offense meant, in this I mean that you are failing to compete.)

That said, as harsh as I am when I control my monsters, I firmly believe that it is entirely possible for high level players to be demolished by mooks, and it's just as possible for a first level player to annihilate a high CR monster. The thing the guidelines don't account for is strategy. Those guidelines are written with the assumption of a head-on clash of arms in a face-to-face confrontation. It isn't meant for creating challenges of any other sort.

This is my guide to how to destroy an ancient red dragon- one controlled the way I would run it- at 1st level.

Let's make something clear though: This depends on being able to hire soldiers. If your DM makes it impossible to hire anything more powerful than a commoner- or indeed disallows hiring anyone for anything at all- you can not do this.

Alright you bunch of apes, here's the plan:

1. Find a suitable killing site.

You do NOT want to fight a dragon in its lair or out in the open. You need to corner it in a roofed-in area where it can't use its mobility to defend itself. A large cave or a big interior space in an unusually vacuuous keep might work.

2. Pool your resources.

Gather your collective starting wealth as a party. Do some small quests to earn some extra coin.

3. Hire labor.

You need people to carry a lot of stuff for you. People are WAY cheaper than horses at 2sp per day and no initial purchase cost. Hire a gaggle of commoners. Buy a whole bunch of sacks for them.

4. Lure the dragon out of its lair.

You need the thing gone for a few days. A couple of weeks is better. The best chance you have at doing this: Whoever got the highest ability score roll during chargen should put it in charisma and play a dragonborn dragon blood line sorcerer. It also helps if this player plays a noble to justify later meetings to hire soldiers. Remember to appeal to the dragon's hubris and greed.

This step, and step 8, are much, much harder than they sound. Getting an ancient red dragon to do anything it wasn't planing to do should be extremely difficult. They are chaotic, disobedient, independent, and inherently evil. They're also supposed to be incredibly smart. Good luck.

5. Steal its hoard.

All of it. I told you you need a bunch of commoners. If you can go into debt hiring them, or hire with the promise of later pay, all the better.

While you're at it, you're probably dungeon crawling its lair too, right? Well kill everything. Get rid of its minions. If you can hire soldiers on loan to help you with this, do it. The last thing you need is a rescue team throwing a monkey wrench into your dracocidal plans!

6. Use the hoard to buy an army.

Pay off your debts first, of course.

7. Become Tucker's Kobolds.

Prepare the killing site for the dragon. Make it so the dragon has to fight to get in, possibly being forced to destroy a barrier, while taking damage from sources that it can't retalliate against. Booby trap the interior of the cave. Find some way to subdue the dragon. Set up siege machines behind protective structures. Do everything you can to make it so your guys can attack without being attacked. Also, set things up so that once the dragon manages to get inside, the entrance seals behind them, trapping them completely.

8. Lure the dragon to the killing site.

Maybe taunt it and tell it to come get its treasure hoard back.

Alright, let's talk numbers. What is this really going to take?

The magic number you're looking for is 546 damage. It has 22 AC.

How many guys are you going to need to hire, and how long will it take? That depends on what statblock the DM lets you hire. You're most likely to get either guards or veterans, so that's what I'll calculate.

Guards have +3 to hit by throwing their spears. That means out of every 20 you hire, ~2 will hit per round. Their spears deal an average of 4 damage per hit, so you're looking at ~8 damage per turn per 40gp/day spent on your army. Keep in mind that they lose their spears when they throw them, so you'll need to buy stacks of ammunition to supply them after the first round. I would recommend buying piles of javelins. They're cheaper. One volley of javelins will run you 10gp per round per 20 guards.

Veterans also have a 10% chance of hitting. So again, ~2 per round per 20 soldiers, costing 40gp per the day. Their attacks deal an average of 5 damage, so you're looking at ~10 damage per round per squadron. Crossbow bolts have the same effective price as javelins, theyre just bought in stacks of 20 at a time, so cumulative rounds will cost you just as much.

So, given that information, how many 20-man attack volleys will it take to end this dragon?

68.25 for guards.

54.6 for veterans.

Now, obviously, the more rounds you run, the fewer soldiers you'll have attacking, and the longer it will take. Theoretically, if you can afford to hire that many squadrons, you can kill the thing in the first round of combat. Keeping in mind that 1 squadron, costing 2gp per man and consisting of 20 men, costs 40gp, that means a first-round kill costs 2,730gp for 1,365 guards and 2,184gp for 1,092 veterans.

Given that the treasure hoard should contain approximately 322,000gp, that shouldn't be a problem. You'll even have the spare change to repay the 10 commoners you hired to haul that 1,400lb of coinage back to civilization! Oh, also, since a sack has a capacity of 30lb, that means you'll need 5 sacks per commoner, for a total of 50 sacks.