[Cast] Summon Ur-Priest = Dragons and Associated Class Levels

[Vaz]

I'm attempting to create a mid-level boss for upcoming players, which involves a Cobalt Dragon - basically a Dragon with a Force Breath Weapon which causes a bullrush effect with a DC equal to the damage dealt. Obviously, bull rush = Dungeoncrasher correlations.

However, I don't want to make it too screwy for my players, so was wondering how Dragons interact with "association" with Class Levels - as it stands, their chassis makes everything associated. Is this true?

[WhamBamSam]

I've wanted to sick a Cobalt Dungeoncrasher on a low/mid teen level party for a while myself. What's your current stub/statblock, out of curiosity?

I usually treat everything as associated, unless it's obviously suboptimal or somehow less bang for your buck than giving the levels to a human enemy. After all, I didn't put those levels there at random. They're there to specifically optimize the monster. The RAW for associated class levels (such as it is, it's more of a guideline) seems to support this. Anything that increases the dragon's spellcasting and any melee class should probably be associated.

If something introduces a new form of spellcasting, like Ur-Priest does, you could make an argument that the levels should be non-associated according to the guidelines, I guess. It strikes me as a little abusive, but at a table prone to particularly high optimization or a lot of player-killing (neither of these are necessarily a bad thing) it might be reasonable to calculate it that way.

You could also compare the levels against an equal increase in CR by adding dragon HD.