Removing spellcasting from dragons

[dascarletm]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if you simply removed all spellcasting from dragons, and kept them closer to their mythological counterparts, how much would that adjust their CRs? What do you all think?

[Beheld]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if you simply removed all spellcasting from dragons, and kept them closer to their mythological counterparts, how much would that adjust their CRs? What do you all think?

It depends. If your party is super competent, you'd probably need to decrease their CRs by a scaling amount, such that it's like, 1 for losing first level spells and 34 for losing 9th level spells, because being a big brute with a bad turn radius stopped being threatening at level 13.

But if your party is a "standard" party, that everyone believes the game is balanced for (even though it isn't) you could just leave them the same, since that party is like... 90% useless against Dragons that just fly around kiting with breath weapons. (Since Rogues won't get SA, Fighters won't even have bow feats, Clerics have a whole lot of melee range spells and some buffs that mostly aren't great, and Dragons have good saves and lots of HP, so a Blaster Wizard will just do very very very little to them.)

[ShurikVch]

I know 3 ways to remove Dragon's spellcasting:

1) Wyrm of War sovereign archetype (Dragons of Eberron): spellcasting replaced with bonus feats, or martial maneuvers from and stances from the Tiger Claw discipline (Tome of Battle); no CR change mentioned

2) Xorvintaal Dragon template (Monster Manual V): instead of usual spellcasting, Dragon gets some number of special abilities (but SLAs still there); some people regard Xorvintaal Dragons as "the most mythological dragons of D&D"; CR +0 or, if too many special abilities, +1 for each extra ability

3) Nameless template ("Dragon Psychoses" article, Dragon #313): lose both spellcasting and SLAs; CR -1 for every 5 CL lost (if no CL lost at all, then CR +1)