Well, i've come up with another minor gripe about the frequency and consequences of dragon attacks, and i'd like to hear some input from those who have nearly maxed out in character level.

The other day as I was wandering through Riverhold, a blood dragon attacked and ended up killing off Alvor, the very first NPC i encountered, and a reliable merchant for unloading loot. It was upsetting because it essentially diminishes the value of the town as a general-purpose stop, leaving only one other dedicated merchant (golden claw dude) who may also possibly end up outside and vulnerable to dragon attack. Later, an NPC outside of riften was roasted while defending his farm from a frost dragon with his bare fists, and i couldn't help but wonder if he would have offered an interesting side quest for me.

My problem is, once you initiate the dragon spawning portion of the main quest, they start showing up EVERYWHERE, killing merchants, potential quest givers, and other flavor npcs that i'd rather have alive. And since it never stops, i'd imagine that eventually you'd have ghost towns without any useful NPCs at all. I wish the NPCs, even the non-essential ones, would either run from attacking dragons or be unable to die from dragon damage, instead falling down into recovery mode like essential npcs (but ONLY under dragon attack... they would be capable of dying by the player or any other encounter).

To those of you with higher level characters, does this become a noticeable problem the farther you progress? I'm considering just creating characters that never embark upon the main quest, in order to preserve the full flavor of the game world. It's kind of a shame.

Yes, there is a point in the main quest in which the dragons become MUCH more common. And then after that there is a point where they become less common.

I assume completing said Main Quest will lower them to the least common of all, but it won't entirely remove them from the game.

Yeah i've noticed that too, and i seem to be either in or close to the apex of dragon encounter frequency. i've also heard that others have been encountering dragons within the walled main cities, which means that it's possible for even those "protected" merchants and npcs to get toasted.

my first request to the modding community would be the one mentioned in my previous post; when under attack by a dragon, ALL npcs are unable to be killed by dragon damage, and will be given a very low threshold for entering recovery mode so that they will essentially be incapable of providing combat assistance. Either that, or just have them immediately run into their homes at first sighting. I'm not too happy about losing Alvor!

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/9237-The-Dragonslayer

I have yet to lose an NPC to a dragon but Im a reloading ho-bag. The populations are already too low to risk losing more!



If he was a Dunmer he did :/

For someone who has achieved the "Less Dragon Attacks" achievement - Can you please throw up spoiler tags and tell us what part of the main quest we must complete to reduce the frequency of the random attacks?

I don't really have an issue with NPCs being killed by enemies or the environment. The issue is that this is a Bethesda game: NPCs are morons at best, suicidal at worst. If they had a real sense of self-preservation or if there was a reliable means for the player to protect them, then I'd say any deaths are a valid consequence. But that's not how things are, and so it comes off as an annoyance.

awwww... i'm not sure what race he was. just some male NPC. i don't like that the relationship between "fun dragon encounters" and "existence of flavor quests/NPCs" seems to be INVERSELY proportional.

They don't because of the insane amount of "essential" NPCs as mentioned in another recent thread.

Which I suppose was some of the point of setting them that way, but if they weren't it would have been a little more imperative that you actually SAVE the town and kill the dragon quickly.

That would, of course, also be based on "Jim the Blacksmith" not trying to go all Muhammad Ali on an ancient dragon.

Laughable AI, sometimes.

good point; luckily for me i'm an illusionist, so i suppose i could use fear spells on the useful npcs to preserve them... but still... dragon attacks have become more about preventing useful pit-stops from being rendered obselete rather than "oh cool! a fun and challenging dragon battle!".

I acknowledge that having NPCs around to get killed by dragons could be seen as realistic and immersive for some, but i'd rather have the USEFUL npcs staying out of the way and sticking around in my world. If they want to have commoners getting killed by dragons in order to give a real sense of "saving the world" to the dragonborn player, then just have totally useless NPCs called COMMONERS that spawn and will often choose to help fight dragons and risk their lives, while the other npcs either run or are incapacitated by dragon damage.