What I do have issue with is this concept that dragons or dragon affected people are the only ones that can move the plot. That the only way to affect the world is to be bequethed something in a dragons will or be someone around from the fourth age. I don't have a problem with magic, dragons, or anything else. I have issues with beings not being subtle. I have issues with Dragons not having to hide their hand a bit. That's what the current plot lacks, draconic subtlety. Because honestly draconic magic and raw dragon physicality shouldn't be as big of an ace as people play it out to be, and by now the nations of the world should have draconic counters under lock and key ready to go even if that method is "Glass the area with stand off munitions".
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TLDR: I believe if you get into a stand up fight with a AA or above mega, or especially a AAA mega you probably aught to be vaporized. The same goes if your a runner team or a multi-ton fire breathing lizard, and I'm a little disappointed that so many of the plots right now involve fourth world hold overs, as if no one born in the sixth world can do anything without an immortal elf or a dragon secretly being behind it.
And this is basically correct.
However.A draconic attack - especially if you're talking about a Great - can take place, start to finish, in a couple of hours, perhaps only in minutes. Most of your anti-dragon options take that most valuable of things, time, to implement - not
only because of the wrangling of and for authorization, but also for the simple mathematical and physical facts of 'It takes X item Y time to make it from point A to point B before it can execute a terminal attack maneuver on Target Q.' Do Thor shots have that problem? No, but Thor shots have a different issue implied.
It is
implied that authorization for something like a Thor strike is under Corporate Court jurisdiction - which means that letting one loose
without it could/would endanger your very existence as a corporation. Each member of the corporate court is going to act in their corporation's best interests; taking Danchekker out (the only use of a Thor shot that
I know about)
was in every corporation's interests. Using a Thor strike to take out a Great Dragon committing a military strike against the people who executed (possibly falsely) one of the
highly limited population of his people is going to run into a large number of blocks, the first one being that one big corporation with the Great Dragon at the helm - and the other ones being every megacorp who has a beef with Aztechnology. (Remember that the genetic-predisposition spell came only at the
very end of Sirrurg's hours-long attack.) Could Aztlan have nuked him before that? Yes, but you're also talking about a) using a weapon with questionable efficacy and b) killing a HELL of a lot of your own people to get him, which would NOT have played well. Sirrurg should have left well enough alone with the military base.
Anyhow. Take these things along with the fact that a) dragons tend to stick together against metahuman 'jurisdiction' (witness the current morass), and b)
THE largest corporation is run by the
de facto chief dragon, and c) that plenty of other corporate might is, with or without metahuman knowledge, leashed to dragons and their interests, what do you have? You have a small group of personally, economically, militarily, and politically powerful individuals willing to work together if, all of a sudden, the world wants to go to war with them.
Yes, they're having internal issues right now; yes, a lot of their
typical subtlety has gone by the wayside as they are facing off with each other in displays of magic, might, and influence. Yes, you don't like that that's true, but that's what happen when the fecal matter strikes the spinning turbine; shit goes everywhere. But see, draconic magic and raw dragon physicality are
not the only pieces on the board. They
may be the only pieces you're paying attention to, but that doesn't make the other pieces go away.
