Why are dragons so overpowered? how are you even supposed to fight one?

Just accept their superiority and bow before them as your masters, user.

Let me help you with that.

What is friendship?

You ask the Giants for aid.

wh-what does frienship have to do with anything... we are talking about dragon here, user.

Erek-Hus, the King of terror.

With an oversized sword made from
monster parts and three buddies who also have oversized weapons made from monster parts.

One thing that my GM has done to prevent flaming strafes is to link the muscles they use for their two most devastating features. Dragons can fly, or use a breath weapon, but not both. That at least gives them a reason to choose to fight on the ground (though landing just long enough to spit fire at everyone and then taking back off isn't out of the question).

Dragons have underground lairs specifically so that the protagonists can fight them in their own homes for a strategic advantage. The dragons liar is basically tailor made to be the single worst place for a dragon to be, because even a large underground cave dramatically limits their mobility and combat options compared to fighting outside.

So you fight them underground, use the close space to get into melee with it, and you go for the soft underbelly. Thats the classic approach. Getting up on the walls of the save and making a plunging attack onto the dragon for a high risk high reward strike is less common but more dramatic.

If you are going to fight a dragon out int he field, you need an army specially designed for the task. You need banks of archers to wing the dragon and to force it to land. A single arrow will do nothing, but a bunch of arrows in waves will eventually weaken it, and the trick is that dragons (being big and heavy) actually get rather tired from flying around. Especially in circles.

Once it gets close enough, you want grappling teams with hooks and chains to keep it on the ground and generally try and tarpit it. One end of the chain is the hook, the other end is a large rock. Once you have the hook in, the guys carrying the rock drop it and that whole team runs. Again, a single weight is an inconvenience, but the more the better.

Spears are your weapon of choice for wounding the dragon on the ground, because you need to reach their organs to do any real damage. Axes and swords will do flesh wounds, but that's all. They simple don't reach deep enough to be more than bleeding cuts, which is a slow way to win a fight that depends on you ending it quickly.

So they can still dive bomb? Stop beating their wing and drop down from incredible hight breathing death on the fool below before sweeping upward and grabbing some into the air.

Your end goal is the dragonhunter's spike. Essentially a big metal spike tipped battering ram. Once the dragon is on the ground, you have teams of dudes charge and ram it from different directions. The spike is the most reliable way to deal heavy damage to the dragon, piercing its hide and leaving open wounds, while also being able to break bones on a good hit and the impact and pain can keep the dragon off balance.

The most critical job in the party, however, are the wallmen. They carry giant metal shields that often take three or four men to carry, for the purpose of creating a wall that your other teams can hide behind to get out of the way of dragonfire or push and advance on a downed dragon. Its not foolproof, as a dragon still in the air can obviously attack from above, and whats more the shield often gets too hot to hold after a single attack, forcing the carriers to drop it.

Even with all of these teams used effectively, hunting a single dragon carries massive casualties. There are bold dragonhunters, but no old dragonhunters.

Very few people handle dangerous animals for a living, so our main point of reference for how dangerous an animal should be is fiction. That removes the grounding. There's "more impressive than the last fictional example" as a reference, but not practical experience to say "no, that's ridiculous." Thus, monsters naturally inflate in power.

Consider how dangerous it would be for you to fight a lion, if you just had a sword. Someone handy with swords could probably deal with it, but how much more dangerous than a lion does a top-tier monster really need to be?

So my dragons are the size of a rhinocerous, are a bit stronger than a lion, can fly but are awful at it, and can occasionally breathe great big jets of fire. On a practical level, every one of these traits is a serious problem, even in isolation (even shitty flight). It really doesn't need to be house-sized and be able to melt steel and change forms and cast spells on top of that.

That only really applies in more grounded, 'realistic' fantasy settings though.

Because Dragons are embodiment's of human pride and greed. They are without weakness in terms of power because their primary faults are, well, due to being dramatically overpowered for the rest of the world and the pride that goes with it, along with a voracious hunger that is both literal and metaphorical. You don't really straight-up fight a dragon because you lose. You trick them, outmaneuver them, or just overpower them with a vast number of individuals, and even then it's a risky game because dragons (based on Smaug) are clever and well-learned themselves, and not easy to trick even if they have massive, glaring vices.

>how are you even supposed to fight one?
You don't, you make him your friend.

My character has found that climbing on their back and stabbing them with magical knives generally does the trick.

Sure, but if you can grab your sword, leap twenty feet into the air, spin end over end, and come crashing down in a giant sword swing that cuts through solid rock...

Then I don't see how the building-sized dragon is a problem.

You only really get problems when you have anime-sized dragons and you don't have anime-sized swordsters.

this