Story time!
I started an adventurer (elf with a focus on swords) and set out to find random monsters to kill off. First I went to the human village to see if they were enemies of my civilization. They were friendly, and no one wanted to join my team, so I left off into the far wilderness. I killed about 7 yetis and sasquatches while looking for something - anything interesting, and those would be my character's only kills for a while.
I traveled around for a bit, and finally found a cave. I go in, and there's a dragon waiting near the entrance. I tried talking to him because hey, maybe there are friendly dragons in the new version. Everything else I met so far was friendly. The game actually did open a chat window, but he didn't respond to anything I said, but I assumed that since he did that, that meant he was friendly. I go out into the open of his cave, and only then do I get the whole introduction of all the people he killed before me, and he attacks. I run deeper into the cave because I had a speed of 1700 or something. Unfortunately it wasn't a very deep cave, and the back chamber had nothing but a few trinkets lying around, and a pair of giant rats. The rats were friendly to me since I was an elf. The dragon comes storming into the room, blasts the rats to smithereens, and turns his attention to me, but I run past him and grab all the little knickknacks I find along the way, and get out of the area.
I explore some more and check out the dwarf and goblin civilizations. They're both friendly. I went back to the human town and sold all of my dragon treasures for the best sword they had for sale. I bought a breastplate too, but I forgot that the game doesn't let elves wear metal armor for some reason, so that did me no good. I tried to find a safer cave or a hostile town or something, but there wasn't anything. That cave was the only place I was going to get a fight, so I decided that I would rather go down in a literal blaze of glory than just wander around fighting yetis forever.
I head back to the dragon's cave, and he's waiting outside for me. I run for a tree for cover, and he shoot fire at me, which I completely block with my crappy wooden shield (the new material system is working great, Tarn!). I jump out at him from behind the tree, and we start fighting.
Now, I fully expected to get completely trampled by this thing. I have seven kills to my name, and I never do any of that metagaming stuff like throwing rocks, practicing stealth, or choking zombies for hours to get super stats.
Anyway, I run up to him and he charges at me, and I get knocked over, but not hurt, and I stand up and start stabbing at him, and to my surprise, the sword I bought actually works pretty well, cutting through tendons and nerves all over the place when I expected to be banging it uselessly against his scales.
So I beat on him for a while. He never touches me. With each hit he gets slower and weaker. Soon enough, he's a mess collapsed on the ground. Red injuries all over, lying there gargling with all limbs broken in extreme pain and with heavy bleeding.
At this point the fight reached the stage every fight reaches in the new version of Dwarf Fortress - where one side has clearly won, but the other refuses to die, so you lean on the directional arrow on the keyboard to keep attacking them a few hundred times to finish the job. Finally, the dragon bleeds out. Every part of my body was still in the white. I came in thinking I'd get a one sided fight, and I got it, but not in the way I expected.
I then tucked the dragon's 19,000+ kilogram corpse into my backpack and walked back (completely unhindered by the weight) to the village where I retired.
