We discuss how various properties of dilaton black holes depend on the
dilaton coupling constant a. In particular we investigate the a-depen
dence of certain mass parameters both outside and in the extremal limi
t and discuss their relation to thermodynamical quantities. To further
illuminate the role of the coupling constant a we look at a massless
point particle in a dilaton black hole geometry as well as the scatter
ing of (neutral) fermions. In this latter case we find that the scatte
ring potential vanishes for the zero angular momentum mode which seems
to indicate a catastrophic deradiation when a > 1.