In short, I want gold dragons to be LG because it makes my D&D games play better.
110% Archetype.
D&D, for me, more than most things, is a game about fantasy archetypes. The strong warrior, the stout dwarf, the brilliant wizard, whatever. D&D tends to hodge-podge and throw in a few of its own, but rarely is a fantasy archetype ever expressly written out.
The "good dragon" is a fantasy archetype. The dragon of light and purity, aloof and defending the innocent. This is a fantasy archetype, contrasting with the evil dragon of smoke and fire, it is a dragon of sunlight and maybe even 13-year-old "I want a dragon buddy!" ideas. It's Falco from The Neverending Story. It's, heck, half of dragons in fantasy these days, because people want to be buddies with heroic dragons. D&D may have even had a hand in creating this archetype!
"Oh, but you can't really fight and kill it!" is a horrible reason to violate archetype. For me, this isn't a game about fighting and killing things. I don't care if I can't fight and kill very many LG gold dragons. They don't exist for me to fight and kill, generally speaking. They exist to help my group tell our story, to make our world more interesting and engaging, to add a variety of challenges and allies to the mix...a dozen good reasons for a dragon of pure goodness to be present in the rules.
The fact that they should exist and should be dragons of pure good is also more fuel for my "Mosnter Manuals should not just be stat blocks" point, too.
In short, I want gold dragons to be LG because it makes my D&D games play better.
Yet another stat block to reduce to 0 hp doesn't really do that.
And, yes, I know it's "easy to change for your campaign," but that's not really the point, now is it?
I wonder if a lot of the alignment issues many of us have with 4E would have been solved if the choice of alignments had instead become: Lawful, Good, Unaligned, Chaotic, and Evil.
If they were going to toss out the importance of alignment in this edition (instead of throwing it out entirely) they should have made it even more general than they did.
Unaligned has become too much of a catch-all.
I agree, FWIW. But instead, they did the next best thing and mechanically neutered it. Completely excising it from 4e takes zero effort, from a DMing standpoint. Heck, I told my players to put down whatever they want on their character sheet - Chaotic Good, Selfish, Libertarian, Socialist, Animal Lover...Wizards should have taken the bold way and removed all alignments for game.
Wizards should have taken the bold way and removed all alignments for game.
Lawful Good's tricky to fit into this scheme, although in Dragonlance and other Balance-centered campaigns, it probably mirrors Chaotic Evil.
What I find interesting when reading the MM2 is that the actual descriptions of Dragon behavior have not changed; gold dragons are still noble and silver dragons (and couatl) still crusade for good. The designers apparently did not change the creatures, they changed the goalposts. They put the bar higher for a creature to be considered good.
Once, just once I would like someone to tell me why the old fluff was worthwhile beyond "it's the stuff I remember from my childhood".Then the debate turns to history and "core assumptions". Won't someone please think of the children?! The poor new players won't play DnD the same way I've been playing for 30 years. In that 30 years the sophistication of storytelling has improved greatly. Even young people can handle some light moral ambiguity. They don't care about what came before and are going to play the game how they want to play it.
The 4e world, if you could call it that, is not the same thing from 30 years ago. I used to hate DnD because it was so black-and-white. It still is to a certain extent, but it's a lot better and worlds like Eberron showed you can do DnD without being a good vs evil slugfest.