D&D General Are dragons wings too small/little?

Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
The idea of a "real" dragon picking a fight with anything (and being able to fly) is fairly laughable.

Well, if you make dragonbone some really awesome stuff, and make their muscles magical, and you can do it...

Similarly, the idea of a six-limb creature is impossible from our world

It is less "impossible" and more "our animals chose fewer limbs a long, long time ago, and adding functional limbs is so unlikely as to be unthinkable". There is no real engineering reason to not have a six-limbed animal - the only reason we don't is that the tradition of genetics is very, very hard to break.
 

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GreyLord

Legend
And of course, we already have flying insects. None of them are the size of dragons...but they do exist with six limbs and many of them with additional wings.

Maybe Dragons have carbon fiber for wings and their skin is NOT flesh, but aluminum or some light but hard substance (afterall, many of them have armor classes on par with Metal Armor, which means for a beast of that size it probably is NOT their nimble and dodgelike abilities that make them so tough to injure).
 


I dig the movie...only discovered it as an adult, which considering all the other stuff I watched as a kid, surprises me.

I just want to add to the thread that for a long time, gold dragons didn't even bother having wings.

I have not really read the book, but I did see the movie and read up on the book a bit.
 

Mistwell

Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
tenor.gif
 

dave2008

Legend
I agree with everything you said, but...
As far as how durable, I have no clue. But most theropod dinosaurs had hollow bones. I'd still rather not meet a T-Rex in a dark alley*.

...there is a huge difference between the 'hollow' bones of a t-rex and pterosaur. ;)

Personally I wouldn't want to meet a T-rex or a Quetzel in a dark ally!

EDIT: That is not entirely true - I would be really stoked to see a living t-rex, if only for a short while
 
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Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Even then you have to make them fly like colossal hummingbirds and create hurricane-force winds all around them.

Sounds like an entirely acceptable result to me. A big honkin' dragon landing in your village knocks down small buildings? Cool!

Isaac Newton is a harsh master.

Well, that's assuming that Isaac Newton is in force. There could be some other model for gravity in our fantasy world.

I mean, a linear 1d6 per 10' fallen is not obviously accurate model of the damaging impact of falling in our world, so maybe fantasy gravity isn't Newtonian/Einsteinian, or mateirals are different, or air resistance is different, or whatever. Things still fall to the ground, but not following the equations you know from physics class. Suck it up - as a result, you get fireballs!
 
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Dausuul

Legend
Even then you have to make them fly like colossal hummingbirds and create hurricane-force winds all around them. Isaac Newton is a harsh master.
Depends on how far you're willing to go. The fundamental problem for dragons is the square-cube law. Basically, if you multiply the dragon's length by X, its flying efficiency is divided by X*. So if you're going to invoke magic to make it a better flier, your magic needs to increase its efficiency by a factor of X.

Let's start with a real-life animal that's roughly where we want dragons to be. Quetzalcoatlus is all very well, but I prefer my dragons a bit more robust. Say we use Haast's eagle, a very big extinct eagle that hunted moa: Weight up to 30 pounds, body length about 4 feet, wingspan up to 10 feet, able to take off from the ground.

How big should dragons be? Let's figure the tail is extremely long and thin, more of a steering vane. For the body, say 40 feet. That's on par with the very largest minis (8x8 base). So, this dragon is 10 times the size of Haast's eagle in every dimension. Thus, it must be 10 times as efficient a flier.

Assuming we want to make the dragon fly without direct levitation, there are two options: Increase its strength (muscles, bones, and tendons) to support bigger wings, or make it lighter. So, let's double the wingspan and cut the weight to 20% of normal. The dragon now has a 200-foot wingspan, and its flesh has about the density of balsa wood. If you pick up the scales or bones of a dragon, they will seem to weigh almost nothing, but they will be nearly impossible to break or bend. Its blood is some weird liquid, far less dense than water, and probably quite volatile when exposed to air.

Now, this dragon does not look a lot like the typical fantasy-art dragon. It's not a sauropod with bat wings glued to the shoulders. This dragon is proportioned like a bird. It has a tapering body with a huge chest, and vast, massively-muscled wings that spread out to near-absurd length, the membranes extending to well down the tail. Its legs are spindly, mostly bone and talon, and its tail is a long thin whip rather than a big heavy crocodilian thing. It looks like it should weigh 15 tons, but in fact it weighs only 3. For all its size, it is scarily fast, its light weight and supernaturally-strong muscles allowing it to move at lightning speed.

It's a different vision of dragons, but I rather like it.

*The dragon's wing muscles are stronger by a factor of X^2, proportional to the cross-section of the muscle, and its wing surface is likewise X^2 larger. But its weight has increased by a factor of X^3. Divide X^2 by X^3 and you get 1/X.
 
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Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Peter Dickonson in The Flight of Dragons posits a lighter-than-air hypothesis where dragons have evolved so that their stomach acid dissolves large amounts of calcium (from bone and limestone) which releases massive amounts of gas (hydrogen) which gives the dragons body lift and supports the body above the ground.

The dragon's wings arent used for lift, just propulsion and steering (and can thus be smaller). The evolution of fire breathing is a byproduct of the need to remove of excess gas.

It makes sense to me
 

BookBarbarian

Expert Long Rester
Dragon wings are too small to fly, Giants are too big to not have their bones crushed under their own weight, Barbarians can fall from the stratosphere and walk away from it, lifting capacity increases linearly without regard to the square-cube law, etc, etc, etc.

Gravity just doesn't work in D&D the same way it works in the real world.
 
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Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
The largest flying animals were pterosaurs. The largest ones we know of had a wingspan of a small plane and when on the ground were probably about as tall as a giraffe. The wings in proportion to their overall body length wasn't really all that large, but they were almost all wing and they had hollow bones. In addition, there's no way a flying creature could have forelimbs like a dragon - there's no place for the muscle to attach.

But dragons? Magic. After all we are talking about a creature that breaths fire. Oh, and just because I've always found pterosaurs fascinating I've included a couple of images

View attachment 115446
View attachment 115447
Also worth noting, the atmospheric conditions of Earth were different when pterosaurs were around. If Jurassic Park happened and we cloned a quetzalcoatlus, it probably wouldn’t be able to fly today.

For folks who really need a physics-based explanation for dragons flying, I suggest that the fantasy world’s atmosphere may similarly be more conducive to flight. Also, dragons breathe fire, yeah? So, maybe the air in their lungs is very hot, making them more buoyant than they look.
 

Dausuul

Legend
Peter Dickonson in The Flight of Dragons posits a lighter-than-air hypothesis where dragons have evolved so that their stomach acid dissolves large amounts of calcium (from bone and limestone) which releases massive amounts of gas (hydrogen) which gives the dragons body lift and supports the body above the ground.

The dragon's wings arent used for lift, just propulsion and steering (and can thus be smaller). The evolution of fire breathing is a byproduct of the need to remove of excess gas.

It makes sense to me
I was a huge fan of that book as a kid. However, aesthetically, I prefer dragons that fly by wing lift - even if the dragon must be given supernatural strength and lightness to do so - rather than floating along like living blimps.

Also, a dragon that is stabbed by a knight's lance should not pop and deflate like a balloon. :)
 


dave2008

Legend
Peter Dickonson in The Flight of Dragons posits a lighter-than-air hypothesis where dragons have evolved so that their stomach acid dissolves large amounts of calcium (from bone and limestone) which releases massive amounts of gas (hydrogen) which gives the dragons body lift and supports the body above the ground.

The dragon's wings arent used for lift, just propulsion and steering (and can thus be smaller). The evolution of fire breathing is a byproduct of the need to remove of excess gas.

It makes sense to me
However they have to look like blimps to make that work - which is definitely not acceptable to me. I would rather stick to magic.
 


Garthanos

Arcadian Knight
Yes, dragon wings are too small for them to fly under natural laws. It's the same problem as giants standing under their own strength.

The issue is endemic to fantasy. If you tried to change it, it would look weird.
Giants would have elephantine distortions .

There myths about beings who gained magic from touching the earth ... maybe if you can lift a giant off the ground their strength would fail them and their heart would burst.
 


The wings on this gliding reptile allow for some impressive gliding capabilities, of which dragons should also be capable of similar gliding capabilities as well as flying abilities.

And magic is not a suitable explaination for the flying ability of dragons since it lacks in empirical evidence and explaination. Although I do like the super strong bones, carbon fiber like skin, etcetc. Weapons out of Dragon Bone can even be better then steal or titanium etc.

And if Dragons do have "Anti-Gravity" properties in their blood or physiology, then that ingredient should be able to be harvested and used in other applications, such as air ships. Although I do not agree with this claim without there being proof first. And I also don't support the idea of senselessly killing dragons just because all of the components of their body are worth a serious fortune.
 

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dave2008

Legend
And magic is not a suitable explaination for the flying ability of dragons since it lacks in empirical evidence and explaination.
What are you talking about? Dragons are fictional, are you writing in character or something? In the context of D&D magic has plenty of empirical evidence, just take a trip to the nearest school of magic.

If your talking about making dragons IRL, well you need to get some really advanced degrees in bio-engineering (some which don't exist yet) and maybe a century (or more) of technological advancement before we get there.
 

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