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Companion Thread to D&D Survivor: Dragons, Metallic
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<blockquote data-quote="RealAlHazred" data-source="post: 9170398" data-attributes="member: 25818"><p>Again, that was my bad. I snatched four hours of sleep under the tyranny of the Baby Dragon, and am glad someone caught it immediately!</p><p></p><p>I find the original D&D dragons to be dull as dishwater. Back then, people didn't want a lot of description of their monsters -- they're just experience points in a meat bag, after all; and besides different campaigns will have different ideas how these monsters work, so minimalism in description is better!</p><p></p><p>Which, of course, misses the point. I will change anything, anything, especially what you, the writer, believe you have set in stone, if it makes the setting/monster/spell interesting to me, the world-builder for my table. If it messes with my players' expectations, even better.</p><p></p><p>But later, after countless novels and modules and Ecology articles in <strong><em>Dragon </em></strong>magazine, they started putting loads of detail into monster descriptions. Sometimes it was great, but a lot of times it read like dry academic texts. You can do it well (see, for instance, the excellent <a href="https://www.themerrymushmen.com/product/a-folklore-bestiary-for-old-school-essentials-tmm/" target="_blank"><strong><em>A Folklore Bestiary</em></strong></a> by the Merry Mushmen), but a lot of authors felt like they needed to put in details but weren't inspired to come up with anything cool.</p><p></p><p>As for the original dragons, they were by then in everybody's campaign, so they got the blandest of official interpretations, so that they would hopefully fit in the most campaigns just fine, I suspect. When people came up with brand new dragons, they didn't feel constrained by those limitations, and a lot of the newer dragons are weird, and cool, and interesting as a result. For an example of this, see the free <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1snCMRNy-KBle96iq-gVnytf5ENfRRMws/view" target="_blank"><strong><em>Cosmic Dragon Breviary</em></strong></a> by Tony Caspar; it's got a whole new type of dragons, and they're very different from the Chromatics and Metallics, and they seem at least somewhat interesting to me.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="RealAlHazred, post: 9170398, member: 25818"] Again, that was my bad. I snatched four hours of sleep under the tyranny of the Baby Dragon, and am glad someone caught it immediately! I find the original D&D dragons to be dull as dishwater. Back then, people didn't want a lot of description of their monsters -- they're just experience points in a meat bag, after all; and besides different campaigns will have different ideas how these monsters work, so minimalism in description is better! Which, of course, misses the point. I will change anything, anything, especially what you, the writer, believe you have set in stone, if it makes the setting/monster/spell interesting to me, the world-builder for my table. If it messes with my players' expectations, even better. But later, after countless novels and modules and Ecology articles in [B][I]Dragon [/I][/B]magazine, they started putting loads of detail into monster descriptions. Sometimes it was great, but a lot of times it read like dry academic texts. You can do it well (see, for instance, the excellent [URL='https://www.themerrymushmen.com/product/a-folklore-bestiary-for-old-school-essentials-tmm/'][B][I]A Folklore Bestiary[/I][/B][/URL] by the Merry Mushmen), but a lot of authors felt like they needed to put in details but weren't inspired to come up with anything cool. As for the original dragons, they were by then in everybody's campaign, so they got the blandest of official interpretations, so that they would hopefully fit in the most campaigns just fine, I suspect. When people came up with brand new dragons, they didn't feel constrained by those limitations, and a lot of the newer dragons are weird, and cool, and interesting as a result. For an example of this, see the free [URL='https://drive.google.com/file/d/1snCMRNy-KBle96iq-gVnytf5ENfRRMws/view'][B][I]Cosmic Dragon Breviary[/I][/B][/URL] by Tony Caspar; it's got a whole new type of dragons, and they're very different from the Chromatics and Metallics, and they seem at least somewhat interesting to me. [/QUOTE]
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