Dragon resitrictions too rigid?

[Dagredhel]

What I wonder is, if the chromatic, chrystaline, and metallic dragons are specialized subtypes, then what would the ancestral stock they derived from be like, the primordial undifferentiated common stock?

I imagine that you could come up with a basic archetype, a single race that once gave rise to the different strains now prevalent. Individuals of this breed needn't be as alike to one another as are 'modern' dragons of the same type. They could start out the same as hatchlings, but then progress in radically different directions as they aged, according to their individual personalities and habits. This could be represented in game terms through the selection of 'dragon feats'.

For instance, all 'primordial' dragons would start as firebreathers, but could alter their breath weapon or add an alternative by selecting a feat, in the manner that sorcerers and wizards can gain a feat to alter the energy type of their damage dealing spells. Likewise, a primordial dragon could acquire an elemental subtype through feat selection, perhaps with an appropriate breath weapon as a prerequisite--- or vice versa. The primordial dragon would be eminently customizable!

In this manner, a dragon's predilections and choice of lifestyle and habitat could shape its abilities as it ages. These choices might also be expressed in the dragon's appearance as well. As a dragon aged, its outward form would reflect more and more its chosen powers and environment.

Over the course of millenia, these variations, once individual to each dragon, could culminate in the racial subtypes common in D&D, if one were too assume that dragons of common temperament and similar abilities, choosing to live in the same habitat, would be more likely to breed, and that this would increase the likelihood that their offspring would make similar choices.

Sound good?

 

[Plane Sailing]

Another, minimalist, option is to have only one type of dragon. Pick one of the tough critters (Red or Gold) and use that.

No fancy pants coloured dragons in different environments. Just one kind of Dragon. It could be a greenish-grey colour and comes in various sizes from small to collosal. Breathes fire (for traditions sake) but probably doesn't have the fire subtype. Gets 20 DR against ALL energy types though.

This could be a mean, mean kind of critter, coming in any alignment it feels like.

- in fact, I like the idea so much that I think I'll probably do this with my worlds dragons... back in 1e I replaced the relatively wimpy dragons with ones single type, and I think I'll do the same again now.

Cheers

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Hey, there are some great ideas here...
Dragons changing color thanks to an alignment change?
The "original" Dragon Race?
I might use some of these ideas in the future...

 

[Corwin]

Keep in mind that "Always" doesn't really mean "Always" in this case.

From the SRD on creature alignments:

"Always: The creature is born with the listed alignment. The creature may have a hereditary predisposition to the alignment or come from a plane that predetermines it. It is possible for individuals to change alignment, but such individuals are either unique or one-in-a-million exceptions."

So, there is nothing preventing you from having a good chromatic dragon or an evil metallic one. It just should be a unique and exceptional occurance.

For ex: I'm currently playing a Lawful Neutral half-red dragon monk. Though he has pure evil pumping through his veins, his heart is noble and just. He is constantly struggling against his draconic nature. So, although he strives to do the right thing, he is often a bit cold blooded (no pun intended ) and so I reflect that in his current alignment.

All of this dispite the fact that his racial alignment is technically listed as "Always Chaotic Evil".

 

[DWARF]

Oh, I know that. I just think my players might think it's my way of tricking them or something, unless I'm clear that all dragons will be different.

 

[Someone]

Another, minimalist, option is to have only one type of dragon. Pick one of the tough critters (Red or Gold) and use that.

That´s exactly what I do. The bunch of carnival dragons with varied breath weapons of acid, lightning and popcorn. sometimes make me smile. Dragons are big, nasty and breath fire. Period.

 

[Corlon]

Screw the alignment AND the players

make it interesting!
use a big red dragon confront the characters, they kill him, and realize that some order of paladins are after them or something. Or go on a quest for a gold dragon just to realize they've put a new plan in line for the devils to take over the material plane (this is for high levels of course).
This makes detect alignment and those other spells actually usefull. Dragons are supposed to be HUGE powerful creatures with a lot of treasure and great wisdom, whether they're evil or good. Surprise your characters and keep them on their guard.
I like the alignment for "story purposes," such as all the characters have grown up being taught that werewolves and wererats are evil to the bone (my campaign, the characters started near a forest where lycanthropes live).
And when they discover one, even if he was lawful good, they'd still distrust him.

This already happened once, one of the PCs was a wererat, and was the lawful evil alignment set out for him. He had a grudge against one of the NPCs, so he tried everything from poisoning him, to killing him in his sleep. It finally ended with a silver crossbow bolt in the head!

 

[Celebrim]

There is certainly no restriction that says 'no you can't do that', but I do think that the alignment absolutes often represent good advice and should be broken only by an experienced DM with an experienced party, or only rarely, or both.

The alignment absolutes are there to provide structure to the game - especially to young players. They help the players understand what is going on and divide the sitatuation up neatly into 'teams'. Eventually, players are going to mature to the point that they have thier own good grasp of good and evil and you don't need to divide the teams up so explicitly and absolutely. But even so, I've found that DM's who are quick to shift around the alignments are often as not consciously or unconsciously stating either 1) that some alignment other than 'good' is actually the 'better team', or that 2) that there really isn't anything difference between being good or evil (which is actually a special case of #1). Typically that degenerates down to 'us vs. them', which to me isn't a particularly interesting philosophical problem.

Even a mature player, nay especially a mature player, is going to interpret behavior as clues to which 'team' the monster is on.

A problem that can also occur when you start taking some creature with a lifestyle that forces on it a certain sort of morality (or rather immorality) and then change the alignment without changing the lifestyle. A lawful good werewolf is going to have to stop living like an average werewolf if the alignment is going to be anything other than a arbitrary classification into teams.

And also, if the alignment of everything becomes mutable, say we have a temple protected by lawful good zombies, the world is going to become so grey that you lose the ability to apply those sharp visual distinctions between good and evil that is a hall mark of heroic fantasy. As someone else in the thread suggested, in fantasy worlds, the content of your character IS reflected in your form and appearance.

This is not to say that sometimes it isn't interesting for the good thing to be ugly and the bad thing to be evil, but that often, for non-humanoids at least, it is a better solution to have the ugly good things appearance be the result of some curse, and the beautiful evil things appearance be the result of some illusion.

For instance, if I wanted an good red dragon in a story, I'd probably create a back story that the dragon hadn't always been a dragon. At one time the dragon was a human paladin, and he has been polymorphed into a red dragon as the result of offending some powerful force. Or if I wanted an evil gold dragon in a story, I'd probably have the gold dragon not be a gold dragon at all, but an evil dragon using an illusion to disguise its appearance so as to allow it to work greater evil than it could otherwise.

 

[Corlon]

I'm not saying always switch em

just when it makes the plot interesting. And with the "team vs. them", its kinda how the world works.
But why make the evil gold dragon not a gold dragon at all?
Give him a reason to hate the world. He was betrayed, the gods destroyed his mates and children, an order of humans he trusts, kills his family in their sleep and loots his hord, etc. Give him a reason to be evil, and the Red dragon, he could've been attacked by fiends or somethin, and now he ISN'T good, but he helps the characters attack the fiend's base and destroy them. Because of these alignments being set, as I said this could show what adventurer's learned growing up, and the creatures with this switched alignment could play off what the characters think about them (especially the evil ones). I agree with you that this shouldn't just be thrown around, but placed in strategic places.
And about the lawful good zombies, how would that work... I gues there are a couple ways, but they're undead, and undead are pretty much always evil.
And then you say "but so are dragons," but undead are pretty much the essence of evil, and they're usually there against their will or by evil forces, and dragons have a choice.

 

[Celebrim]

"And about the lawful good zombies, how would that work... I gues there are a couple ways, but they're undead, and undead are pretty much always evil."

But that is in itself a campaign based assumption that tries to draw lines around what is good and isn't in a way that is irrelevant to actual behavior. And it is normally, behavior that we use to define good and evil.

Mind you I'm not suggesting that it isn't a useful assumption, and for the record, IMC, all zombies are evil as is the act of thier creation.

But, you could quite easily suggest that zombies are not evil and that there is nothing about there behavior that is intrinsicly evil, and that they could be created in a fashion that was not evil, and then you could have Lawful Good temples guarded by heroic undead soldiery. Just be prepared to handle in ambiguities that might arise because of that.

For instance, again IMC, not all 'undead' are actually evil. Actually that's splitting hairs, because not all 'undead' are undead. Ghosts aren't 'undead' in my campaign, although they are. Undead normally refers to something which has by some unnatural fashion gained unnatural life after death, albeit life of a different order than natural life, so that they have become 'walking dead'. But not everything that is dead but is present in the world is their as the result of some process that is deemed unnatural and evil. Some ghosts have returned or tarried for entirely benevolent and noble reasons which the gods of good do not oppose. You can think of them as being like 'Ben Kenobi' in SW, or the spirit of Jasla in dragonlance. As such, I have good aligned 'undead'.

"But why make the evil gold dragon not a gold dragon at all?"

You don't have to, but I tried to explain some of the reasons why you might not. And in fact, if we want to be really mature about this, the gold dragon doesn't even have to evil in order to oppose the PC's. You could easily get into a situation that the gold dragon feels that for various reasons it must slay the humans, and the humans in turn feel they must slay the dragon - and both sides could feel this is a terrible tragedy. And of course we can have situations where the path of an evil being and the path of a good PC temporarily are going in the same direction, though probably neither side would be entirely comfortable about it (and some Paladins would probably have to balk at an alliance).