Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ProfessorCirno" data-source="post: 4201116" data-attributes="member: 65637">First of all, I regret using that most dreaded of acronyms, FATAL, to begin with, and have damned my soul in doing such (though I have done so before, so there wasn't much left to damn this time around).  Do not follow down my god forsaken path into madness by looking further into it.Secondly, I use unimaginative, sloppy, lazy, and pandering to...well, juvinile-ism may not be a word, but that fits better.  And I use it because that's what boobs on dragonborn are.  Let's not mess around.  They aren't even breasts.  They're boobs.  They're there for two reasons: 1) make dragonborn women "sexy," which is, in my opinion, a dumb idea, and 2) make it really easy for people to tell the females and males apart.There's nothing conservative about my statements - heck, go to the actual dragonborn thread, I think the best idea for the race would be making them a matriarchal society, something that I don't think has actually happened in D&D yet, excusing the psychotic and insane ones because...well, duh.So why do I have my problems?  I'll go through it with both one and two.1) "Make dragonborn women sexy."  The problem here is the question of "To whom?"  Dragons don't have boobs (at last I'm pretty sure).  And while it's true that often, creatures in the animal kingdom do things to show themselves off, not only is it rarely such humanoid features as breasts, but it's never the females that do so.  Humans are one of the very few animals in which the female dresses up for the male.  Which again brings me to my issue - who are dragonborn women supposed to look sexy for?  Is it for dragonborn men?  Or some of the more, er, varied young men who inevitably play Dungeons and Dragons?  Let's both be honest here - dragonborn males weren't in mind when the breasts were slapped onto the dragonborn females.  That's the first reason I say it's unimaginative, sloppy, lazy, and pandering (especially pandering); because it's not made with the game in mind, it's made for "Hahaha boobies" in mind.2) "Make it easy to tell dragonborn females and males apart."  Again, the same question comes up: "Who's telling them apart?"  Do a small experiment.  Go outside, and find a lizard.  Just glance at it briefly.  Can you tell it's gender?  Probably not.  Do other lizards have any problems telling it's gender?  Probably equally unlikely.  The *only* creatures in the game that should have heavy concerns with telling the two types of dragonborn apart should be, well, dragonborn.Let me drift off topic momentarily - one of the problems I'm seeing with 4e, and one of the reasons I'm as...disagreeable with the fluff as I am, is that I'm not seeing varied and exciting races.  What I'm seeing is "Humans...WITH A TAIL!" or "Humans...WITH SCALES!"  This is what the dragonborn breasts do.  It breaks DOWN that barrier that I think *should* be between dragonborn and humans.  Because otherwise you're just playing another human with a silly costume on.To go back on topic, and to readdress my previous statements, just slapping on breasts is the very literal interpretation of laziness.  It's about as unimaginative as you can get if you want to add sexual dimorphism to just throw on a physical human trait and call it a day.  In the case of dragonborn, I personally think the race would be greatly improved if they were less "anthro dragon people" and more of their own seperate race.  To that end, you want a sexual dimorphism that ISN'T inherently human.  My idea for it was to take a look at nature and see what she's been doing all these years, and the answer there was "male preening."As I mentioned before, in the vast, VAST majority of the animal kingdom, it's the male that goes around screaming "Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!"  To that end I proposed that, since dragonborn AREN'T specifically related to any one colored dragon flight, we keep the bronze and gold colors for females, but change the male scale colors to be very bright and vivid.  I think it would have some really excellent roleplay ideas, and would fit in perfectly with their tribal, militaristic, and arrogant nature, where different color patterns could show tribal loyalties, and the dragonborn males could look down on the inferior non-dragonborn for how lifeless and un-manly their lack of colors are.  It definitely adds sexual dimorphism, but makes it more alien and exotic, which is, in my opinion, what dragonborn are SUPPOSED to be.  I mean, they're freaking dragon people.  They aren't supposed to blend in perfectly with no troubles, especially in a world that's supposed to be mostly Bad Places with points of light; on the contrary, they should be a rare and wonderous (and fearful) sight.And one more thing.  I'm way too long winded.</blockquote>

Verification