D&D General Dragons and Dragon Breath (Chlorine Breath and Freakin Lasers!)

[Seramus]

I'm convinced Dragons are just some kind of evolved Elf. Their bodies change to suit whatever kind of environment they are in, there are more subraces than you can shake a stick at, they breed with everything. Next thing you know, someone will want a Dragon as a playable race!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I feel there are way too many different sorts of dragons. Five is plenty for creatures that are supposed to be rare and powerful.

 

[Cadence]

Astral, Force, and Prismatic dragons are the greatest of them all!

Can they take 10,000d6 damage from a breath weapon though?

(Wow was my 12yo relieved when I told him the Quasar Dragon was an April fools joke!
I also had to explain the Armor Class conversion to +4020).

Spoiler: The article text about it - and how to possibly "defeat" it.

From Dragon 96. Which also featured the great adventure Nogard, the Killer and Sleep-inducing Dungeon Masters (which I had forgotten), and the What's New Dragon.

 

[Cadence]

I'm convinced Dragons are just some kind of evolved Elf. Their bodies change to suit whatever kind of environment they are in, there are more subraces than you can shake a stick at, they breed with everything. Next thing you know, someone will want a Dragon as a playable race!

Give it a week. They'll be from the feywild. ;-)

 

[Jer]

Next thing you know, someone will want a Dragon as a playable race!

Rifts waves hi from the 1990s!

 

[billd91]

Yellow was what I was thinking, but I wasn't sure. I wonder if the Orange, Purple, and Yellow ones wonder why the three famous ones are from the additive light rules, but they're a mixture of paint and light (or are Orange and Purple just glad they aren't Cyan and Magenta?).

Do you remember the breath weapons?

Yellow dragons breathed out sodium chloride that blinded, caused pain (relative to damage already sustained), and could asphyxiate. Orange ones spat out liquid sodium that engulfed targets in a napalm like flame when exposed to air and exploded when exposed to water. Purple breathed a bolt of high energy.
They were in Dragon Magazine 65, which was included in my Dragon Anthology CDs.

 

[Cadence]

Yellow dragons breathed out sodium chloride that blinded, caused pain (relative to damage already sustained), and could asphyxiate. Orange ones spat out liquid sodium that engulfed targets in a napalm like flame when exposed to air and exploded when exposed to water. Purple breathed a bolt of high energy.
They were in Dragon Magazine 65, which was included in my Dragon Anthology CDs.

That would have been the second Dragon magazine I ever got then (started with 64).

 

[Yaarel]

4e mithril dragon, ethereal with teleport speed.

I wanna 5e one!

 

[Vaalingrade]

So I changed up dragons in my setting/system.

As mentioned, silver dragons a big mirrors and so generate light and focus it into a laser cannon.

Greens, being forest dragons a beasts of life and breathe life energy which in turn makes the fungal spores folks naturally have on their skin to hyper-grow and put down roots, pre-digesting the target.

Reds are living furnaces that consume stone and breath lava, which sticks to the target like napalm.

Black dragons still have corrosive breath, but it's alkai and the damage type is 'corrosive'.

Whites breath cold, but can also one time launch a storm of icicles they cultivate on their wings and tail.

Golds do regular fire because they basic.

Coppers have a sandblast jet.

Bronzes have water cutter breath Brasses are misidentified sexual dimorphism for bronzes and coppers and have desiccation breath.

Blue got explode-killed during the dragon war and so don't breath anything.

Dragons are also smart enough to learn magic from a different element because no duh people are going to bring fire protection to a red dragon fight, so why no learn to railgun your coins into them instead of trying to but Asbestos Man?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Why did Green Dragons change to acid in 3e and then back to poison gas in 4e without the chlorine? Would the universe have exploded if 4e went sonic?

No idea. For my personal rework of dragons, we'd ditch bronze and brass (which are alloys, even if they can sometimes appear in nature), and instead have two other metals: cobalt and iron. I gave iron dragons the lightning breath (because magnets/electricity) and made cobalt dragons thunder (aka 4e's version of sonic).

What's the point of metallic dragons? Why aren't silver ones giant mirrors that shoot lasers (as per @Vaalingrade 's brilliant suggestion)?

In my unwritten dragon-centric cosmology, the "point" was that both Metallic and Prismatic dragons were things of beauty and purity: metals or gemstones. But when Tiamat fell in the ancient days--she had been meant to be Monarch (dragons are all genders and no gender; they choose what aspects they wish to manifest, and Tiamat identifies as a mother), but instead became Corrupter. Where once she had glistening scales in seven colors (the extant five + yellow and purple), now she has just five heads. What happened to her Topaz and Amethyst children is not known, but they have not been seen since her fall. Her mate, Bahamut, now struggles to keep creation in order with her absence; Bahamut was Counselor, not Monarch, and filling Tiamat's role has left him stretched thin. (Not to mention, his very essence is now at war with itself: he was designed to be Tiamat's mate, just as she was designed to be his, yet he was also designed to fight exactly this kind of corruption. It is the great tragedy of existence that they are driven so far apart.)

Because the above requires there be seven Prismatic dragons, there were also seven Metallic dragons. The new types are wolfram (aka tungsten), which would be depicted as faintly greenish, and a fictional metal, tyrium, named after tyrian purple. Haven't decided what their breath weapons would be. That's a neat idea with the lasers, I'll have to think on that. Perhaps a trick older, larger-winged silvers can pull on unsuspecting targets.

Is the Quasar Dragon still greatest of them all?

Never heard of it, so probably not.

How about the new (old) ones in Fizban?

Haven't read it, so I couldn't say. I personally preferred 4e's Catastrophic dragons for things that are a bit more eldritch than your usual dragon.

Were the orange, purple, and !?!? dragons ever worth looking at back in Dragon Magazine (iirc?)?

Some of the weirder off-brand dragons were interesting. I liked...I think it was "tome" dragons? They were big on metamagic and were even nerdier than golds.

What is your biggest concern about Dragons?

That they are simultaneously over-used and under-used.

That is, it's easy to trivialize dragons as opponents by just throwing them in wherever you want them to be. I think that's a shame, because a well-run dragon antagonist (or even ally!) can be really interesting and exciting. Dragons are sort of inherently a creature about power, that's what they've meant in basically every culture ever (because nearly every culture has some kind of serpentine mythological figure or entity that gets identified as "a dragon.") That gives them an allure, a symbolism, a significance. Allowing that to get diluted into Monster Of The Week territory is just sad.

On the flipside, however, there are some who...kinda act like because dragons have this allure, they shouldn't EVER show up ANYWHERE unless it's super duper ultra important. They shut out the possibility of letting draconic flair seep into other things in ANY way. That's a big part of what drives many dragonborn critics, from what I can tell; they see the race as tawdry, more or less, as sort of trying to "cheat" into inherent awesome just by being part-dragons. I find that a pretty jaundiced take, and actually really love seeing such draconic motifs worked into worlds and lore.