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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6036163" data-attributes="member: 2067">This might be part of the controversy going forward, but here's where I disagree.The most horrible monsters in the game, for me, ARE thinkers and manipulators. A White Dragon might be more of a raw muscled beast of a creature, but it's also the weakest of the dragons. A red dragon is an ancient being of immense intelligence, and one of the most powerful and ancient beings on the planet.  When I think of Red Dragons in D&D, the first thing that comes to my mind is greed. Red dragons, as the classic, evil, D&D dragon, are compulsive collectors, hoarders, and acquirers. They measure each others' worth by their bank accounts -- er, hoards. They know every gold piece and every magic ring they possess, and they always want more. They are willing to do anything to get more, too. A young red dragon might loot a kingdom. A great wrym red dragon might be the cause of an empire's downfall, simply so that she can own everything it had built in its lifetime. They're slave-keepers, they're maiden-devourers (mostly just to show that they CAN and WILL take what is most valuable to you and destroy it casually), they're ruin-makers. Any encounter with a red dragon should invoke a tense negotiation and a feeling of overwhelming odds: it might have bigger fish to fry than you, and if you're lucky there's some utility in leaving you in one piece, but if it chooses to fight you, it will not be a fight, it will be a massacre.That requires more than big scary teeth and claws. It requires a big scary brain, one that is the worst combination of a sleazy Wall Street investor and a 1850's Railroad robber-baron and Donald Trump ("You're Fired!"...get it? anyone?). A mind that looks at mortal beings in terms of their value (specifically, to the red dragon itself). Monstrosity for the red dragon isn't really about punching you in the face seven times. It's about knowing that this creature's plans likely involve the slow destruction or enslavement of everything you know and love, that you are only around because you are an instrument of that, and that the only way to fight back is to give up. What makes you a hero, when facing a red dragon, is if you choose not to give up, and you choose to fight against its plans rather than it's teeth, and you accept that you personally will likely loose everything you love anyway -- but that future generations will not have to.Lockwood gets closer to that with arrogance and noble bearing than the new illustration does. "Rar, I'm a tough aggressive thing!" might work for the Terrasque. Red dragons need to exhibit their monstrosity through more than just the number of spikes on their body and the thickness of their forearms, though.</blockquote>

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