D&D General How do you use dragons in your game?

Alerad

Explorer
This is a straight copy-paste of the "How do you use giants in your game?" thread where I answered. But then I thought I did something similar with dragons, I would share here.

For our second or third campaign, which turned into a 3-4 year project and we went from 1st to 15th or 16th level, we had dragons at some point. Again, as with the giants in my first campaign, I opted for an unorthodox solution.

We didn't introduce dragons at first. It was supposed to be a low-magic few magic items gritty realism world, so such creatures had no business there. My character was a Japanese or Chinease warrior ("Zanthian" to be exact, an imaginary country we had), Zanthian noble (same as Waterdavian) barbarian - he was a refined noble the entire time, except in combat he went into an Emptiness or Void state of mind, which we treated as Rage.

We were visiting his hometown (rotating DM-s) and I literally designed one encounter after the dragon fight scene in 47 ronin. The party just killed an evil necromancer, who was a brother of the good high level cleric. Well, they didn't expect they both have a niece who didn't know the entire story except the party killed one of her uncles, so she lured them to a remote location.

It turns out the 5 Zanthian noble families stole, bought or traded the secret of dragonkind at the dawn of their nation. Unlike the natural dragons (chromatic), the metallic dragons are only five. Only one reincarnation manifests in a family and the size of the dragon depends on how long that person has been aware that he or she is the incarnate, and how long has trained to control the dragon form.

She was the Gold dragon, the their house, Wu, was the most powerful and in charge of religion in the city. I suppose they bought the secret in gold.
Another house had the Silver dragon, and they were negotiators. I suppose they bought it in silver.
The house of naval trade were half-thieves, half-pirates and had the Copper dragon. They got it really cheap!
My character was from the military family (barbarians!) and they had the Bronze dragon. So I suppose their ancestor won the secret by force and military strategy!
I think we swapped the last dragons for Mercury! Needless to say that house were politicians and schemers. They were the last to obtain the secret of the dragonkind, obviously!

We later had fun in PeiPei's kitchen, a pocket dimension where PeiPei, the Uranium dragon was locked away for being too dangerous!

How do you use dragons in your games?
 

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Sparingly. My recent campaigns have each featured exactly one dragon, which has served as the big centrepiece challenge of the whole campaign - it may not have been the climactic encounter, and may not have been the most difficult encounter, but it has been the most elaborate.

I have also tried to ensure that in each case the dragon-encounter has been a role-playing event, and not just a knock-down drag-out fight. Interact first, and then draw swords.
 

They actually very rarely show up in-person in my games. Mostly they are forces of nature that are in the background, something you don't want to run across because they will eat your face. Just about every time I have had them show up for a fight, it's been a near TPK for the party - at least half the party actually dies in combat. I think I've done somewhere between 3-5 dragon fights in my 40+ years DMing.

It's a bit of a let down in some ways - I've got tons of dragon minis (including the 3E Gargantuan ones) and have never really got to use them for my games. I'd love one day to have my players make up some "pregen" characters and do a fight with Big Red, just to get some use out of those minis, and maybe see what a high-level dragon fight actually looks like (since I don't usually play past 10th-12th level).

Because of the above, I've created a line of drakes that are far more brutish and dull-witted that characters are more likely to encounter and be able to beat. A lot of times when stories go around of an NPC whose a dragonslayer, they've actually killed a drake or two.
 

I don't use them very often. But I'm starting a D&D campaign set in Greyhawk in 2025, and dragons will feature prominently. The first adventure involves a silver dragon hiring the PCs to find her kidnapped son. Why would a dragon need to hire someone to help? She's a bit frantic and has a penchant for mauling or eating those involved before they can answer questions.
 

I used to use them very sparingly, to the point that a player even joked that we should just call our game D& because dragons never showed up.
I realized though that dragons are great so there's no reason to be stingy with them. I have a handful of named dragons in my current campaign that each have their own territory on the setting map. Some are just very powerful and dangerous monsters, but others are essentially NPCs with their own schemes and motives.
 

Castle Dracula
Dracul/Draco/Dragon, whatever. Vampire shadow dragon second form.
Against the Idol of the Sun
1. Random encounter as they're crossing the ocean with an aquatic young dragon that climbed onto their ship at night. The group figured out really quickly that he was (a) arrogant and (b) totally outclassed and (c) didn't realize that (b) was true. They humored him and gave him some gold to go away.
2. Ancient green dragon with spellcasting, guarding a divine artifact that HAD to be protected from the BBEG. They knew it was around and had a no-go/no-fly zone. I had it do the usual "I must test you" thing... but since the artifact was a secret they didn't realize why they were being tested.
3. There was a White dragon off in the mountains, but they didn't ever look in that area.
4. I believe I had an abandoned dragon or dragon turtle lair underwater in another area they never checked.

Baldur's Gate II (ongoing)
It's BG2. An ancient red ran them through a gauntlet and then let them walk away. He's on their "go back and kill later" list.
I don't think they're going to go to the place with the shadow dragon. They are about set to meet the Silver, who's going to strong-arm them if needed.
The only other dragon before the BBEG is a black(?) with druid spellcasting working for him. "You are here for the goblet of life, or perhaps for my newly acquired hoard or some notion of justice. I don't care which; you shall find only death."
 

I believe that DragonLance (and Forgotten Realms) had a big change to how dragons were perceived in D&D. Looking at older modules and the 1E MM, dragons come across as a bit more generic - the green dragon in X1 and the white dragons in G2 don't even have names!

I remember a few articles in Dragon to "pump up" dragons, and then in 2E they got made into boss-level terrors
 

I love dragons. This almost surely won't surprise anyone on this forum.

So I intentionally made a game where dragons were exceedingly rare. I wanted them to be special.

The party has encountered only, and exactly, three active dragons. The first that they knew of was Tenryu Shen (family name first, so friends call him* "Shen"), a gold dragon masquerading as a dragonborn priest in order to hunt down the second dragon on this list. Second, a black dragon, hiding in plain sight in the main city, trying to slowly keep it in a stranglehold under its authority. Third, a time dragon that got himself* caught on some complicated hyperspatial...stuff that surrounds the planet the PCs live on.

No other dragons are present in the region where they live, nor for thousands of miles in any direction from there. No wyrmlings, no secret dragon lairs, nothing. Even the time dragon was only included because I wanted a suitably powerful entity that would make sense for getting "caught" on the higher-dimensional manifold barrier that surrounds the planet. I very intentionally excluded dragons as an option for lesser things, because I wanted every encounter with one to matter. Overall, I think I succeeded.

(*Technically, gender is elective for my dragons, one of the ways they are partially-outsider-like, but two of the three they've met identify as male. There's a fourth, dormant dragon they haven't woken up yet, who identifies as female. The black dragon's preferred gender is unknown. When Shen knew this dragon, long ago, it identified as male, but this may have changed.)
 

I frequently include a few dragons in each campaign - both as foes and storyline elements; though rarely as big bads. I think dragon-hunting arcs are fun, and my PCs often choose to focus on them. In my present campaign: One of my PCs is aligned with a kobold tribe that is raising a wyrmling. The wyrmling is self-important, demands offerings of shiny trinkets and head scratches from anyone seeking an audience with HIS kobolds; but doesn't quite yet grasp the concept of value. Elsewhere, there's a society of dragons in the background of the setting; working partly to maintain their own often tyrannical interests but also partly to prevent the stupid, short-lived, two-legged species from messing with things that cause worldwide cataclysms every few decades. And the PCs are presently hunting a young feral dragon (that is one that is not aligned with the aforementioned society) that recently started stealing livestock. The PCs chose to focus on and pursue this task themselves, from a number of other rumors and adventure hooks.
 
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