D&D 5E How many dragons do we need?

[see]

(And yes - I know the obvious answer - if you do not like them in your game, do not use them. My question is not aimed at how to fix my world - it is aimed at what the D&D brand is doing overall).

Well, from a brand perspective, it's a simple enough question. Are you trying to make a game consonant with the particular history, lore, and tradition of "Dungeons & Dragons", or are you going to do a "Reimagined Ideal New Fantasy RPG" and try to market it under the D&D name? Given the history of relative commercial success for various RPGs over the last five decades, if you as a brand manager want to avoid losing your job, you answer the first.

In the very beginning, the game had six types of dragons (black, blue, golden, green, red, and white), plus hydras and wyverns. Those all then reappeared in AD&D, B/X, BECMI, AD&D 2nd, RC, D&D 3rd, D&D 3.5, and D&D 5th. So, that's your absolute minimum set of dragons and dragon-like creatures for the D&D brand.

If a DM is worried about there being too many types of dragons, you tell him he's free to exclude any he likes from his game world, but you keep them all for the brand.

If you then decide, as a brand manager, to add more dragons, the first four types to add are pretty much already decided for you -- the four types from the first D&D supplement (brass, bronze, copper, and silver) that then appeared in the core releases of AD&D, AD&D 2nd, D&D 3rd, D&D 3.5, and D&D 5th.

After that, you gain some flexibility on what you add. But if you try to break from the particular history, lore, and tradition of "Dungeons & Dragons", you'd just be begging to be "Pathfindered" out of a job.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Giants, and Elementals.

giants need an utter rebuild for it, and elementals live on a plane it has to be something that lives where players live.

The main problem here is, there's very little which has the nearly-universal appeal of dragons. I wasn't kidding when I said that something dragon-like exists in basically every human culture ever. Moreover, the one through line for all of them is "powerful and important and at least kind of reptilian," making the category broad but consistently Kind Of A Big Deal.

The only other types of being which come close to the universality of dragons are Giants, Fey, Undead, and Demons/Devils. Almost all cultures have myths about those last two in some sense, the "unquiet dead" and "malign spirits" being incredibly broad categories, but Giants and Fey are a lot harder to call universal, even with intentionally broad definitions. Fey and Undead aren't the best fit because a lot of them are specifically very weak/minor, and Demons/Devils are highly variable. Plus, these categories often blend together; the Japanese word "youkai" is often translated as "demon," but the word encompasses everything from fairy-like spirit beings to souls of the restless dead to powerful malign beings, essentially a blender of Fey, Undead, and Demon/Devil all rolled into one.

In other words...there really isn't anything else that quite hits that mix of Universal, Powerful, and Important like Dragons do. Not in mythology at least. That makes any effort at creating an alternative at least somewhat fraught.

With my aforementioned cosmology, the four fundamental classes of supernatural beings are Dragons (overall LG, unless fallen), Fey (CG, unless fallen), Giants (overall LE, unless redeemed), and Demons (CE; a redeemed demon becomes something that isn't a demon anymore.) Even then, one must be careful to avoid letting dragons take too wide a place, simply because of how mythically resonant they are.


While I did know this about wolfram (it's why the elemental symbol of tungsten is W), I had no idea this was an archaic name for neodymium! I just invented it as a term for an implicitly purple metal (on the notion of "tyrian" purple.) In my semi-fantastical interpretation, wolfram would be green metal in the way gold is yellow and copper is red, and tyrium would be purple. Iron is of course the "black" metal, cobalt is blue, and silver is white.

honestly, I find the notion that every culture has dragons is wrong because of how different many of the ideas are on what they are like as beyond chimeric reptiles they feel different and represent very different things, it would be like calling and fierce mystical being a demon which fails to explain things.

 

[Quickleaf]

I just ran a one-shot that involved rescuing a young dragon from a psionically haunted dwarven hall, in which a few of the dwarves had been charmed by the dragon. The haunted dwarves put the dragon to work digging in the crystal mines. It first encountered these dwarves by throwing snowballs at them. There was a strong undercurrent of comedy overlaid by tragedy.

The dragon the players rescued was a young crystal dragon. Swapping in another type of dragon maaaaybe could have worked, but not nearly as well as that specific dragon type with its lore of amicability, curiosity, playfulness, and psionic power.

 

[jmartkdr2]

My brother had an idea for a campaign where every monster is unique: you’re not fighting a hydra, you’re fighting the hydra - or the blue dragon.

If I really wanted to include all the different dragon types as species, I agree you’d need a huge setting. But if each dragon is unique that isn’t an issue.

 

[Scribe]

giants need an utter rebuild for it, and elementals live on a plane it has to be something that lives where players live.

Then put the Elementals on your plane....and that Giant book is coming.

 

[Incenjucar]

Everywhere is better with elementals. You can have "native" elementals that form from natural environments like living rock formations and beings born of the giant crystals in deep caves or tainted veins of ore from the Underdark that learned to hunger.

Serpents have a lot of possibilities neglected by the genre and especially D&D.

Fantastical mammals are under-used on the larger scale.

D&D barely even acknowledges the concept of non-undead Spirits but imagine something like the great spirit from Princess Mononoke.

Giant plant and fungus monsters can be terrifying and majestic. Imagine a living grove that tears itself free of the earth at night like some kind of massive spider and goes pounding villages into paste.

 

[Celebrim]

I have the 5 chromatics and a bunch of things derived from them as 'half -species'.

Then I have a bunch of drakes which are natural creatures who preexisted the true dragons, since true dragons were created after Tiamat transformed herself into a monstrous drake inspired creature. This includes familiar things like wyverns, the BECMI sea dragon, homebrewed versions of the fire and ice drakes from earlier editions, psuedo-dragons, fairy dragons etc., but also a bunch of homebrewed species that exist partially to have draconic things for PC's to encounter and fight starting at 1st level.

Some examples:

Mini-Dragons - Forest dwelling insectivore that uses puffs of fire to stun and incapacitate moths and other flying insects. Mostly dangerous for causing forest fires in the dry season. Sold as pets, often illegally, because of the fire hazard.
Spire Drakes - If an eagle was dragon shaped
Forest Drakes - If an owl was dragon shaped and also a poisonous chameleon. One of the many reasons NPC lumberjacks have to be tough as nails.
River Drake - If an alligator was also a flying fish.
Swamp Drake - If a bullfrog was the size of a compact car and had a tongue that ended in a Thagomizer.
Reef Drake - Half plesiosaur, half electric-eel

I've never settled on whether metallic dragons exist in my campaign, because I've never used one. I know all the other variants like gem dragons and variant metallics do not.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I had compiled all the OD&D/1e monsters from Strategic Review and Dragon all into a single book (466 of them).

That is an impressive amount of work. Well done, sir!