D&D General Let's Talk About Dragons

[Li Shenron]

I love dragons. They are far and away my favorite Big Bad in D&D. I am partial to city-buster sized great wyrms whose coming was foretold and whose wrath changes the course of the river of time. I don't use little dragons very often as I feel like it cheapens them, but sometimes smaller and young dragons show up as scions and servants of the Great Beast of the Earth. I usually leave the D&D color assumptions in place, but will sometimes alter or ignore them. I once rana campaign where dragons got their color from the environment their eggs were hatched in, and another time I had dragons change color as they aged.

I don't use good dragons very often and when I do it is usually as a patron of the party in the fight against the BBED.

How do you like your dragons in D&D?

I love them too, after all my favourite RPG is named after them (and yes I also love dungeons)!

I like dragons to be really powerful, but since I rarely reach very high level in the game, I also use their younger versions (except wyrmlings because they are really too low level), however I do not particularly emphasize their young age. Probably if it comes up I would rather narrate "wyrmlings" as young adults, "young" as mature adults, "adults" as elders, and "ancients" as, well, ancients (they're already there). Generally speaking I never feature under-age monsters in any case.

I like dragons to be complex, even if it means more challenging to run properly. I miss spellcasting dragons, and I will add at least some spellcasting on top of most dragons in the game, either using the Innate Spellcaster "variant" in the MM, or just customizing them.

I like dragons to be unique. I am not against color-coded dragons, even though sometimes I wish for each dragon to be its own color, as in "Ashardalon, the red dragon", but this would work a bit against my other wish to have a good number of them in the adventures. But with various customizations (adding spells, feats, class abilities, other monsters abilities, appearance tweaks...) I can achieve enough variety and distinctiveness in each.

That's it in a nutshell for me: powerful, complex and unique dragons!

 

[Alzrius]

I like dragons to be complex, even if it means more challenging to run properly. I miss spellcasting dragons, and I will add at least some spellcasting on top of most dragons in the game, either using the Innate Spellcaster "variant" in the MM, or just customizing them.

Same. While there's absolutely room for the animalistic, terrifying engines of destruction-style dragons in my game, I tend to assign that particular role to linnorms (or, at low level, wyverns), rather than "true" dragons. On the other end of the spectrum, when I want to emphasize a dragon with extreme magical ability (along the lines of "mortals wield magic, dragons are magic"), I usually use the spell dragons from Monster Menagerie: Draconis Arcanus (affiliate link), which are subdivided by magical school, e.g. evocation dragons, illusion dragons, necromancy dragons, etc. Not your average archmage, there!

 

[Reynard]

I don't think I mentioned it, but I am really glad I bought Fizban's. I think it is the first quality DM facing book of 5E from WotC. It reminds me of the 3.x era where books actually delved into a topic in depth.

 

[dave2008]

I don't think I mentioned it, but I am really glad I bought Fizban's. I think it is the first quality DM facing book of 5E from WotC. It reminds me of the 3.x era where books actually delved into a topic in depth.

I feel like Volo's did that to, just more groups. It was definitely more in-depth than a typical MM.

 

[Reynard]

I feel like Volo's did that to, just more groups. It was definitely more in-depth than a typical MM.

Volos had a bunch of interesting lore, but it was not particularly utilitarian. Fizban's has a lot of actually useful tools in the book.

 

[Tutara]

I am going to be controversial and say I don’t like dragons. The standard fantasy dragon is dull, obvious and played out. Nobody likes a smug villain, and too often dragons fall into that archetype. In a world of demigods, variant planes and other weirdness a smartass lizard with wings seems a bit lacking.

I use the dragon statblocks, but as other things to avoid the complacency a dragon brings to the table. I personally like the Robert E. Howard dragon - a terrible proto-dinosaur - or the Lampton Worm, rather than Tolkien’s Smaug.

Of course, this is all my opinion, and if you like a traditional D&D dragon more power to you - I couldn’t get it to work for me.

 

[Bitbrain]

I use the dragon statblocks, but as other things to avoid the complacency a dragon brings to the table. I personally like the Robert E. Howard dragon - a terrible proto-dinosaur - or the Lampton Worm, rather than Tolkien’s Smaug.

Yeah, my chief inspiration for dragons comes from the ones in Beowulf and book 1 (Knight of the Red Cross?) of the Faerie Queene.

 

[Reynard]

I am going to run a short LevelUp adventure as a test and want to make it a dragon hunt. The (young) dragon is going to have been raiding the barrows of ancient kings and heroes in order to amass it's hoard and the ruler of the region will hire the PCs to killthe dragon and return some specific items of cultural significance, but be allowed to keep anything else as payment.

What kind of dragon would be good for such a plot? It doesn't have to be a traditional chromatic or metallic.

 

[delericho]

I'm mostly happy with dragons stats as-is. Just a few things:

• I don't use alignment, and even when I did I didn't feel bound by it for dragons. So PCs who assume dragons are colour-coded for convenience are in for a shock or two.
• I believe dragons should be the toughest monsters PCs face, which means that the CR for a dragon encounter will always be right at the top end of that "deadly" category. They can be beaten, but it's going to be a fight.
• All dragons IMC, both the malevolent and the benign ones, have a besetting sin (most commonly pride or greed, but could be any). That may serve as a weakness for PCs to use against the dragon, or it may prove a complication when dealing with an ally.

Regarding dragonborn:

Dragonborn consider themselves to be the heirs of seen great progenitor dragons. In ancient history they founded The Final Empire, but when their sages foresaw some great disaster coming the best and the bravest of their kind were selected for The Return to the Egg - they were placed into suspended animation until it was all over. But something went wrong, they slept too long, and emerged much diminished shadows of themselves, and into a world overrun by elves, humans, and other such races.

All that said, there's something very confused about the Dragonborn account of their own history, because they claim to be descended from the last dragons, and they claim their empire stood longer than the entire life of the world so far, both of which are manifestly incorrect.

 

[aco175]

I seem to have one in every 5e campaign. LMoP had the green dragon from Thundertree. It fled after taking a beating, but came back later for a better fight. It died from a well placed feather token that grew a oak tree and captured it in a barn. The white dragon in DoIP. It was supposed to be the BBEG fight in the end of the story, but somehow took 105 damage from the fighter on the 2nd round and died. Now I have the black dragon from Forge of Fury in my mashup of Phandalin region and the module. I will likely add an age category for this fight.

I used to save dragons for higher level play, but found that my group likes to start new campaigns by level 10-12 and the dragons would never come into play. There were rumors of dragons and treasure, but the PCs thought (rightly) to stay away.

I do not seem to use any good dragons. I should, but never seem to. I could add one after my Forge of Fury module if the players want to keep going since there is a dragon cult theme of them coming to the region after the last two dragons were here in the last couple years. Maybe rescuing a dragon from the cult instead of just killing them.