D&D 5E (2024) Opinions on the Topaz Dragon Reverse Wings?

[Laurefindel]

That is fine, personally I don't have gem dragons in my world - solves the issue rather easily.

However, this whole discussion has not made me interested in making a crazy topaz dragon design with backward wings that make some sense for some bizarre reason. Saying the simply dislocate and reverse only when they land is not nearly deep enough for what I am looking for. I want some strange method of flight with some other adaptations. My current angle is that it is an adaptation to make it a crazily agile flyer (like the humming bird and X-29). What else needs to change about the design to push that concept? What else is sacrificed to make it insanely agile (probably can't fly as fast for example). I want to take the backward wings and figure out what could work!

I see. While their pitch leans forward, the wings of a x-29 aren’t backward. They are thicker in the front than in the back, like any regular wing. So keeping with the x-29 analogy, to make some sense of reverse wings, the dragon’s musculature should face the « right » direction, compensating for more powerful backstrokes. The dragon probably flies in short, powerful bursts, crawling in air like a swimmer doing reverse butterfly strokes, but does not glide. Perhaps it doesn’t need to and tucks its wings when coasting (but still, why use wings at all?).

What this specific configuration allows however, is for the dragon’s fingers to face forward. So if I was looking for a way to explain flight with reverse wings, I would look for a magic-y reason where the dragon’s wings are not used for flight but its fingers are doing something that absolutely needs to face forward.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Question: the humming bird can fly forwards, up, down, and backwards with its wings. Why couldn't this work for the dragon but in reverse. If the bird can fly backwards with its forward leading wings, why couldn't this dragon (with a little tweaking) fly forwards with its backward leading wings?

Because:

• These wings are the wrong shape. Notice how hummingbird wings are shaped. They are smooth and continuous on both edges, leading and trailing, so that they can slice through the air either way. The topaz wings are not, and would cause enormous turbulence if you tried to use them that way.
• These wings are not (comparatively) rigid. Hummingbird and insect wings are rigid airfoils. These are membranes. The membranes would curl and twist, and the "fingers" would whip through the air, amplifying the turbulence.
• The articulation and musculature is incorrect for this kind of flight.
• Hummingbird wings still point forward. They're just aerodynamic in more than one direction. These wings are only aerodynamic in one direction...the wrong one.
• Hummingbirds achieve their VTOL style flight by flapping their wings incredibly fast. This is why they're so small and light relative even to other birds. Now, that doesn't mean a dragon couldn't also do that, but you'd have wings that look like a blur, not obvious flapping. They'd also need an extremely high-energy diet, waaaay more than what hummingbirds need.

That is what I want to go with now. The topaz fly's like a humming bird essentially upright through the air. Now I just need to think what do we need to tweak to make this more plausible and why the backward wings are a good option.

I mean...they aren't a good option and never will be. That's the problem. You could dramatically alter their design, so that the backward facing no longer really matters, but you'd have changed them so drastically they wouldn't look anything like what they are now. They'd look more like...well, insect wings or hummingbird wings.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, astronomically speaking, the old constellation Argo (named after Jason's ship and now divided into Puppis, the stern, Vela, the sail, and Carina, the keel) actually has the stern forward and the prow to the rear as it moves along its daily path through the sky. I'm pretty sure the ancient Greeks knew which way was which when it came to ships, but they apparently had no problem suspending belief by having a big ship in the sky basically sail backwards. You can, too this day, watch it rise and set stern first.

...I don't really take "we see this imaginary star-figure boat from the rear" as much of an argument. Clearly they thought it was sailing away from them. Like a boat might do if it were, say, sailing to a faraway land to steal a great treasure.

 

[Ancalagon]

Yikes! This is awful.

I'm running a second Yoon Suin campaign, in which there is an "important" Topaz dragon. She absolutely does not have reverse wings.

 

[briggart]

Well, astronomically speaking, the old constellation Argo (named after Jason's ship and now divided into Puppis, the stern, Vela, the sail, and Carina, the keel) actually has the stern forward and the prow to the rear as it moves along its daily path through the sky. I'm pretty sure the ancient Greeks knew which way was which when it came to ships, but they apparently had no problem suspending belief by having a big ship in the sky basically sail backwards. You can, too this day, watch it rise and set stern first.

I’m about 99% confident the ancient Greeks did not place stars in the sky to trace the outline of a ship, but had to do with what was already there.

 

[Corinnguard]

Not that I'm likely to, but if I ever use Asian dragons, that's exactly how I'll have them travel. They float with magic and their method of propulsion is farting. Sure.

I've heard that the dragons in the Discworld series use their farts to take off into the air. I don't know if their farts count as a weapon though. Unless, of course, you are standing downwind of one as it takes off. Fire damage only.

Because a dragon isn't a hummingbird.

Unless it's the rare Hummingbird Dragon, an offshoot of the Faerie Dragon.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But that is not a good argument when we have psionics / magic involved - aerodynamics (and physics in general) have only a passing importance.

I'm afraid it absolutely is. The problem is a comprehension-of-argument one on your end or an explanation-of-argument one on everyone else's end ("No, it is the children who are wrong"), or some slider in-between.

Magic can easily make up for such issues.

No.

You can have pointless decorative wings that "flap" however you want, but these aren't that. They're huge and wrong. @EzekielRaiden details exactly why.

At a certain point you need so much magic that it's all magic, and you're way past that here. But even with magic, these wings are an impediment! Literally some laughably undersized pair of joke wings would be more plausible.

Like, obviously this guy is getting almost all of his lift and probably motive force from magic (unlike Toothless), but the wings at least face the right way and probably aren't causing a huge problem.

but why would the topaz pursue such agility

Any dragon with wings like those pictured would have absolutely zero "agility" in the air. It could fly backwards pretty quickly and nothing else.

And again, there's reason nothing that's eagle-sized or larger (or even quite a bit smaller) flies like a hummingbird. It's not for a "lack of magic" either. It's because it's not workable to flap and twist larger wings at the sorts of speeds you'd need to. Even with magic somehow allowing it to work better there's a fundamental issue that isn't solved unless "It's not air you're breathing" levels of magic/fantasy is going on.

I mean that is true of a gargantuan sized dragon too (or a giant or about a hundred other things in D&D). So I hardly thing that is the issue.

That's not really true. A lot of very large dragons have semi-plausible aerodynamics, or ones where a fairly small amount of magic could be needed to support them, or are pretty much explicitly magic (like the new Gold Dragon). That you don't think it's an issues shows that you're not actually understand why it is an issue.

 

[Corinnguard]

The upcoming book, D&D: Book of Dragons might provide some explanation for the Topaz Dragon's odd wing structure. If it delves into dragon biology somewhere in its' pages.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The issue really is not whether the wings would work (they wouldn't) or whether there is some explanation for them being like this. The issue is that they look wrong and stupid. Like someone said, it looks like someone assembled a miniature incorrectly or like some AI error. Now why it looks like that that to us is tangentially related to how wings work, as we have seen working wings all our life and they very obviously are not like this. It does not look like "interestingly magical impossible" it looks like the artist made a fundamental anatomy mistake.

 

[dave2008]

That you don't think it's an issues shows that you're not actually understand why it is an issue.

That you think it is an issue shows that you're not actually understanding why it is not an issue.

I am pretty sure I understand your point, what you seem to missing is that I am not talking about trying to explain why the dragon is designed the way it is, but how we can change it to make the idea "work." There are mechanical and logical issues with your argument, but that is not really the point. This, to me, is supposed to be a fun exercise in how do you do this, not a search for how not to do it.