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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7802959" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Let me back off and take another punt at this.</p><p></p><p>"To my mind, this takes a lot of the terror and splendor out of dragons... they become a "stock encounter""</p><p></p><p>In the last 40 years that this particular comment has come up a lot, and every time it seems to have a different idea to 'fix' the problem? I don't know that your the first person to think that the problem is that the dragons have some sort of knowable form and are thus demystified by that, but your the first I've encountered that has blamed the problem solely on the color coding. The stock way that eventually won out is what I call the 2e paradigm, where the biggest of the big dragons have epic CR and are far more dangerous and powerful than just about anything else that they print in Core, and every edition seems to try to crank that up to 11.</p><p></p><p>So, to begin with, RPGs demystify magical things. That's just what they do. They put numbers to things and give mechanics for the numinous and mysterious so that you can game them and the players have some agency when doing so. So understand that at the heart of this complaint you are dealing with something that is almost inevitable. Whatever is magical and terrifying will ultimately become common place to a gamer sometime after the first session.</p><p></p><p>Secondly, beware your motivation here. If your motivation is to over awe the players, then chances are you are GM ego gaming in some form, where you are staking your enjoyment of the game on getting some sort of worshipful or fearful response from the players. The symptoms of this are all powerful NPCs, DM PCs, tuckers kobolds or any variant, worrying about whether players are metagaming, and spending a lot of time imagining the players panicking, cowering, and freaking out about how dangerous or clever or frightening your encounters are. Beware tendencies to introduce every encounter as an ambush, and spending too much time imaging monsters dishing out punishment to the PCs. Truth is, most of your monsters will go down like chumps, and that's OK. PC's will get into plenty of tough fights without you explicitly planning for it, and you as the DM have unlimited resources and this isn't a contest.</p><p></p><p>Thirdly, most of your complaints don't seem to match your stated problem. Your stated problem is with the color coding. But I'm at a loss to see color coding prevents ideas like, "So you'll want to tread REALLY carefully, in case you accidentally insult his Mom or something.", nor how removing it would enable that idea in a way that wasn't already enabled with chromatic dragons. Nor am I really understanding what you mean by "realistic NPC" when you are speaking of a completely non-real magical creature that, by virtue of being non-real, is whatever the primary the author defines them as being. You get to decide what is realistic in personality for your dragons, and I don't see what the color wheel is doing to prevent that. What is a realistic motivation for a nigh immortal gigantic magical carnivore? Smaug and Glaurung have a bunch of great speaking lines, but they don't seem to have very human motivations. In fact, in The Hobbit, the thing that seems to bother the dwarfs about dragons even more than their well known fondness for dwarf flesh, is that they don't seem to have any sort of motivations. To a dwarf, all that treasure has a purpose and is meant to be used for something either practical or beautiful, but they bitterly complain that the dragon has no purpose at all and won't even spend or use a brass coin! They are just agents of destruction that are either sleeping or destroying, but they don't have any more complex thoughts than delighting in sleeping and destroying. </p><p></p><p>As I said, my version of dragons are alien beings with inhuman emotional range and motivations, but there are plenty of examples of talking dragons in D&D that act like humans who happen to be fire breathing winged dinosaurs if that is what you prefer.</p><p></p><p>I almost feel like this is a contradiction on your part, in that you on the one hand say you are upset that the "terror and splendor" is taken out of dragons, and yet on the other hand you also say that you want to normalize them so that they aren't any different than anything else - "Like with all my villains/allies, a prefer a more nuanced and flawed approach."</p><p></p><p>Which is it to be? Are they going to be terrible and splendid super-genius intellects in a flying dinosaur's body, or are they going to be nuanced and flawed things just like everything else? Are they going to be EVIL and GOOD, or are they going to be nuanced and flawed things with perfectly normal motivations and personalities that weird bodies aside are basically just like ordinary humans and everything else? And whatever your answer, what does that got to do with the color coding?</p><p></p><p>Let's say that all dragons have Red Dragon stats, and different personalities. How does this improve the situation? What are you hoping for?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7802959, member: 4937"] Let me back off and take another punt at this. "To my mind, this takes a lot of the terror and splendor out of dragons... they become a "stock encounter"" In the last 40 years that this particular comment has come up a lot, and every time it seems to have a different idea to 'fix' the problem? I don't know that your the first person to think that the problem is that the dragons have some sort of knowable form and are thus demystified by that, but your the first I've encountered that has blamed the problem solely on the color coding. The stock way that eventually won out is what I call the 2e paradigm, where the biggest of the big dragons have epic CR and are far more dangerous and powerful than just about anything else that they print in Core, and every edition seems to try to crank that up to 11. So, to begin with, RPGs demystify magical things. That's just what they do. They put numbers to things and give mechanics for the numinous and mysterious so that you can game them and the players have some agency when doing so. So understand that at the heart of this complaint you are dealing with something that is almost inevitable. Whatever is magical and terrifying will ultimately become common place to a gamer sometime after the first session. Secondly, beware your motivation here. If your motivation is to over awe the players, then chances are you are GM ego gaming in some form, where you are staking your enjoyment of the game on getting some sort of worshipful or fearful response from the players. The symptoms of this are all powerful NPCs, DM PCs, tuckers kobolds or any variant, worrying about whether players are metagaming, and spending a lot of time imagining the players panicking, cowering, and freaking out about how dangerous or clever or frightening your encounters are. Beware tendencies to introduce every encounter as an ambush, and spending too much time imaging monsters dishing out punishment to the PCs. Truth is, most of your monsters will go down like chumps, and that's OK. PC's will get into plenty of tough fights without you explicitly planning for it, and you as the DM have unlimited resources and this isn't a contest. Thirdly, most of your complaints don't seem to match your stated problem. Your stated problem is with the color coding. But I'm at a loss to see color coding prevents ideas like, "So you'll want to tread REALLY carefully, in case you accidentally insult his Mom or something.", nor how removing it would enable that idea in a way that wasn't already enabled with chromatic dragons. Nor am I really understanding what you mean by "realistic NPC" when you are speaking of a completely non-real magical creature that, by virtue of being non-real, is whatever the primary the author defines them as being. You get to decide what is realistic in personality for your dragons, and I don't see what the color wheel is doing to prevent that. What is a realistic motivation for a nigh immortal gigantic magical carnivore? Smaug and Glaurung have a bunch of great speaking lines, but they don't seem to have very human motivations. In fact, in The Hobbit, the thing that seems to bother the dwarfs about dragons even more than their well known fondness for dwarf flesh, is that they don't seem to have any sort of motivations. To a dwarf, all that treasure has a purpose and is meant to be used for something either practical or beautiful, but they bitterly complain that the dragon has no purpose at all and won't even spend or use a brass coin! They are just agents of destruction that are either sleeping or destroying, but they don't have any more complex thoughts than delighting in sleeping and destroying. As I said, my version of dragons are alien beings with inhuman emotional range and motivations, but there are plenty of examples of talking dragons in D&D that act like humans who happen to be fire breathing winged dinosaurs if that is what you prefer. I almost feel like this is a contradiction on your part, in that you on the one hand say you are upset that the "terror and splendor" is taken out of dragons, and yet on the other hand you also say that you want to normalize them so that they aren't any different than anything else - "Like with all my villains/allies, a prefer a more nuanced and flawed approach." Which is it to be? Are they going to be terrible and splendid super-genius intellects in a flying dinosaur's body, or are they going to be nuanced and flawed things just like everything else? Are they going to be EVIL and GOOD, or are they going to be nuanced and flawed things with perfectly normal motivations and personalities that weird bodies aside are basically just like ordinary humans and everything else? And whatever your answer, what does that got to do with the color coding? Let's say that all dragons have Red Dragon stats, and different personalities. How does this improve the situation? What are you hoping for? [/QUOTE]
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