Stats for Good Metallic Dragons?

[GMforPowergamers]

Good does not always mean on the same side as the PCs. It's one thing to have the Pcs fight and defeat evil all the time. To really make things interesting sometimes my good aligned PCs have to fight and defeat other good characters and creatures.

I had an entire portion of a game (IIRC 6th-15th levels) where a lawful good gold dragon with paliden levels was the main bad guy of my game. All the PCs were good as well. The concept was that there were 9 evil artafacts that could not be destroyed, so they were hidden away to never be used. The PCs found out that they could use them to banish a being of pure chaos and evil from this realm if assembled, so they had to find them, but the dragon's duity was to ensure no living being ever got there hands on them.


so yea I voted 1 or 2 times, not enought o worry about it...

 

[Rechan]

As far as I'm concerned, alignment in a statblock is pointless. Its motivations are what I decide when I decide to use it.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I agree with some of the above posters. There are lots of monsters in my MMs that do not ever see the light of day. Eitehr no chance, too strange, or whatever.

I ahve no problems seingthe dragons in the MM, especially as I will not be buying the Good Dragon book coming out whenever. HAving the stats gives me another option.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I agree with some of the above posters. There are lots of monsters in my MMs that do not ever see the light of day. Eitehr no chance, too strange, or whatever.

I ahve no problems seeing the dragons in the MM, especially as I will not be buying the Good Dragon book coming out whenever. Having the stats gives me another option. A lot mroe of an option that some other weird monster, that is for sure.

 

[SKyOdin]

I voted that I got use out of the Good Metallic Dragon entry in the 3.5 MM, but that is only because my DM gave my Paladin a Gold Dragon as a special mount.

Personally, I prefer the new paradigm where both Chromatic and Metallic dragons can be either Good or Evil. Why would every Gold Dragon be good and every Red Dragon be evil anyways?

 

[doctorhook]

I voted that I got use out of the Good Metallic Dragon entry in the 3.5 MM, but that is only because my DM gave my Paladin a Gold Dragon as a special mount.

Personally, I prefer the new paradigm where both Chromatic and Metallic dragons can be either Good or Evil. Why would every Gold Dragon be good and every Red Dragon be evil anyways?

"Because Gary said so."

That doesn't make a very good reason for anything, ever, does it?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Used lots of good dragons. Never used the stats. Still want the stats. They're just to important not to define them with the rules of the game.

 

[Bumbles]

Personally, I prefer the new paradigm where both Chromatic and Metallic dragons can be either Good or Evil. Why would every Gold Dragon be good and every Red Dragon be evil anyways?

Biochemistry shaping both their personality and their physical development.

 

[I'm A Banana]

"Because Gary said so."

That doesn't make a very good reason for anything, ever, does it?

If you think that's the only reason, I've got 30 years of fun D&D with at least one good-aligned metallic dragon in them who would be shocked to find out that they weren't really as much fun as they thought they were.

More relevantly:

Personally, I prefer the new paradigm where both Chromatic and Metallic dragons can be either Good or Evil. Why would every Gold Dragon be good and every Red Dragon be evil anyways?

The biggest reason is probably one of fantasy storytelling. The evil Red dragon and the good Gold dragon are really quite archetypal; and the Good Dragon/Evil Dragon dichotomy exists far outside of D&D. D&D, in order to be a good narrative game, should include the rules for using these narrative archetypes in the game. That doesn't necessarily mean statblocks for fighting gold dragons, but that does mean rules for what they are and what they do when you put them in a game, as good, benevolent, yet perhaps adversarial, creatures. That does mean that the good dragon and the evil dragon both should have their supported place in D&D.

The second reason supports the first, but is also distinct from it: the idea that not every monstrous creature is there to fight the PC's is key to having a variety of different types of challenges in the game. Strong support for non-combat narrative challenges is key for a game that is diverse, especially a game that is about, to a certain extent, storytelling. The gold dragon, as an archetypically Good creature, was an opportunity to showcase this concept.

4e's current dominant design paradigm regards the narrative reason and the "not every challenge is combat" reason as fairly worthless, but my own games, and I'd wager the games of a lot of players, would be made more robust by including at least one iconic evil and one iconic good dragon, even if the rest of them were up for moral grabs.

IMO, this is related to the broader issue of 4e's functional ruleset vs. traditional D&D's more descriptive ruleset, but those two reasons are very important to my games, at least.

 

[Wombat]

In my games ... we rarely met with dragons and dropped alignment.

As such, the issue never came up.

Oh, and our dragons were never colour-coded nor were they metal-coded.