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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scrollreader" data-source="post: 4150547" data-attributes="member: 62761">If dragons in your world are social, then they make a great example.  The local dragon might care if a little kingdom is expanding, but that's probably it.  Once you start throwing around the kind of power some of the fallen empires have, then the parliment/council/whatever of dragons gets concerned.  An old dragon isn't worried by a kingdom, even a big one.  But a massive empire, and perhaps more inportantly, the heroes and magical wonders it spawns are a different matter.  They /also/ are on a long, slower timeline than mortals, and are capable of everything from rampant destruction (few cities, in even the greatest empires could handle a concerted attack of a couple of wyrms and lesser dragons), to subtle manuevering, especially if dragons are still capable of innate shapechanging (as many of the metallics were in 3.X, even without spells).  It makes dragons more mysterious, and more adversarial, but the latter is something 4e is doing anyway.  And it makes Dragonkilling /special/ and important.  Especially if they're social, and keeping the mortal races in check, people that can kill dragons go on the watch list, and just this could generate whole adventure paths at the paragon and epic tiers, as worried dragons devote more and more resources to trying to stop these dragonslayers.EDIT: if you want more moral ambiguity in your dragons, or to keep your chromatics and metallics separate, simply put them on opposite sides of some prophecy of statement.  Maybe the metallic "Wardens" wiped out Bael Whatever, due to the infernal taint, and try to shepard civilizations along, even if they are a bit pedantic and overprotective.  And maybe the chromatics are trying to keep the mortals from fulfilling their eventual destiny of surpassing the glory of dragonkind, and are responsible for the fall of the dragonborn empire.</blockquote>

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