D&D General What Even Is The Deal With DnD Dragons?

[cmad1977]

They’re cool?

 

[Doug McCrae]

Nothing in D&D is mythical, even the gods. D&D takes content from myths, legends, and 20th century fiction, views it only in terms of its powers and capabilities, and stats it up thereby rendering it meaningless. If you kill Tiamat in D&D can you make the world out of her body? No, you get xp and loot, which makes your PC more powerful.

The colour-coded dragons date back to OD&D and seem to be an extrapolation of the Smaug-like red dragon in Chainmail. Red = fire, so other colours = ? There's not much to it.

EDIT: And the good-aligned metallic dragons are an extrapolation of the evil-aligned chromatic ones. Alignment grid filling, exactly as you say.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The word "dragons" sounds cool paired with "dungeons", the focus of the earliest prototypes of the game, and gives the consumer a sense of the sort of fantasy milieu they are jumping into. Naturally if it's right in the title (in the plural!) buyers are going to expect a certain number of dragons, as one of the two things they were most overtly promised. There was also an early need to fill monster manuals (there still is, but decades of source materials makes it a lot less of a scramble). Having lots of types of dragon helps. The general proliferation of dragons, naturally, does depend a lot on the campaign setting.

They are also common because people like dragons. They are the archetypical monstrous foe for the archetypical fantasy hero. Everyone wants to fight them at some point. Once a foe is relatively common it can no longer be mythical.

The Dragon as it is known in western fantasy literature basically begins with Beowulf, which introduces the cave, hoard, and firebreath, as well as makes it the final foe for someone with an illustrious adventuring career. It comes to us by way of the Hobbit, where Smaug is partly based on Tolkien's scholarly theories about the cultural meaning of the Beowulf dragon. Trying to match the dragons of typical Western fantasy after Tolkien with Welsh dragons, the dragons that early christian saints deal with in hagiographies, Eastern depictions of dragons, Greco-Roman dragons, or anything that isn't Norse/Germanic is not really going to line up as well as one might like. One would think something like the Greek myth of planting a dragon's teeth and a fierce race of men growing from the soil would be ripe for a game where people often harvest monster parts, but no.

I have no comparable explanation for this chromatic/metallic nonsense.

 

[Charlaquin]

Nice.

See that’s some medieval hermetic esoterica, and I’m here for it.

Glad you like it. Feel free to steal it wholesale for your own games if you so desire.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I'm sure @Rob Kuntz could probably give some insight into how and why D&D dragons look like they do, with the categorization they have.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One would think something like the Greek myth of planting a dragon's teeth and a fierce race of men growing from the soil would be ripe for a game where people often harvest monster parts, but no.

I went there right away. Created a spell for it...

…well, skeletons.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The word "dragons" sounds cool paired with "dungeons", the focus of the earliest prototypes of the game, and gives the consumer a sense of the sort of fantasy milieu they are jumping into. Naturally if it's right in the title (in the plural!) buyers are going to expect a certain number of dragons, as one of the two things they were most overtly promised. There was also an early need to fill monster manuals (there still is, but decades of source materials makes it a lot less of a scramble). Having lots of types of dragon helps. The general proliferation of dragons, naturally, does depend a lot on the campaign setting.

They are also common because people like dragons. They are the archetypical monstrous foe for the archetypical fantasy hero. Everyone wants to fight them at some point. Once a foe is relatively common it can no longer be mythical.

The Dragon as it is known in western fantasy literature basically begins with Beowulf, which introduces the cave, hoard, and firebreath, as well as makes it the final foe for someone with an illustrious adventuring career. It comes to us by way of the Hobbit, where Smaug is partly based on Tolkien's scholarly theories about the cultural meaning of the Beowulf dragon. Trying to match the dragons of typical Western fantasy after Tolkien with Welsh dragons, the dragons that early christian saints deal with in hagiographies, Eastern depictions of dragons, Greco-Roman dragons, or anything that isn't Norse/Germanic is not really going to line up as well as one might like. One would think something like the Greek myth of planting a dragon's teeth and a fierce race of men growing from the soil would be ripe for a game where people often harvest monster parts, but no.

I have no comparable explanation for this chromatic/metallic nonsense.

Each of those could be different types of dragons, though. That’s why I like dragon turtles and faerie dragons and wyverns and drakes and pseudodragons, but find the chromatic dragons entirely uninspiring.

My buddy has a homebrew spell named “Sow Dragon’s Teeth” which is a sort of oddball Conjure X spell that creates 1 Spartoi per dragons tooth consumed by the spell. They’re loyal to the caster for 2 weeks, after which they require payment in order to stick around. They don’t ever disappear, which is the most oddball part of the spell. But they also cost 1 50gp tooth per warrior.

I’m working on some Boon type effects you can get from killing a dragon and eating its heart, or by laying it to rest in an appropriate manner, or sleeping inside its corpse for a long rest (gross, but real magic often is).

 

[tetrasodium]

And the whole Chromatic/Metallic thing...what the hell is this?

Alignment used to be rooted in absolute morality & some settings largely copied how others extended this into dragons. Decades later we still have that lore presented as an absolute. At least one setting does not technically have them & at least one other takes the absolute morality baggage attached to dragons & throws it into a fire.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

It just seems like having so many types of what is really the same creature, just with differing personalities and breath weapons, dilutes the whole concept. Stuff like Faeirie Dragons, Wyverns, Dragon Turtles, etc, at least expands what a dragon can be, rather than just being a palette swap I’m expected to take seriously as an important part of the world.

I'm actually running a whole campaign centered around slaying dragons at the moment.

Some reasons I like the multiple colors of dragons:

• Adds some variety to multiple different adventures featuring dragons.
• Easy to delineate different factions of dragons scheming against each other.
• Dragon personalities provide starting points for roleplaying
• Experienced adventurers/players know a little bit about the dragon they face, so we can spend less time on exposition.

Some of these like roleplaying and factions I could design from the ground up, but I'm busy and having them prebuilt for me saves time.

I also would argue that many variations of a single kind of creature is very much part of D&D. How many kinds of elves are there?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm actually running a whole campaign centered around slaying dragons at the moment.

Some reasons I like the multiple colors of dragons:

• Adds some variety to multiple different adventures featuring dragons.
• Easy to delineate different factions of dragons scheming against each other.
• Dragon personalities provide starting points for roleplaying
• Experienced adventurers/players know a little bit about the dragon they face, so we can spend less time on exposition.

Some of these like roleplaying and factions I could design from the ground up, but I'm busy and having them prebuilt for me saves time.

I also would argue that many variations of a single kind of creature is very much part of D&D. How many kinds of elves are there?

On the bolded, I agree. I just think things like “dragon turtle” and maybe elemental dragons, and such, would be more interesting than what dnd has as its primary delineator.