Does anyone else feel like DnD dragons are just...a little too small...

Does anyone else feel like DnD dragons are just...a little too small? Don't they only get a hundred feet long or so at most, and that's with a creature that's mostly tail and wings. It seems sort of diminutive to me.

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Well if you want to use them in DnD, there's probably an upper limit to what would work/make sense.

For really huge dragons you'd need, like, Exalted or something.

What if the dragon itself is the dungeon?

>For really huge dragons you'd need, like, Exalted or something.
But if they get too big they count as buildings.

>100 feet
>diminutive

Alright, let's say you've got a 100 foot, head to tail, dragon.
Now let's be generous and say that the tail is 40 feet long. Why is it so long, with it having 4 legs and no use for a tail that long? I dunno, but we're doing this worst case scenario.
That's still leaves 60 feet of dragon, or, in another measurement, over 6 stories tall were it to stand up on it's back legs.

Now, let's use this picture as an example. The building is 7 stories tall, but you're talking dragons, so you can use your imagination and think of that top floor being gone.
Now imagine you're that guy at the bottom, walking along the street.
Now imagine how fucked he'd be if that building decided to attack him with magic, elemental breath, and claws the size of his arm.

He'd be IMMEASURABLY fucked. He'd be so dead not even true resurrection would work. He'd just decide to stay in the afterlife, where there's no dragons.

That's why dragons max out at ~100 feet. They can already fulfill even the fattest man's vore fetish while simultaneously killing scores of elite soldiers and casting stupid strong spells at the biggest, meanest, magi that are against him. Anything twice that size could not plausibly be killed by anything smaller than a ballista or fifty.

You don't use catapults to kill a dragon user, you use cannons.

No, you use seduction.

Black arrow, you fucking pussies.
That's all you fucking need.
And not even the big one from the movies.
Grow some fucking balls already.

The real reason D&D doesn't have truly enormous dragons the vast majority of the time is so that you can still represent them with miniatures.

For truly vast boss battles, the enemy is as much the terrain as they are a single figure, which gets harder to deal with.

D&D characters for the most part do not have the capability to fight something as large as say Ancalagon unless you use like Immortals Handbook rules

To fight truly giant monsters you either need to be on the same scale either in size or destructive power like mountain destroying power at the least

>Why is it so long, with it having 4 legs and no use for a tail that long?

Well, if it can somehow still fly, the tail could have fins used for guidance. Or have some sort of barbed tail that would make it easier to physically attack without having to get impractically close? Swoop over someone and stab them, sort of thing, instead of having to rake with your claws.

Heroic archers with magic arrows are one way to kill a dragon.

An army in a D&D-style world would probably use arbalests and ballistae, though.

but a sword or lance is the best way

>Does anyone else feel like DnD dragons are just...a little too small

small. Hell no. To me they are way to large. This is Colossal size. Human is so small in comparison it will be only able to trim its nails.

I prefer this size. Size is about right for it to carry dragon riders and it looks good when band of knights or adventures are fighting it. Large enough for it to look imposing in size.

agree on that

So the T rex here is 41 feet long. A hundred foor long dragon would be almost 2.5 times as long and roughly 14.5 times as massive. (To put that into perspective, if you weigh 180 pounds that would be like standing beside a miniaturized person who weighs 12.5 pounds.) How many times have you looked a T rex and thought: "Damn, that's one tiny lizard! If something weighed 10-15 times more than that, it'd still be pretty diminutive!"? Because that's never happened to me. For sake of comparison, a Brontosaurus reaches up to 72 feet long and weighs 15 tons. So, you know, a hundred foot dragon would be bigger.

Yeah, that's ridiculously big. As far as I can tell, it's almost 40' to the top of the dragon's head, which would probably put the length of the thing at 150' and maybe more. How are people supposed to pose a threat to that? That'd be like if you were attacked by Star Wars action figures... but only small ones, like jawas. Maybe they could sting you with their little needle-shooting bows (though maybe not if you were armored like a dragon), but how would the fuckers ever melee you? The only time they could reach you would be when you were in the process of kicking them or stepping on them.

speaking of monster size I also think giants work best at 9-12 feet of height. People have hard time imagining how tall that actually is. Go to your room and stare at a corner where ceiling meets the wall. Now imagine that is the location of giant's eyes. Not so small any more.

In addition halflings and similar creatures should be 4 feet tall (2/3 of human height) and dwarves should be (5/6 of human height). D&D height scale is either absurdly tall or silly small. Imagining 3 feet tall halflings and gnomes doing anything to you is fucking hilarious when you get a finally visualize how much 3 feet actually is.

For comparison here is a photo of people with dwarfism. In d&d dwarves are the same height. Now look at the size comparison to a person on the right. He isn't even tall. Maybe even below average.

So ideally proportions in my book would be:

Human 1,80m (6 feet)
Dwarf 1,50m (5 feet)
Halfling 1,20m (4 feet)

What does it say about me that my first thought after seeing this is 'Wow, those planets seem really close to that star'?

>T-rex with feathers

I like my giants around there. That way snu-snu won't involve spelunking.

It means you have some sense of scale.

Nobody draws space to scale, since 99% of the picture would be empty space

You know, D&D already has absurdly-ridiculous-beyond-comprehension sized dragons. On page 179 of the Epic Level Handbook, or right here on the srd
d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/dragonAdvanced.htm
dragons go above Colossal size. Since we've already seen how ridiculous Colossal size is, imagine something bigger than that. Anything more than that is no longer a monster, it is a plot device or a highly lethal piece of terrain. It wouldn't merely not fear you, it would barely notice you as it steps on you like an insect.

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After a certain point, it either needs to be somewhere excruciatingly remote, or just plain water bound. Because even casual existence destroys wildlife for miles, and a take off gust destroys anything not made of hard earth.

I have zero problems with that size dragon existing, but there's a lot you have to manage for to make it feel right.

Good. Absurdly oversized creatures belong to clearly exaggerated mythical tales from thousands of years ago. The here and now requires something workable.

Some drafts of the Silmarillion included Morgoth's army using personnel carriers powered by internal combustion to assault Gondolin.

Point is, First Age combat and warfare was just ridiculous for the standards of your average fantasy setting. You're seeing Balrogs being deployed as (notably elite) regular troops while shit like werewolves or trolls are just a fodder level slightly above orcs.

To be fair, that stuff is pretty much entirely in the Fall of Gondolin, most of which seems to have been abandoned by the time you get to the Quenta Silmarillion. FoG was what? Written in 1916?

That picture always triggers my autism. I mean yes, we have that line about how Ancalagon's fall breaks Thangorordrim. But this is in the same magical battle that sinks the entire fucking subcontinent of Beleriand. It's almost entirely certain that the detstruction is due to some magical crap on a "realistic" level, and a demonstration of Morgoth's power breaking on a narrative level. He's not some enormously fat ass.

Durin's bane is described as being a little bigger than a human, but Gandalf "Throwing him down" destroys the side of a mountain. Powerful beings fighting destroy local geography, since this is a fictional myth, and earthquakes and other geographic cataclysms are often attributed to the Gods warring in ancient, primitive people.

Yeah, for truly large creatures like this I've considered doing something that would probably make my players riot.

Why would a sword that is the relative size of a broke toothpick even be able to do much more than scratch a beast this large? It simply can't go in far enough. Without poison or some magic you'd at BEST be taking a box cutter to the for the amount of damage you'd probably be doing.

But that's not very fun or in the spirit of the game so I don't do that. Would be a good way of fucking the group over, though.

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Source? Reverse image search just gave me buildings.

darkmane.deviantart.com/art/For-Macroceli-139764602

Honestly they seem rather oversize. Always been a fan of smaller, more bestial dragons. Size of a dog to a horse, maybe put a really giant one in somewhere like Vermithrax. DnD is just a system that scales up ridiculously until you need 60' dragons with spells on top to be a threat.

For something where more 'epic' dragons are fitting, I'd want something set in Norse myth with Nidhogr and Jormungandr. Tolkien had Ancalagon there, but that was back when there were armies of angels to oppose him, so not really fitting for most LoTR style games.

How would it feel like to rip and tear Ancalagon the Black's guts?

>peple don't want to be remembered in folk tales for centuries for defeating a 6000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 metre tall dragon

Sorry, I really like cheesy epic stories. It's my fetish.

As long as they're magical and have great fire breath. They need to be a threat.

I feel like you're a really good DM

that pic seems contrived to me

this

I don't see the point in dog sized dragons.
Even if they breathe fire, they still aren't really a threat on any sort of real scale.
It just cheapens the accomplishment of killing them. It goes from a legendary feat to barely more than spearing a boar. That's just not fantasy.
Horse sized is fine, and can be great if you want a less mythic scaled dragon. Its still on a level where defeating one in single combat is worth writing songs about, but you don't need to come up with justifications for why they don't completely overrun humanity since a coordinated group of experienced hunters can take out down pretty reliably.

>I feel like you're a really good DM

Sarcasm much? Not using absurd heights doesn't detract from the fun. Most times people remember, at least in my knowledge, is not when they kill a building sized dragon but when they accomplish something with a small chance of success. Situations where players feel their characters aren't up to the task.

examples:
- driving a pickup truck on the highway while being chased by machine gun government agents. Then chased by a mecha. Also mekton rpg rules says that being hit by mecha sized plasma weapon kills you outright.

playing 3-4 level adventurer party in forgotten realms. Survive the battle against 20 mounted knights.

Dark Heresy - IG guard and tech priest against hive gang. They are cornered in a room. Both are on negative hitpoints. They have one lasgun, and one frag grenade.

i was being serious

>realistically since humans arent all 6 feet (which is certainly above average into the top 25 percent of humans) and there arent many humans under 5 feet, the scale in D&D is just about right
>humans- 5-6 feet
>elves (depending on what brand you use) are usually 4.5-5.5 feet
>dwarves- 4-5 feet
>gnomes- 3.5-4.5 feet
>Halflings- 3-4 feet
there are always notable exceptions, but these are rare.

>elves (depending on what brand you use) are usually 4.5-5.5 feet
>tfw no ancient 8' warrior elves
oh wait

Some people just like to imagine that Ancalagon was literally several miles tall.

I personally think it fits the mythology theme. Sure, he might not have ACTUALLY been that big, but the idea of a dragon that physically blots out of the sun being slain by an airship crewed by angels and super-elves, and captained by a half-elf who wears Venus as a hat, really appeals to my sense of epic fantasy, because that's exactly what it is: epic in scale. Everything is taken up to 11 because it's intentionally ridiculous, and having him be HUGE is no more relatively silly than having him be regular sized but then explode and take out three volcanos on death.

Like, at a certain point you're just arguing over which is more silly, while agreeing that they are both extremely silly, which is, well... Silly.

wtf i hate dnd now

psst!
psst, user!
post giant dragons

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Since it's not stated how Earendil slew Ancalagon, how do you guys think it happened?

Arrow volleys to wings?
Spear thrusts to heart while flying at high speed?

A single black arrow

>Spear thrusts to heart while flying at high speed?
it was definetly some sort of ranged atack

>DnD dragons are all the same.
Welcome to another edition of Depends On Setting.

While most Dragon D&D's player face are restricted to the 6 by 6 squares of 30 x 30 this should not be confused with the "Largest" dragon around.

Breaking the charts to start the Dragon Gods, Chronepsis, Bahamant, and Tiamat's true forms. Which have been stated to be anywhere from 30x30 (small) to 100x100 or bigger (better).
Lets not forget Io who's on occasion be started to be the size of the world once and continental size a few other times.

Speak of worlds. If were counting spelljammer as "D&D" which we shouldn't we have Dragon's the size of star systems, and the 80's understanding of a "Black Hole's Size"

Scaling it back down we look at the Dragon of Tyr from Dark sun! No! Not the current one! He's only 40ft, but the metamorphosis describes how it CAN create much much larger dragon on "more suited" candidates.

Three Dragon God's of Eberon made the world with their bodies. Based on what little we know of the Dragon Prophecies this might literally be true.

The Demodragon's original stats from state it to be larger than Colossal++ and simply states it's too large to fight.

Torpedo to the exhaust port.

Unlubricated.

Bigger dragons simply don't work fine with RPG combat rules. If you want to go with insanely big dragons (from Smaug to Ancalagon) is just a matter of figuring out how to do it.

>peple don't want to be remembered in folk tales for centuries for defeating a 6000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 metre tall dragon

>TFW You fight Jormungandr

are you saying you have a story to tell?

>6000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 metre tall

According to Wolfram Alpha that's a dragon larger than the observable universe.

Considering Jormungandr encircles the nine realms, I'd say he's bigger than the universe.

No. If anything, they and many other monsters are too big. Also they're too smart, too magical, and all around kind of awful.

This girl is apparently 3' 9", and she looks plenty tall for a halfling. 3' halflings may be a bit on the small side, but somewhere around 3' 6" to 3' 9" seems pretty good. 4' is probably too tall.

>Dwarf 1,50m (5 feet)
That's a bit on the high side, I think. The average US woman's height is just under 5' 4" and women within an inch or two of 5' are very common (the average Japanese or South Korean woman is apparently only 5' 2", by the way). Assuming you're giving male dwarf height, female dwarves would be somewhere around 4' 7" or 4' 8" (assuming the gender difference in height is the same percentage it is in humans). That's definitely short, but I guess I have an issue with a male dwarf being the same height as a somewhat short woman. So I'd kick them down to more like 4' 9" (with female dwarves being more like 4' 6").

>Human 1,80m (6 feet)
The average US adult male is somewhere around 5' 9 1/2" and is a bit on the tall side when compared to the world at large, so making human height 6' is pushing it a bit.

You're missing the entire point of European dragons. They're emblems of greed, cowardice, stagnation, etc. People attribute glorification to them because of their narrative merits, not because "it's big and scary".

Deal with it, scalesucker, they more than likely had feathers

All of those are way better represented by something more physically intimidating than a lengthy pitbull with a skin condition.
And in narratives, they're actually almost always big and scary, for that exact reason.
Even in the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, the thing's corpse took 4 ox carts to carry.

Supposedly the reason they're so small in classical art is that the church wouldn't allow the glorification of a creature that represented the devil, but I can't remember where I heard that so take it with a grain of salt.

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Rammed with the Silmarill on the prow, burning and shattering his armor, then maiar warriors of wind and the secret fire on board help tear the rest of the way through. Essentially a magical Silmarill tipped bullet filled with the heroic version of balrogs and Eonwe, greatest of all armed combatants

Because when you go to grab him the little dude ninjas his way up your arm and dual-wields his little swords right through your eye. It's like you've never seen Small Soldiers.

Unless you drop it into a black hole, or slice it open with a magic sword that can rip through a dragon's scales like butter.

>reverse-searches a picture of buildings
>gets pictures of buildings
Shocking.

I played a game with my group once where there was a dragon inside a dungeon that was another dragon that was inside another dragon-dungeon and so on. We all got out the alcohol and tried to fight our way out.

My nigga right here

You can always get bigger.

Aren't the only dragons that size great wyrms? Those are horribly powerful even if they shape shift down to human size

Way I see it, you can get larger dragons, and the do exist.

They're just unstatted. They're too big, too powerful. The stuff with stats is just the stuff a party can realistically defeat. You meet one, you realise that it doesn't have a mountainside cave, it just IS a mountain with it's own cave that giant dragons also live in. And it could flex a single eyebrow and have enough arcane might to smite you from existence, summon in powerful outsiders to piss on your smoking ashes and still have enough left over to cause a gust of wind and cleaning charm to make it as if you were never here.

I'm fine with fuckhueg dragons but they shouldn't be a common thing.

A dragon bigger than a 100ft is a threat to an entire civilization. Much bigger and you're dealing with god level threats.

Related but off-topic question: is the "c" in "Ancalagon" pronounced soft (s) or hard (k)?

Wow that guy's eyes are in a really bad location. How the fuck does he see anywhere?

That's about the size of a young dragon. They get larger when they grow, though.

Adults and ancients aren't in the realm of realism anyway, and most campaigns never get so far that they'd be realistic opponents.

Hard c. Pretty much all Tolkien "C"s are hard.

I do feel like the best sized D&D dragon is great wyrm sized and there should be a way for D&D dragons to get FUCKHUGE, but only as rare and very high level encounters

I honestly like Jabu Jabu style dungeons and would love to play a campaign that involved one inside a dragon

That size feels like a young dragon to me

>I also think giants work best at 9-12 feet of height
Okay, no, I want my giants GIANT
But then again I love the idea of someone heroic fighting huge monsters even if it's not realistic

>legendary feat
This, at the point when you slay HUGE dragons you can do it cause you are a LEGEND, you've left the realm of realism a while ago

going by dnd, horses are Large, so that's clearly a Huge size.
That's adult through mature adult size IIRC.
Huge covers a bit of a range, and that's the smaller side of it, but they don't get to Gargantuan until ancient or higher, and not all types of dragon can even grow to Colossal, even at Great Wyrm which is the size shown in

>defeating a 6000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 metre tall dragon
>defeating a dragon 715 trillion times the size of the observable universe

Well it was a big dragon.

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>no scale reference
I'm choosing to think it's 6 inches tall.

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fair enough, though I have a hard time believing space dragons being small.
here
this better?

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400000000000x10^-11 U

I don't know why but that's have to be the most adorable thing I've seen in a week.

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No. But I've played a setting where the "dragon-kings", each a ruler of an elemental type, were capable of growing. The Red King true form was several hundred meters long. The aura of fear became something several kilometers wide and killing most people out of sheer fright. It destroyed kingdoms just by flying over them.

Been there, done that.

>Wait, should mountains move...?

> Don't they only get a hundred feet long or so at most,
A: No
B: 100ft is huge

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