Why would a dragon give a shit about hoarding gold or kidnapping maidens...

Dragons are basically metaphorical representations of human sin. Avarice, gluttony, pride, all that jazz.

They hoard gold and jewels because they understand that is has value, and that humans covet it. They kidnap beautiful, high born maidens for...pretty much the exact same reason.

Currently reading a web serial where dragons are all male and seduce women of the various other races to breed (they shapeshift), though this rarely involves kidnapping anymore.

There's a short side-story looking into an Elven main character's past where a Blue Dragon started an all-female gladiatorial arena out in a bumfuck nowhere kingdom, in hopes of finding the perfect Veeky Forumswaifu. The heroes shut the racket down, not because he's mistreating the women (he's not) but because once he has what he wants he'll be pretty much running the local economy, and when he leaves with his victorious bride the whole area will lose it's primary source of employment and entertainment.

In my home campaign

Dragons "Eat' gold slowly but absorbing it which lets them grow bigger meaner etc. So sleeping atop it is on of the best ways to "Eat"

Noble bloodlines in Humanoids help them rule lands, people, leylines. Depends on the bloodline. Dragons can also gain this power by eating people of noble or royal blood. So not just Princesses any royal blood. But Prince and Princesses tend to be easier to ensnare than kings or queens.

Well those are MY reasons. Not universal.

>Why would a dragon give a shit about hoarding gold or kidnapping maidens?

Presumably to decorate their lair in an attempt to attract mates or some shit like that.

Somebody once estimated the volume of gold in Smaug's hoard. Since the total volume of all gold in the world is known (or estimated to a quite accurate degree), the numbers can be compared. Turns out Smaug's hoard contains significantly more gold than actually exists in the world.

Gold is slightly radioactive in large amounts and dragons slowly grow in power and size by absorbing the radiation.

It's not about buying things, it's about having things.
Specifically having more things than everyone else.
I always thought that the kidnapping princesses/princes thing was more just their lack of understanding of human culture, with them thinking that owning the princess/prince when the current ruler died, meant that they would then own the kingdom and people would just be cool with it, since the princess/prince was owned by them when they became queen/king.
Or just to say that they owned some royalty that they could show off, but they know that literally the entire kingdom would come fuck them up if they took the ones who were actually in charge.

AtomicGigaDragons!

That's kind of the explanation in Smax. Dragon's are like miniature suns, working their way through the elements on the periodic table.

Fun fact: this is addressed in an ancient Roman fable by Phaedrus, because dragons hoarding gold goes way back and even back then it was confusing people.

In the fable, a fox burrows into the underground den of a giant dragon who is curled around a huge pile of gold. The fox is confused by the dragon hoarding gold and asks why he bothers when he can't spend it on anything. The dragon explains it's not his choice, he was tasked to guard this gold by Jupiter, and is bound to his fate.

The fox then goes into an extended screed about why misers who uselessly hoard wealth are pieces of shit, which seems a little unfair to the dragon.

Gold's a soft metal. It's still a metal, but dragons are giant lizards made of scales harder than iron. To them, it feels like a nice comfy mattress.

The gold isn't for BUYING things. You don't spend the hoard. You sleep on it.
The maidens? They're either snacks, or to make little half-dragons, or to polish scales/hoard.

...

Well, dragons are evil, usually. So they hoard the money and maidens simply because it deprives good people of things they need and that pleases the dragons to no end.

>Currently reading a web serial where dragons are all male and seduce women of the various other races to breed

Is it porn?

>Dragons have been tasked by the gods to defend gold
>humans, not knowing, steal the gold
>dragons are just divine agents doing their job

is that thing supposed to be a dragon

I thought the concept of dragon only formed during the Christianity where it depicted as evil? Not related to asia though.

Every culture has evil reptile creatures/spirits in its mythos, though asian dragons are good as often as not.

The original word "dragon" is derived from, "drakon" is Greek. Most of the European dragon traditions seem to have their roots in Greece or Mesopotamia, or at least are very similar to them. In some cases you can see direct inspiration, when Medieval writers are taking their cues from the Classics.

Dragons are considered serpentine creatures and are traditionally powerful and cunning- the association was inevitable.

>What could he possibly buy with that gold that he can just take?

>why would a dragon want them?
They were trying to steal his prize. They work for the Mercenary.

Roman armies sometimes marched under a dragon banner. It was already an entrenched cultural concept by the time the Book of Revelation was written, with its references to a seven headed dragon, Christians just adopted the dragon as a symbol of Satan, probably due in no small part to it already being a symbol of Roman oppression.

Bane?

>Slypon will never update his comics.
Will Lamb boy end up getting Snu Snu'ed by his new best pal?
Will he stop being a fucking idiot and just go out with Fox girl?
Who knows???

interesting, because it's actually said in the hobbit that smaug get his belly armored by jewel and gold by sitting so long on his hoard, making him partially invulnerable

as for maiden kidnapping, see and i didn't know there was actually a legend about that

Gold isn't radioactive at all. Some isotopes are, but they aren't found in nature.

>wood capacity

Gold isn't about wealth. It's about keeping score. Except unlike humans, where that concept pops up occasionally because of genetics, the drive to power, in this case represented in gold and territory, is inherent in all dragons

Obviously.

In the Saga of the Volsungs, which The Hobbit takes a lot of inspiration from, Fafnir is a man who kills his father to steal his riches. Fafnir runs away into the wild where his greed and viciousness grows, transforming him into a dragon.

I think Suzuruki Dragon has answers to those questions

Why do magpies horde shiny objects for their nest?

Maybe its vision isn't the best and mistakes blonde hair for gold, maybe they've learned through coincidence that if they kidnap something from a town men in shiny things will come.

I've always liked the idea that dragons like wealth, or to be more exact they like showing success/power and have picked up the idea of wealth from 'lesser' races, in a setting without money/money wasn't considered that important, they'd amass something else, like a primitive setting would have a dragon's lair decorated with skulls and bones of hard to kill beasts, it's way of saying "Look at all the shit I can do"

Dragons are hoarders, and maidens have value to humans.

humans can hoard pets too, not that weird if you think about it.

Nope. It's self-described as a "High Fantasy Western" but the actual western elements are completely swallowed up by the High Fantasy.

The Gods are Bastards is the name if anyone's at all interested. It has a rough start, and it can lay the SJW themes on a little bit thick at times, but it's probably one of the most fleshed out, interesting settings I've seen in a long damn time, and it pokes just enough fun at standard Fantasy cliches without becoming a mean-spirited parody. I'd highly recommend it, since it updates fairly often and goes from being alright to start with to excellent once you've caught up.

Small early example between two characters, one of whom is a Drow:

>“Neat,” said Ruda, bending over and plunging in her hand. She straightened, dragging a rapier from the bag, hilt-first. It was far plainer than her own, but apparently the same in basic design. She stepped aside to make room for Shaeine, who knelt, reached in with both hands, and pulled out a pair of matched scimitars.

>“Heh, not bothering to defy the cliché, are we?” Zaruda asked, grinning.

>“You used that word at lunch, as well,” replied Shaeine, tilting her head inquisitively. “I am not able to infer the meaning from context.”

>“What, cliché? That’s, uh… You know how a phrase or idea or something is really awesome when it’s first invented, but gets repeated so often everybody gets sick of it and it loses all meaning?”

>“Ah, yes.” Shaeine nodded in understanding. “We call that a drizzt.”

Some researchers think the classic Western idea of a dragon came about when the Sarmatians, Scythians, or Dacians moved westward from central Asia, and brought with them the draco, a leathery standard made to look like an eastern dragon. It is thought that these people probably picked this up from the Chinese, who used the dragon as a symbol of divine mandate and royal power, and many of the people who moved west from Central Asia thought the same.

Before this, mythological beings like Ladon or the Colchian dragon were seen as "big-ass snakes", not necessarily dragons. The Romans asked what these banners were supposed to be and they were told "dragons", and began to equate dragons with the creature depicted in the draco, rather than "big-ass snakes". Of course, the new western concept of the dragon ended up being very different from how they were thought of in China.

tl;dr - eastern dragons (lung) and western dragons might actually share a common ideological root, though western dragons are more "eastern dragon combined with gigantic serpent" than anything else.

Take this with a grain of salt though, I was surprised when I heard it myself and although I do see references to it it does not sound like it is a universally held theory (although that may be more because it rather embarrassing for an archaeologist to describe themselves as a "dragon expert" than anything else).

My personal theory has always been that someone, somewhere in early history found the skull of a dinosaur somewhere near the surface and was immediately all "GIANT LIZARDS DUDE!" and things just mutated from there.

"What if they had wings? What if they could BREATHE FIRE!?"

Dragons Kidnap human maidens because they have determined that they are the best treasure humans have to offer.

Dwarves have better gold and Elves have better gems, but humans will go to war over who gets to marry a princess.

It all comes down to humans not having complex enough economies and craftsmanship to be worth stealing from. The alternative would have been grain, which is even less convenient for the dragon.

The dragon is hoarding the gold for the same reason that a bowerbird builds a bower (or, in some ways, a human male buys a large, expensive vehicle). He's trying to impress the ladies. A dragon with a bigger and more impressive hoard of shiny things is going to be pick up more dragonesses than one that doesn't.

Maybe the dragon is sentient, and knows the value of the material he's collected and is using it to signify that he has amassed all this monetary power that makes him more than capable of providing for any offspring she might sire. Maybe he's not, and the dragon is as interested in collecting shiny baubles and pieces of colored glass as he is gold; it's just the gold part that adventurers are interested in.

No clue about the maiden thing though. Maybe the villagers tried to give a maiden to the dragon to get it to stop taking their stuff for its hoard, much like they try to do with all the giant monsters roaming the landscape. Maybe the dragon just wants the shiny objects a princess is wearing, but can't seem to separate the screaming primate from the thing he actually wants.

It's actually probably fossil mammals, in all irony. Even today China sells a lot of so-called "dragon bones" as folk medicine that more often than not turn out to be from extinct rhinos or bears (or Gigantopithecus, as a matter of fact that's how Gigantopithecus was first discovered). I know that at least one town in eastern Europe used to have a "dragon" skull on display in the town hall that upon closer inspection turned out to be from a cave bear. Mammal fossils tend to be easier to find, and when you pull them out of the ground they are more complete and it's a lot less difficult for someone to imagine that these things used to be from living creatures.

IIRC, that's pretty much exactly what happened with the English Dragon Blue Ben.
Come to think of it, the English and Welsh have a fairly disproportionate amount of dragon legends

It tastes good user, have you ever had princess?

>and tyrants have good use for riches
No. The entire point is they often don't. They amass vast fortunes that are effectively pointless to have. They have to invent shit to give meaning to their hoard.

saving up to buy dragon stuff on dragon craigslist.
Maiden is for his sick hentai fantasies

>Giant lizard tasked by FUCKING GOD to hoard gold is bad because he does his FUCKING JOB

Phaedrus is a fuckhead.

Only western dragons hoard gold, right?

What do eastern dragons do? or african or american? I think they had dragons too? Most people do.

Gold is shiny.
Various birds are knowing for stealing shiny stuff.
Like birds, dragons can fly.
Like birds, dragons are attracted to shiny stuff.

Dragons are smart enough to limit themselves to the valuable shiny stuff.

Because, like all wealthy politicians, they understand that having wealth is a form of wealth. There is a certain level of Wealth Beyond which you don't actually have to pay for things. If you are rich enough, people will extend you indefinite credit in the hopes of gaining access to your money sometime in the future. So the perception of being rich is just as good as the actual wealth. Why do you think Trump frequently brags about how much money he has in his bank account?

>Why would a dragon give a shit about hoarding gold or kidnapping maidens?
how about you try to stop me, fuckface

Its just an identifiable stage in the dragons mental development. Living for such a long time does things to the mind. After its youthful stage when it is much like any mortal it start transitioning into a number of mental stages that would be classified as a mental disorder in mortals. It normally lasts for a few hundred years but the dragon soon grows out of it. This is why all the gold in the world is not in a hoard somewhere. Once the dragon matures out of this stage it normally gives it away or uses it as a lure for adventures as it transitions into its next mental stage.

Dragons are literally hoarders; coins, gems, jewelry, magic items, etc. They don't spend it, FFS. Watch some of those hoarder shows, mang.

Copper, silver and gold have bactericide and fungicide properties, and are the most used metals for fantasy currency. Sleeping in a pile of coins probably allows the dragon to avoid a ton of diseases and infections.

Option 2: Riches are often enchanted, and dragons grow when exposed to magic. Therefore the richest dragons become the biggest ones, which means that they will breed first. So nature selects the best hoarders.
And since they're dumb animals they haven't learned to differenciate between magical and regular jewelry, they amass everything.

For the maidens, it's only a way to send good aligned parties to the dragon, to weaken it before you strike to steal his entire hoard.

Rolling in soft metals is good for a dragon's hygiene, and it feels good. And lead is toxic so it's a no-go.

Anyone here read pic related?

Contrary to popular belief, dragons don't eat us. They actually eat gold and treasure, that's why they sit on a giant pile of it.

Why would you sit on a giant pile of food, I mean unless you're the cakefarts girl or something

metal doesn't spoil like ordinary food.

>Lack of creativity

- Hoards are to attract mates
- Hoards are for status
- Hoards are eaten for digestion
- Maidens are tender
- Maidens taste better
- Maidens are like caviar
- He doesn't care about maidens, he just doesn't need to hunt
- Maidens are converted to magical powers

It's not that hard, user. You need a little empathy. Unless you claim that humans are sooo~ much more rational with our plant-extract clothing and looking each other while having sex.

That's not the point

You mean that if sitting in a giant pile of food had no chance of resulting in a foodborne illness, you still wouldn't do it?

I mean why would you eat something your ass has been on?
And just cause the metal doesn't spoil doesn't mean it can't get filthy

You're a dragon. You breath fire and digest heavy metals. There isn't a lot of filth that will survive the furnace that is your digestive track.
Besides, animals are digusting. Have you ever seen the kind of things a boar or a dog eat? They won't be grossed out by a little filth.

Maybe dragons like the taste of their own farts. Damn perverts.

Ah, I see they hail from San Francisco.

Why would a human give a shit about hoarding gold or kidnapping maidens? What could he possibly buy with that gold that he can't just take? And what's he gonna do with the girl? I guess he can eat her, but wouldn't he rather have a cow or something? What, is he going to marry her? Or is she just bait for unwitting adventurers? Which he's attracting...for their gear or something to add to his hoard? Humans are fucking weird.

I always fancied that dragons like laying on gold much like cats like laying on cardboard.

I read that as "God is slightly radioactive".

Well, in AD&D dragons had to eat treasure to grow and eat people to recharge their breath weapons.

Okay, so, this gets into the tricky fucking question of how exactly you define "dragon."

The classic version we all know and love, with fire breath, wings, and clawed limbs seems to have developed sometime in the High to late Middle Ages. Leastwise that's when recognizable art of them starts to appear. Before that (and concurrently, but that's another bag of worms) dragons in Western society were mainly big snakes with a few odd physical characteristics and magical attributes. But they were still recognizably dragons, as they had many of the same traits and behaviors. They hoarded gold. They had impenetrable scales. They had maidens sacrificed to them. They marauded about the countryside. Their body parts had magical properties. They often breathed fire, or at least toxic vapors. You get the idea. So there's a concrete tradition going back to Antiquity that evolved over time, but it's all the same concept, more or less.

But when you step out of that tradition a lot of those similarities fall away. Eastern dragons are big, dangerous reptile monsters, that's true, but beyond that? They were basically minor nature gods associated with water. People prayed to them for rain, or to avert floods. The lived in lakes or in rivers or the ocean. They weren't actively malevolent like Western dragons, they generally didn't hoard treasure, they shapeshifted like crazy (which Western dragons tended not to do), they didn't care about maiden sacrifices, they didn't breath fire. We really only call the "dragons" because when Europeans started invading/colonizing the East it was an easy term to apply to a similar, but distinct mythical creature from a foreign culture. One could argue it's inaccurate to call them dragons at all, and we only do so for convenience.

This is even more true in cultures not from Eurasia. In African and the Americas the closest parallels are mainly big water serpents like the Inkanyamba or the Uktena, but that's all they are: parallels.

>Dragon sleeps on a comfy cushion of half-melted gold
>Adventurers show up to find it's hoard hardened into a perfect mold of whatever position it was in when it woke up

I like this idea.

...Wait, fuck. was for

tard

My favorite answer is from "flight of dragons".
They sleep on it because gold is soft and doesn't burn.

They wouldn't. Historically, "dragons," as we see them nowadays - that is to say, "Western," dragons - were basically a synonym for a demon, or a manifestation of Satan himself. They exhibited the seven deadly sins in how they behaved and were effectively defined by them.

Wrath in destruction; greed and envy in the hoarding of stolen treasure; lust in the kidnapping of young, virginal women; gluttony in eating that which they didn't destroy or hoard; sloth in that, when they weren't destroying, kidnapping, or eating, they were sleeping; and pride in how they believed they were unkillable.

To kill a dragon in a tale was tantamount to driving Satan's influence from your land. Those things just stuck with them, and the reasoning behind them changed.

Eastern and western dragons may have a common root. The tipping factor that seems to have led to the image of western dragons changing from big snakes to a more generic reptilian form with wings and clawed limbs seems to be when a several groups of people from central Asia brought their concept of the dragon to the Romans, who in turn probably got the idea from China. You can really see the similarities when you look how dragons are portrayed in these central Asian cultures, with almost mammalian features such as distinct fangs and whiskers that you also see in eastern dragons. After the "old" concept of the western dragon merged with the eastern one to create the classic western dragon we know today.

Dragons are Anarcho-Capitalists.

They hoard that shit because it's theirs. They generally only attack when someone violates the NAP and then whoever violated the NAP has all their belongings as free game.

The evidence for this theory is really shakey.

Dragons are seen as powerful superior creatures. But despite their superior strength, intelligence, and power, they have the single flaw of greed. It's to show that even such powerful creatures are flawed, and have weaknesses. It's to show they are mortal.

The kidnapping maidens is probably not a universal thing, but I imagine it is for ransoms.If a village can afford to continue to pay a ransom then the dragon's hoard grows. If adventurers try to save her then their gold joins the hoard. It's a high yield investment. And if no one pays/dies, then shes a meal.

>capitalist
>dragon
You're a fucking retarded moron who should never ever use words again.

What dragon is EVER going to spend money when it can just take what it wants and you can't stop it?

Because dragons aren't fucking stupid and they're smart enough not to violate NAP.

Is that dragon's group made of princess's wearing costumes?

What does being smart and NAP have to do with each other ?

I get that for humans, it's "smart" to not go full Attila on each other, as the meanest of the lot would eventually be ganged on by everyone.

But if you are strong to the point nearly nothing can harm you, you fuck the NAP both sides, spit on it and then go on a loot/rape/kill/burn rampage whenever you feel like it.
Sure, you might end up getting stabbed in the face by some knight eventually but, in the mean time, you got some great time enjoying somebody's else labor.

This.

The NAP is only valid when there's an equal chance of destruction from both sides, or no threat of a third-party intervening (like a peacekeeping force who could wear shiny emblems that denote them as peacekeepers, we could call them "cops" after the "copper" their badges are made of.)

>mayhaps
>lastly
Ugh..

I will agree though, I've always heard dragons slept on gold to maintain their immortality. But kidnapping maidens has always been a plot dynamic. What brave knight doesn't want to save a princess?

>Why would a dragon give a shit about hoarding gold or kidnapping maidens?
The whole fucking point of that part of the myths is that they don't have any. It's pure, unadulterated greed with no justification whatsoever

You may be the dumbest faggot on Veeky Forums right now.

It's far more likely that "copper" comes from the Latin "to capture". See also, "Cop a feel".

Also, the third party in Dragons v Humans is Adventurers. If a Dragon goes around causing disproportionate mayhem and damages then he's going to get some heroic young adults all up in his ass. This is probably rather profitable at first but I imagine it puts a pretty severe crimp on the lifespan of most asshole dragons.

>The heroes shut the racket down, not because he's mistreating the women (he's not) but because once he has what he wants he'll be pretty much running the local economy, and when he leaves with his victorious bride the whole area will lose it's primary source of employment and entertainment.

>The heroes shut it down, because when it gets shut down the whole area will lose it's jobs.

All gold is corrupted by Morgoth.
Dragons are pretty much to Morgoth what the Ainur are to Eru.
I guess it nourishes them.