Can you make dragons interesting? Has there ever been an interesting dragon...

tfw I made an unnecessarily aggro post and people are responding reasonably

this is all just standard D&D dragons though, no? it's retreading the same ground. it's all just gentle twists on the same story. I feel like good DMing is more than just "imagine the cliche......but he's wearing a new hat".

Not during combat, no, unless you go out of your way to give them one. Why would they willingly give up their air superiority over the PCs? That can be an interesting motivation to add to the fight, though. The dragon wants to land for something, but what?

>assumptions and cultural factors
I can buy these for a specific setting, but
>cliches
is just you getting hung up over being "creative" enough. Cliches are cliches for a reason. They work. A well-run cliche is infinitely more enjoyable than a half-baked original the adventure where you try to be unique but don't manage to be fun, because you're too focused on making things different instead of what they should be, enjoyable. What you described is just a bag of HP to beat on with nothing else going for them.

so you're saying a dragon is just a person. who is also a dragon.

>Why would they willingly give up their air superiority over the PCs?
To, I dunno, attack? With all those claws, claws, and bites they have?

I mean, what else are we suppose to do without trying to create something from scratch? You can describe a dragon that's a sentient black hole in reality but that only goes so far I guess. I don't know what'll satisfy you but I suppose if you can take the cool imagine in your head and put it on paper and the players enjoy it well enough then it works.

that's a sad way to run a game though, and I guess we might be looking at it through a different viewpoint. sure, the "insane crazed reptile" isn't a great pitched battle but that's fine? most of my games are RP heavy anyway and interacting with the rubble left behind is far more interesting than "OH SO YOU DARE ENTER MY LAIR? PUNY HUMAN, PREPARE TO FEEL MY WRATH".

you can be original and fun, you know. it should be the goal.

Dude, you're up against literally thousands of years of oral tradition, written material, paintings, sculptures, etc...

You cannot be original. Everything has been done before. Your job as a creator of settings, a DM, and author or whatever, isn't to be original. Your job is to add new layers to the already existing tropes. No one man can turn the tides of the cliched idea effectively. Literally no one has successfully done it before.

Name someone who has. Go on. I dare you.

well I mean......I'm not being unreasonable, I think there is a conception of a dragon which doesn't follow the same rails which have been laid out already. maybe there isn't? there is a middle ground between "enter my lair and try to steal my gold, puny humans" and "I am a dragon formed entirely of charcoal drawings of the benzene molecule and I terrorize microscopes"

Why would they bother when they can bathe the area with fire? You can't dodge a cone that spans the width of a farmer's field, and you can't swing your sword at something a hundred yards above you. Why would you give them a chance for either?

Insane crazed reptile isn't a great pitched battle or an RP encounter, while a generic dragon is. What you're describing is a failure on your part as a GM to come up with an interesting antagonist to play against.

I'm not saying there has to be pure originality, a thought never before conceived of. fucking hell. just not the same shit. new layers are great, I love new layers. a new layer that isn't translucent and doesn't smell like last week is possible. authors do it all the time. I'm sure we can too.

It depends? I don't think you'll ever really escape the standard tropes associated with dragons because that's just baggage they come with.

I mean, for my own sake, they are alien space gods who want to breed with all races and make them dragons so they have dominion over all souls and take over existence so basically Deep Ones that breath fire.

the insane crazed dragon isn't a fun fight or an RP encounter, no. it's more of an environmental factor. it is like an act of god, a storm or an earthquake. the eventual confrontation with it would involve putting it out of its misery. if you think you can't weave putting a crazed destructive beast the size of a skyscraper out of its misery before it destroys the city into a good story then............perhaps this isn't for you

Make the dragon a person, who is also a dragon. When you start with dragon first it's the same as front loading a character with an over fluffed backstory.

Split the dragon into parts.

Dragons are too overpowered in most fantasy, it strains everyone's autism to argue how dragons must fight, how a human could kill a dragon, dragon intelligence and magic and so on.

So instead make several separate, unique monsters that fulfill the dragons role in fantasy.
>Giant birds with an eye for shiny things
>Huge constrictor serpents that live forever, use plans to influence the surface world and has magic
>Salamander beast that breaths liquid fire

Another way to make dragons interesting is to make them less sentient and more animal, or make them less evil and more a servant of the Gods, or to make them more like an intelligent race like the Drakken. There are lots of things you can do OP.

I mean.........that's an answer. you could have said that and I'd say that's an answer. it is still *cunt voice* broadly within the dragon paradigm but it's interesting and I've not seen it specifically before? fair enough

All of these are good ideas but you'll never please OP. His very thread was a bait of sorts, he's already decided he hates dragons. His amygdala won't let him take anything you say as an improvement.

But from both a narrative AND gameplay perspective, what does having the destruction being caused by a 'dragon' really change about anything?

Why not have it ACTUALLY be an earthquake or a storm or an act of god?

What even makes it a dragon at that point and not a dinosaur or a terrasque? What's the point of even having "Dragons" if they don't act like anyone conventionally believes dragons to act like in a fantasy setting?

And if you take all of that to it's logical conclusion... why bother bitching about dragons when you're trying to make something that -isn't- a dragon?

A tornado isn't, in and of itself, an interesting fight or RP encounter. The fallout of the tornado can lead to interesting fights and RP, but do not mistake the tornado itself as being interesting for either. I'm not saying you can't make it part of a story, I'm saying that in and of itself is boring. A dragon that filled the same role, yet had motivations and history, is a more flavorful and interesting addition. Of course there are times when it isn't warranted, but you're asking how to use dragons, not acts of nature.

A dragon is an intelligent entity with powerful abilities. How can you not make that interesting? One can only ascribe that to personal failings, not that of dragons.

>amaygdala

Clearly because he likes Abberrants!

>Why would they willingly give up their air superiority over the PCs?
Exhaustion

well look, that's not an unreasonable conclusion, I guess I thought people might have ideas for dragons which kept to the same broad "it's a big lizard y'all" formula but achieved a feel and story different to everything else. still think they might. I'm not being a fucking hardass here, isn't mining old fantasy cliches for new avenues like an obvious way to make campaigns exciting?

Exhaustion is willing since when?

>A dragon is an intelligent entity with powerful abilities

A dragon is a huge unknowable scaly lizard cunt. Don't be hemmed in by D&D. Dragons go back deeper than that, right back to darkest fucking weird mythology. This is the problem. What a dragon "is" has far more scope than you give it credit for.

>dragons are shit
You might need to just take a break from games if you think this, you sound jaded

So you run weak and stupid dragons that charge into battle to be downed by the end of the first round of combat?

well I don't like them but teegee has good ideas and I get a lot from it so if anyone has an interesting idea about it, it'll be here. wouldn't post the thread if I didn't want to know.

first, start by identifying and defining what is a dragon. everything else is then by definition not a dragon. exactly what is this stereotype you are preoccupied with and is utterly unalterable that make dragons uninteresting?

second, i find your premise to be silly and foolish. dragons are interesting. overly used, uninspired cliches dredged up from "what i think/feel/experience only" can be uninteresting, sure.

......................................................................no? they just don't have to be masterminds, magic users. fucking.....Faerun and Forgotten Realms are a cancer of imagination. tell me again about your gruff dwarf who loves ale.

silly and foolish, been called worse. how are your dragons interesting? answer the question if you've got a good one.

Where did I say they have to be masterminds or magic users?

What I have for a low setting grounded in biology and pseudo-science and avoiding magicky-magic:
>Dragons are a diverse class of chordates splitting off from reptiles, distinguished by the following traits: six arms, greater body heating mechanisms, capability to reject most harmful chemicals, ability to spit or vomit acidic bile (in place of fire or magic), usage of tools and symbols
>The first "dragons" are small, semiaquatic, and feed mostly on fish and small mammals, still around today
>They branch off into 3 categories: the sea dragons which become quite large and live around coasts, resting on land despite their name; the ground dragons, which vary immensely in size; and the hammak, highly intelligent and slow moving creatures which form much larger clans than the dragons and built tunnel cities that highly influenced human mythology after the humans killed most of them
>Flying dragons diverge from ground dragons, the first are very small but some species grow large enough to eat a cow by themselves. They are capable of spoken language and form roosts of 5 to 30 dragons. From the largest fliers come the "behemoths", massive flying dragons which devolved their capability of flight in favor of being the largest terrestrial animals
>Ground dragons that never developed flight become very diverse, some being the longest terrestrial animals while others are dog-sized and built for speed instead of crawling
>Most dragons are a very dull brown, grey, or blue-green to blend in with their bleak surroundings, but small coastal dragons develop brighter colors. Most dragons are frightening, not very scaly or mystical (see pic)
>Big dragons don't live where humans live except for a few desirable regions where humans have driven them nearly to extinction
>Human villages, warbands, and kingdoms have allied with roosts of dragons before, but dragons are very untrustworthy and difficult to command, they do what they want

eh just took the inverse of weak and stupid. ok fine. no, my dragons are not weak and stupid lizards who run into battle and die. the opposite of cliche dragons is not weak dragons.

Take a look at this. It's quite cliche but you may like it for some strange reason.

This desu.

OP- why don't you make them into animals. They don't breath fire, they can come down and attack after finding a place to land or their targets.

>dragons are huge unknowable lizards
>old mythology is "dark" and "weird"
You're the one being hemmed in.

>......................................................................
Oh, okay, you're just some asshole.

lol @ being savaged all thread for this unreasonable question and then you hit it out of the park and actually approach it in the right spirit

>No capitalized letters
>No punctuation
>.....
>@

Get out.

or they're tiny knowable lizards. maybe they're carvings in rock whose lifespans measure in millennia and and cults form around them, and one day they burst out of the rock after a volcanic eruption. there you go. fucking hell. the point is they don't have to be smart, they don't have to be conniving and capricious. because that's what they have always been.

yes probably still an arsehole but fantasy is so reactionary man, so stuck in the mud.

Your fighting strawmen and windmills my friend. There are several interpretations of dragons that are not Tolkien/Forgotten Realms.

>tfw prescriptivists try to shame you for not conforming to grammatical anachronisms

You're*

well sure, you just named yours (if you're the same guy?) bang in the middle though. what are fun ideas outside of those two? I'm being a dick but I am genuinely interested in more, please tell me.

You're getting exactly the replies you deserve.

I like it because the dragon is capitalism ergo bad. you knew just how to ensnare me.

don't know what you're on about I have enjoyed this spirited and fulfilling debate. these captchas are taking the fucking piss

Get out you filthy fucking commie

all those posts you cite are in fact punctuated, correctly even. do you not know what punctuation is?

tfw a communist dragon has some sort of psychosis and believes that hoarding gold is the most capital of crimes becomes a vigilante murdering other dragons and redistributing the wealth

Das Capital 2: Reign of Fire

Fuck you I kekd

welcome to the party, comrade

Go full medieval with them, make them wretched, foul, monstrous and Satanic in nature, they exist to sort of just be malignant and vile, poisonous and destructive, killing one of these awful things is tantamount of cosmic mercy for its mere presence makes the world suffer. And make them weird and nasty, coiling serpentine crawling things with beaks and teeth and fin-like wings with eyes, curling horns and spikes.

Dragons in my own setting are born from the corpses of warlords and murderers, people of violence and wrath, in their tombs or in whatever dark places their corpses end up, the darkness itself (that's a whole thing) takes the body, which died with great cruelty in its heart, and changes it into a slithering horror which belches searing, toxic smoke.

I'm ripping this off so that my PCs are hired by the capitalist dragons to infiltrate the communists and bring them down from the inside

I very dig this, I like it. it's kind of similar lines to what I was thinking, a real offence against nature, a violation. no nobility or comprehensible thought, just a fucking taint. they won't plot revenge and appear as humans to taunt you, they'll just raze a village so that nothing ever grows and poison the land, thrash about.

if nothing else, D&D makes Adam Smith's "invisible hand" a lot more viable

> I'm a fucking idiot who only knows of shit like Smaug. Despite the fact that I'm on Veeky Forums I refuse to read any historical records of mythology, because finding out why these things are so proliferated takes work. Please dumb down the research so I can pretend my half-baked OC dragon is smart and cool.

Fine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatl
> Feathered / winged serpent responsible with enlightening society with agricultural and mystical innovation. Created mankind, so somewhere on the Promethean scale. Got drunk and slept with his sibling. Planning on making a comeback and fixing fucking everything.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamuy
> Indigenous Ainu people of Japan who saw their gods oft depicted as dragons in the material realm. Lived on clouds, usually evil spirits of nature that loved to fuck with humanity.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafnir
> Asshole who killed borther for daddy's money turned into a dragon, the personification of greed. Probably the only dragon depicted in pop culture, and he's nothing but a warped human.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaolong
> water spirit that hangs out with mermaids that are better at making everything than lame surface dwellers. China has a bunch of different categories for their dragon mythology, but I threw the smuggest one on the list that's farthest from the shenlong muh dragonball type dragon.

I could go on and mention how often dragons show up in the bible, in india, or pretty much anywhere you bother to actually look. I could mention how they go from martyrs to literally satan in these depections. I could describe how many different visual elements are incorporated throughout the world, and how your campaign's shitty dragon is only because of your shitty levels of creativity. I could, but I honestly doubt you actually have any desire to better yourself and would rather spend your life never learning because shitposting takes less effort.

Can you make OP interesting? Has there ever been an interesting OP? Have you had an OP in your campaign who hasn't been fucking shit? How can we break through a stereotype that is clinging onto the bedrock of Bhutanese Shadowpuppetry?

>OP is shit
> unique OP ideas

take a breath buddy, it's okay. this is interesting, I know Quetzalcoatl and parts of the Chinese mythology, this is all interesting. will I get banned if I admit weakness and say I am happy to learn

in order: no, no, no, suicide.

Nah, but your premise in the OP makes you sound like a belland. Do some reading, I promise it's the best chance for something to catch your interest.

Dragons in mythology are seldom used as inspiration in games though. Maybe they are in good games. You'd be a good GM. It's seldom people will broaden their horizons though, and this thread is a litany of people belligerently insisting that boring things are good.

I've done some reading, it won't stop my experiences with fantasy RPG players and writers being shit. this stuff is interesting but you're mistaken if you think that everyone else is on the same page, even just on the basis of the replies here. I've probably just blown it by being belligerent (lol) but inertia is the death of fantasy, it doesn't just need to be paint-by-numbers genre fiction. if I'd phrased it less like a prick, "has anyone got any ideas for a dragon which hasn't been done to death" is a legitimate question and a couple of people have tried to answer it

Legit question, do you have some strain of the 'tism?
I'm not judging you if you do, it just really comes off that way.

Dragons are intelligent, magical, love money, and are immortal.
And they're almost impossible to fight for your average medieval-ish army.

Some are bad, some aren't.

Dragons make for AWESOME kings/nobles.

pretty sure they can just dip low and swipe with all their claws and tail without landing anyway

It really upsets me when I see people simplify things this much. It's a 5000 year old lizard who's whole life has been dedicated to growing its hoard, territory, and power. A dragon encounter shouldn't be a pitched fight anyway, its a plot point. That dragon is going to have alarms sensors illusions and underlings all over the place protecting its territory, which should stretch for miles if its of a respectable age. Even FINDING its lair should be a feat in itself, and you should be properly kitted for it to even be able to access it.
What if the white dragon decides to keep distance and elude the players till they're scaling the sheer cliff that is the only way to access it unless they can fly, then does flyby attacks with its breath? and if the party can fly, then cool! Air battles are dope shit!
What if the local Red has actually set himself up as the region's king and spends most of his time polymorphed? There's word of a dragon in the area but no one can pin down where its lair might be because it flies off to different places after each attack and walks back into town in disguise and makes its way back to the throne? Maybe a nosy theif finds some clues as to the king's nature upon managing to enter the treasury and finds something incriminating?
How about an ancient sunken city inhabited by drow? Black dragons like ancient ruins, how about if it poly's into a drow and leads his new underlings in raids on the surface? "village seeks adventurers to root out local raiders" indeed.
How about a silver dragon that basically fulfills a scenario like pic related? That's a very Silver thing to do. He might even be helpful to the party's quest for knowledge... to a point. Heck maybe the party is even there looking for more clues about another dragon and this one happens to know their target making it more/less likely to help?

If you're doing a pitched battle with a dragon just to have a pitched battle with a dragon then you're probably not a very good dm.

Missing periods, bruv. Don't you know that you have to end sentences with periods?

Or question marks or exclamation points, of course, but that's besides the point.

>Quetzalcoatl
>Kamuy
>Fafnir
Just like in my japanese animes.