Do any other dms tend to avoid dragons because they are kinda boring?

Anything can be boring or generic if you fuck it up.

Dragons, if used, should be important. A dragon should have a personality much more complex than just "is a dragon." They should have a cult, ancient feud, ceremonial place in the local government or religion, etc. They should have a personal style: draped in delicate gold chains, scenes of prophecy inscribed on every scale, usually appears in the form of an elderly dwarven woman, something.

Dragons can be done well. They can be done very well. Don't overuse them, and make each one a real character.

You are boring OP.

This
or dragons that wheter they are lawful good or chaotic evil their morals and way of thinking are so detatched from that of inferior beings that they all look true neutral

DM never do the classics for the only reason they think they are overdone.
Paradoxically, most players never managed to play the classics because of that, and instead always play the weirdest shit.

One time there was this new guy that, before entering my group, begged me to put a dragon in my games, because he had never seen one in years with other DMs.
I shit you not, that was the first thing he asked.

Little did he know, I revel in the classics.

Im thinking maling a setting where there are 2 types of "dragons".

1. Come from large hellmouths opened up by evil warlocks/witches. This types would look demony and be more of a convebtional dragon
2. Giant cosmic abomibaations that fly around and not only cause physical damage but drive people to madness, these wouldnt look very dragony and would be really grotesque

I tend to avoid orcs as well, dwarves i use because they add flavor to town populations

Me too.

Dragons are overrated and well over done.

>Dragons as Main Story Boss
>Dragons as Gaurds to Vast Loot
>Dragons as Wise Advisers for the PC
>Dragons as Dragonborn for scale fetish
>Dragon Teeth/Scales/Eyes are objects of world breaking power

I avoid Dragons so I have freedom to make something new.

Dragon's can have attached personalities and are generally super fucking smart
That makes them good NPCs and villains, or good bait for the party to get themselves in trouble with
Don't make them just big angry lizards

That's not a dragon, either, it's an oversized kobold with delusions of grandeur.

DM forcibly turned my character into a half dragon. Does that count?

New for the sake of new is no good either

My dragons are basically a cross between shoggoths and demigods. They have cults. They can grant spells to their servants/worshippers. They can understand mortal language but no mortal can understand them unless they choose to communicate in a mortal way. Their goals and plots are literally incomprehensible to mortals. And they're not even the most powerful supernatural entities.

Dragons in my setting are Aliens that brought their magic to the world, helped make the sentient races evolve, then got purged by an angry demonlord. The ones who lived just sleep underground where all the major kingdoms built their capitals.

No, they're avoided because their overuse lessens their impact.

I don't avoid dragons. I avoid using them often, and I fuck around a lot with the rules when running them. A dragon should be an iconic, insane encounter if you're going to fight one.

When that nigga lifts off, you're all rolling to stay on your feet as its wingspan produce a hurricane-force blast of air. When it descends, the immense cloud of dust and powdered rubble it creates is fucking with everyone's vision, and if you're near anything that might fall over you're probably going to have to deal with that. When it unleashes its breath, prepare to deal with everything in that area now being on fire, and having to choke and retch your way through a blinding mass of smoke.

The strength of dragons is that they're generic - classic, more accurately. Instead of not doing them, make encounters with them worthy of the hype.

Same.

You need to add minions so the fight isn't just against one huge boring HP sink

I haven't put a dragon in a game in over a decade.

Except for one of my players playing as one, I just don't really see a use for them.

>dragons
I'll be honest...not a fan. They either tend to be push-overs, or horrifically- over-the-top.

I want to enter her vestibule and irrigate her crops.

>kinda boring
>flying
>super intelligent
>ranged
>potentially wizards
>malicious and callous

No. You just can't use dragons properly. A single dragon should be a TPK if you are fighting it outside unless you are literal demi-gods.

I straight up stole Onyxia from WoW and the guards surrounding the Bolvar analogue were all her half breed children, who she'd churn out out and replaced the guards she slept with by sleeping with them and killing them after the eggs hatched.

When she got found out, she went on a tirade against the entire city and fucked up a capital city while the party was powerless to stop her because a dragon that's can fly and is smart enough to manage a nearly successful coup de tate isn't going to stand around and let PCs attack her if she can help it.

It's the one thing Spoony said that made the most sense. If you don't catch a dragon in an enclosed space, you are fucked.

I avoid using dragons because of how powerful they are. It's just too easy to kill the party with them, and I'm not going to make the dragon an idiot just so they can fight it. Using baby dragons is no fun either, I'd use them as lesser enemies that are found in an adult's lair. Someday, I may have a high-level campaign where people can tackle dragons, but I want them to be special and memorable, not just another thing to fight without a second thought.

i like the idea of including "wyrms" and "wyverns" as generic enemies, but actual DRAGONS are rare and usually party wiping foes who are practically unbeatable.

makes the dragons a bit more interesting imo.

The only dragons that have shown up in my campaign so far are a pair of supporting NPCs.

One was mindraped into forgetting he was a dragon and spent twenty years as a kobold, the other was held captive and had her mind scanned for information to build powerful devices. She was the maguffin damsel that the party rescued, and her being free cured the other's amnesia.

They mostly just offer support and advice, had a lovely wedding ceremony and spend most of their time polymorphed as kobolds to live among their kobold minions, most direct help to the party is offering their lair as a base of operations and occasionally finding a useful magic item or bit of information.

They're both adult dragons and quite powerful but neither is a hardened warrior and in a setting where giant steampunk battlemechs exist would hardly be a game changing asset to have them fight alongside the heroes.

>dragons
>boring
No
Theyre fucking great. Both smart talking dragons and dumb boss fight dragons are fun to use.

Dumb dragons are fun to control and fight against (but then i actually enjoy fight scenes in my rpgs, unlike most of Veeky Forums)
Smart dragons make for great npcs to interact with and roleplay as.
And if course if a confrontation with a smart dragon happens, shits get real, which is great too.

I avoid dragons because everyone in my group is a deviant, including myself.

>character drive was finding the source of the eggs that are the children of a destructive force of nature level dragon that wreaked havoc in her homeland years ago
>A blue dragon dubbed “The Maelstrom”
>follow trail of a dragon egg trafficking ring to find if the dragon yet lives
>eventually the trail leads to a mob boss.
>combat for a few rounds, mob boss says fuck this
>turns into a dragon
>it’s the son of the Maelstrom, who had been hoarding and distributing his eggs in some plot to take over lands for his kind
>youtu.be/WWtpAzbEnc8 plays

>party getting it’s shit wrecked
>Lore bard has a plan
>ohboyherewego.jpg
>uses Conjure Animals to summon a giant snake
>from fucking above
>it’s fucking huge
>two size categories larger than the young dragon
>it grapples in a plunging attack, grounding the dragon
>dragon is so fucking confused and continues failing vs the grapple checks the constrictor has with advantage
>party pelts the dragon every round with everything we have
That was a good day.

In all cultural mythologies, dragons represent chaos, the terror of nature and the unknown that mankind must overcome to even survive, never mind thrive. They have massive symbolic meaning. I have done dragons a few times, and I try to make the dragon frightening by keeping it secretive, not "oh it's a X type of dragon which an old man says is weak to this."

That's one of the reasons I hate the D&D combat system, that big things just have to be hit a bunch

>3aboos

If your dragons are boring and generic you're doing them wrong.

I'm partial to the dark-souls-esque dragons as timeless primordial beings concept.

Then why call them fucking dragons?

Not tossing a CR 17 adult dragon at your party at level one.

"Hey guys where is the plot?"
>Kaboom
>Flash
>Fwoosh
>Ahhhhh!
>Blarg
"Think it's that way the dragon went. Everyone in town who lived should get it to avenge our dead?"
"What the 5 of us?"
"Yea"

The problem with dragons is that DMs never do it right. Why the fuck would a dragon ever just smack you around on foot each combat round? Nah, killing one requires the party to first find a way to nail the thing to the ground, and even then, deal with the environmental hazards when the very angry lizard decides to rip up stones and walls and shit.

Hi, Spoony.

>let me tell you about my dragons

'sup.
Seriously though, why is it such a big deal to make dragons a bitch to deal with? Most legendary dragonslayers couldn't take their enemy head on, and resorted to trickery and quick thinking.

Your average D&D dragon was wings, barring environmental restrictions, why wouldn't said dragon use their wings? It's equivalent to fighting with only a sword held between your teeth because using your limbs wouldn't be fair to your opponent.

R8 my dragon idea:
>long ago evil dragon was beset upon some city blah blah
>good dragon fought the evil dragon and sealed it away blah blah
>dragon is now the focus of the local hero cult, with festivals and an official city lordship title despite not being seen in hundreds of years
>a death cult instead wants to unleash the evil dragon from its rumored tomb thing
>Party must stop the death cult
> the bad dragon and the good dragon are the same, but the good dragon is insane and locked himself away in a lucid moment so he wouldnt hurt anyone anymore

I may have a spoiled prince encourage the death cult with delusions of seizing the throne in the chaos.

1/10, derivative and the "it was ___" all along is overdone. Just like dragons.

No, I believe DnD had a great thing for them in 3.0?3.5? where dragons played a grand game on a global scale against other dragons. The game involved maneuvering heroes, villains and even kingdoms and armies to make attacks against other dragon, weather their power structures/followers or for the objective itself, the other dragons hoards. This however wasnt just a game to them as the wealth they amass before they die had something to do with their afterlife and weather their spirit faded away with no hoard or they reincarnated or whatever.

TLDR Dragons are awesome, unless you're a shit GM

>are you happy to see me or is this a gun in your hand?

Yup.
Pic unrelated.

That's a dude.

I did say 'pic unrelated', didn't I?

PETERSON GET OUT
THIS ROOM ISNT CLEAN

"Excuse me, sir, but how exactly do you know what a den of alien whores smells like?"

...

Most GMs don't run them properly.

They're supposed to be as cunning as they are covetous, with hordes of kobold minions and treasure to use against PCs

9/10 they just throw a lone dragon at the PCs and immediately go for melee attacks against the fighter type.

I've run a few shadowrun campaigns. The players are always convinced that a dragon will show up at the last minute and claim credit for every random little event, while all their choices worked out in the dragon's favor.

Haven't done so once, and I don't intend to start.