How intellectually gifted are your dragons?

How intellectually gifted are your dragons?

It depends on what you mean. They don't really understand things the way people do, but they're quite intelligent in their own ways. Whatever the case, cross-species communication with them is difficult, because of the differences in thought processes and how they experience reality. Though simple concepts can carry over smoothly enough.

adults are very smart most of the time, young ones tend to be more child like but not stupid

generally above human but not by much

Green and Gold Dragons I think of as brilliant, though bound by necessity/instinct/magic to be either evil or good.

Red Dragons can be brilliant but only turn to thinking when raw destructive emotions aren't getting them what they want

In the same order as the most intelligent animals. They can do problems and patterns really well and some conceptual things, but they're not a social species and it shows.

Generally, they tend to be absolutely brilliant, but are frequently pompous assholes that often refuse to learn or accept things they don't agree with.
Naturally, the advanced intellect comes half with age, half because the only dragons that survive that long are going to be the smarter ones. Young dragons have a tendency to be idiots, or else stupid but clever.

Lesser Dragons/Drakes are extremely intelligent animals, comparable to dogs, crows or monkeys.
True Dragons are more intelligent than humanoids, but most of them prefer to live away from the humanoid societies and need massive territories to feed so they don't have a civilization

It's a common description in my setting that if someone fights like a dragon, that means they are utterly ruthless in combat and will do anything and everything to finish the fight.

Dragons do not grow old, as we do; time simply makes them bigger, stronger, more cunning versions of themselves. Like a young crocodile, the dragon ventures into its preferred territory and stays there, learning the river. Even until its final days, the river is all it will ever care to know. It could tell you every riverbend, every fishing hole, the taste of flesh from every creature that crosses or swims in it, its history for as long as the crocodile has been there.... but nothing else.
Dragons grow ever smarter, ever stronger, ever more intelligent in its set ways.
But only Man grows wiser.

Pretty damn intelligent, however, their crippling obsessions and compulsions frequently squander it all on useless efforts, such as the self-proclaimed "Spymaster" spending 90% of his time disgusied in various human towns overhearing housewife gossip.
That said, intelligence is subjective, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone more knowledgeable in fine china and upper-middle-class love triangles than he.

They're all beasts except for the very first dragon and his direct successors

Since my system has no mental or social attributes, they're exactly as gifted as my players.

Hypothetically absolute geniuses but their minds are completely alien, as is befitting beings older than the world. Most of what people know about the minds of dragons are from people who became tainted with their effluvia and thus began to become more like them, or from shamans who attempted to make contact and instead got their soul/mind burned out and replaced with a tiny bit of Dragon

Not very

>tfw you're too intelligent for a lower torso.

What the fuck is that

A Heldrake, a chaos flier from 40k. It's supposed to be a fighter that was warped into a metal dragon and is powered by the torture of the former crew, which is metal as fuck. However, it looks like a turkey had sex with an exacto knife and draped in doilies.

> However, it looks like a turkey had sex with an exacto knife and draped in doilies.
Nigga what are you on it looks like the spawn of a pterodactyl and a metal guitar it's awesome

very very magically gifted, leading to inherent intellect as part of their culture.

in 5e, i always use the spellcasting variant on dragons because otherwise they are just a flying breath attack in combat. This makes a single adult dragon the fantasy equivalent of an AC-130.

because of this, dragon control large tracts of hunting grounds, overlapping with their neighbors and striking up agreements on the shared lands. Dragons care deeply about their species survival as a whole, but require each individual to be a self-sufficient member of their society.

my dragons tend to either be reclusive, only occasionally meeting with other dragons, or hyper social, living with and interacting with all sentient creatures. The earliest magical studies were solely chronicled by dragons, and draconic was the first language associated with wizardry and magical study.

how would you mechanically handle a PC bard or similar 'party face'?

would they have to be charismatic and charming irl, or would you allow him to use dice to beat social challenges.

Until you see his ass. He's got tiny stubby chicken legs poking out from the sides and massive exhaust ports that just look embarrassing. It would be the best fucking model in the game had they actually given it proper legs.

>stubby chicken legs
I mean its gotta have a way to move on the ground, giant legs would've ruined the silouette
>massive exhaust ports
It's still a plane after all (i think)

>40k has literal jet fighter space dragons
How does one get into 40k lore

They were incredibly intelligent many years ago, but after the collapse of the draconic empire they've all kinda stopped caring anything outside their horde. That's not to say they're all stupid, many of them were quite well read back in their day and a few have put their obsessions to practical use, but for the most part they're either old men who sit on their hordes and yell at the "lesser races" over space social media or young brats who never lived in the age of the empire and don't understand the value of patience and knowledge.

Of course, this leads young dragons to have a habit of not surviving very long, as their solution to most problems is to just raid a city or ten to get what you need (or for fun), which is great until someone pulls out the artillery. That's kind of a good thing however, as since their elders have literally nothing better to do than breed, there's been a major spike in dragon populations.

Dragons in my homebrew are just powerful beasts; they're more like big scaly lions than anything else.

Royalty likes to go out and hunt them, and hang the heads on their wall so they can preen. Orcs worship them, but then orcs worship everything, because they're animists. They're regularly eaten by swarms of human-sized Wyverns, dragged back to the hive and either consumed by the adults or liquefied and fed to the hatchlings.

They're some of the most powerful magic creatures that can realistically be hunted; mostly due to their large size and flight. They taste good too - sort of like spiced, gamey beef. They're also hunted by Giants, because they're the next smallest thing and have the most magic, and Giants are way too big and are always hungry for more magic.

There's a bunch of different types of "Dragon", but the net is wider than you'd expect. Red Dragons have no wings or legs, and fly using hydrogen sacs along their sides. The Grootslang of Dakhest doesn't fly at all. Green Dragons have six pairs of wings and roost in packs called "thunderings". Blue Dragons are actually massive turtles and feed exclusively off schools of tuna, stunned by their sonic breath weapon.

None of them show any signs of building a society any time soon. If anything their numbers are dropping as guns become popular weapons for hunting them, instead of lances.

Void-mutated mortals. Those who don't go insane, keep their intelligence and expand upon their knowledge because of immortality.

They're basically all geniuses.

Far smarter than humans, but they don't do shit with it.

I don’t understand how “more intelligent than a human” can mean anything without social behavior. Dragons don’t go to dragon school or learn from dragon libraries or correspondence with like-minded dragon scholars; they don’t create dragon laboratories or dragon universities. In the best case, they’re autodidacts or idiot savants. You might get the occasional Ramanujan-like mathematical genius, but math doesn’t stoke the covetous aspect of dragon behavior, so it’d be rare. Humans would run rings around dragons in terms of actual scholastic ability, because we do more lecturing, reading, writing, experimenting, and talking to one another. Thus, the “dragon as genius” idea irritates me almost as much as the “dragon as masterful social manipulator” idea.

Quite intelligent. One of them learned about communism and now tries to unite the proletariat for a revolution

Basically this but the most ancient true dragons actually see all of time forward and backwards, including when they see that they will inevitably die. As a result they're fatalistic and apathetic more than malicious. They'll eat you and burn your village down because they see that as fate.

Can they melt steel beams?

Intelligent but with one-track minds.

They are ancient, living warmachines. Flotsam and jetsam from an empire long gone.

Yes

There is room for improvement

Pick a novel and read it. Most novels have a little blurb at the start that gives you a brief rundown of the universe and the lore is "well documented" so anything that comes up in a book that you don't understand just google it and you can usually find an explanation on the lexicanium. I would not recommend starting with the Horus heresy or any 30k though.

Sauce on that image? It sparked my curiosity and no image search engine is giving me jack diddly to satiate that.