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The Jack
2019-03-09, 12:02 PM
Maybe it's monster hunter flashbacks, where you'd capture a wyvern the size of a house and get two scales and a tooth, but it just came to me the thought that well, if anything were done sensibly in DnD...

Dragon scale armour would be very, very common. Probably (edit: almost) as common as plate. Every dead adult dragon would leave a scale,hide,claw,horn and so on behind to arm a platoon. Dragon scale stuff, which is prized for goodness, assuming it doesn't degrade super fast, would be more common than steel if society looks after it.
Expensive poisons like that of the wyvern could be farmed. Not everything, I can't imagine much luck farming a purple worm, but wyverns... why's that so expensive in at least 5e?

It's not just dragons, you've got snail flails and stuff that're made of magically useful stuff, and somehow humans don't go gonzo and use everything they can.





Edit:
Over the course of the thread, I've been convinced that dragon armour wouldn't be absurdly common. But I still believe it would be a lot more common than often depicted.

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-09, 12:18 PM
Your view is skewed - because you've played PC's, and your GM has let you fight dragons and win, you think that is something that really happens.

In the real imaginary world, adventurers go to dragons lairs and die. Dragons win. Eat adventurers. Drive up the price of platemail, too. There are no 'dead adult dragons' to loot. But if you manage to kill one, you get a lot of antique suits of armor, as well as - possibly - a set of dragon armor.

And why only one? Well, you did cut up the best parts of the skin to kill the dragon, after all.

falcon1
2019-03-09, 12:19 PM
I can't imagine dragons would be too happy about you wearing their skin. And an angry dragon can be very difficult to deal with...

JoeJ
2019-03-09, 12:37 PM
You estimated that one adult dragon can provide armor for an entire platoon of, what, maybe 50 troops? The evil emperor has 20 legions, each one made up of 5,000 regular troops and 120 auxiliaries. So that's 2,048 dragons worth of armor.

Just how many dragons are you estimating there are in the world? And how fast do they reproduce?

The Glyphstone
2019-03-09, 01:05 PM
You're probably over-estimating the quantity of scale/hide available from a single dragon that can be made armor-worthy as well. As far as 3.5 goes (The only source i know that gives explicit figures), you need to kill a Large dragon (Very Young Red, Juvenile Green/Blue, or Young Adult White/Black) to produce a single suit of dragon-leather hide armor for a Medium human. If you want scale armor for a single Medium human, you need to kill a Huge dragon (Young Adult Red, Adult Green/Blue, Mature Adult White/Black). Half-plate and full plate are even bigger/harder to get.

You're not armoring a platoon of soldiers off one dragon, you're slaughtering dragons by the bucketloads to armor that platoon. Gearing your entire armory is basically committing genocide against the draconic race. And that's assuming you can kill them in the first place, as noted above.

Mutazoia
2019-03-09, 01:05 PM
You estimated that one adult dragon can provide armor for an entire platoon of, what, maybe 50 troops? The evil emperor has 20 legions, each one made up of 5,000 regular troops and 120 auxiliaries. So that's 2,048 dragons worth of armor.

Just how many dragons are you estimating there are in the world? And how fast do they reproduce?

The OP is probably thinking of something along this scale:

http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/nalakd/dragon/Redhoard.jpg

Note the Galleon in the pic, behind the dragon. There's enough there to, theoretically, provide the amount of armor he's estimating.

The problem is, only really, really, high level adventurers are going to be able to take something like that down. And they are going to mangle the heck out of it in the process. And at the level said adventurers are operating at, Dragon Scale armor is going to be a serious downgrade from the gear they should already be rocking, so they probably won't even bother to harvest anything....just grab the treasure trove and roll out.

And, to your point, it's not like there are ancient colossal Dragons hanging out on every street corner, waiting to be harvested for raw materials.....

Vizzerdrix
2019-03-09, 01:10 PM
I can't imagine dragons would be too happy about you wearing their skin. And an angry dragon can be very difficult to deal with...

Right. Good and evil dragons would probably be a bit miffed at the thought of being turned into suits.

On this note: Id love to see a dragon wearing a studded gnomeskin armor, or a dwarf hair breastplate.

Quertus
2019-03-09, 01:12 PM
Your view is skewed - because you've played PC's, and your GM has let you fight dragons and win, you think that is something that really happens.

In the real imaginary world, adventurers go to dragons lairs and die. Dragons win. Eat adventurers. Drive up the price of platemail, too. There are no 'dead adult dragons' to loot. But if you manage to kill one, you get a lot of antique suits of armor, as well as - possibly - a set of dragon armor.

And why only one? Well, you did cut up the best parts of the skin to kill the dragon, after all.

Yes, you only use the choicest bits when making dragon hide armor - a fact which greatly limits the amount of useful material one gets from even colossal dragons.

But, in the real imaginary world, evil dragons don't care about their young, and said young dragons are trivially easily poached by mid to high level adventurers.

So much so that, eventually, without proper game management, high level adventurers board Spelljamming vessels and depart for other worlds, looking to repopulate their extinct evil dragon populations. Says voyagers are usually decked out in Tiamat hide armor, having killed the mother of dragons when she got uppity.

Then they treat the next batch of dragons like veal cattle, keeping them chained down, feeding & breeding them etc.

Or maybe they use Regeneration, to keep skinning the same dragon alive over and over again.

But few of us play in the real imaginary world.


I can't imagine dragons would be too happy about you wearing their skin. And an angry dragon can be very difficult to deal with...

An angry dragon is very easy to deal with - you kill it, and wear it's skin. :smallwink:

Xuc Xac
2019-03-09, 02:19 PM
You're probably over-estimating the quantity of scale/hide available from a single dragon that can be made armor-worthy as well.

There was enough to armor the dragon. If the dragon was at least the size of a cow, then you could make at least one suit of armor for a big brawny fighter.

All the excuses like "only some of the scales are good enough to make armor" are just that: excuses. It's part of a long pattern in D&D of designers and DMs making cool stuff for settings but then restricting PC access to it because it's "too powerful" or "unbalanced" or "I don't want those players to put their filthy peasant hands on my precious creation".

Their attempts at balance overcorrect for the "problem" and make the cool things useless. You want to play a thief that knows a handful of spells? Sure, here are rules for making a custom class that will let you make exactly what you want at only double the normal cost so you'll fall behind and suck after a couple levels. Oh, you want to do that cool-looking and moderately useful warrior trick? Sure, that's worth a feat (but you have to take three useless prerequisite feats first, sucker). Oh, you want to use the dragon corpse to make a cool looking suit of "hide armor +1". Ok. That's not too powerful for a low level character. All you need to do is kill a CR15 dragon which will require you to have far superior protection already thus making the dragon hide armor redundant.

This is one of the things I love about Whitehack. It's D&D where a fighter can kill a dragon and just say "I take its hide to make a leather jacket, so now I have its fire resistance ability", because that's what a dragonslayer should do.

The game is called "Dungeons & Dragons" but then they put dragons on a pedestal and made them rare. St. George is famous for killing a dragon but every painting shows the dragon being the size of a komodo lizard. It's scary in a world of 0-level peasants, but simply being 1st level PCs should put you in the dragon slaying league.

Pleh
2019-03-09, 02:35 PM
This is hugely setting dependent. Dragon availability and renewability is not always abundant. Some settings may have dragons so scarce or remote that common folk attribute their accounts to myth and legend.

Also in question is the number of adventurers of sufficient quality to reliably slay dragons, as well as their proportion to the number of dragons mentioned previously.

Others have added that a single dragon doesn't provide as much raw material as you might suppose, but in addition to that, you have to take into account how many craftsmen exist that have the skill to work with dragon hide and scale. In most fantasy settings, production remains preindustrial and all these thousands of sets of armor you want to produce must be hand crafted by masters (I doubt a common iron working blacksmith would have the skill necessary).

So the OP proposal is sound given a specific set of assumptions about the setting:

Dragons are sufficiently populus and prolific for harvesting them to be tenable and sustainable.
Dragon slayers are sufficiently skilled with respect to dragons and numerous with respect to the size of humanoid civilization to provide a sufficient supply of dragon parts.
Armor crafters possess the requisite skill in sufficient numbers relative to the size of humanoid civilization to craft dragon based commodities at a rate that can satisfy demand.
Humanoid civilization must have the economic power to compensate the dragon slayers and armor craftsmen for their work.

Many of these conditions are not certain in any given D&D setting and some are not even commonly found in various settings.

And why would it? You're asking why dragon based products haven't been industrialized in a game that by default uses preindustrial civilization as a base.

Keltest
2019-03-09, 02:38 PM
There was enough to armor the dragon. If the dragon was at least the size of a cow, then you could make at least one suit of armor for a big brawny fighter.

All the excuses like "only some of the scales are good enough to make armor" are just that: excuses. It's part of a long pattern in D&D of designers and DM making cool stuff for settings but then restricting PC access to it because it's "too powerful" or "unbalanced" or "I don't want those players to put their filthy peasant hands on my precious creation".

Their attempts at balance overcorrect for the "problem" and came the cool things useless. You want to play a thief that knows a handful of spells? Sure, here are rules for making a custom class that will let you make exactly what you want at only double the normal cost so you'll fall behind and suck after a couple levels. Oh, you want to do that cool-looking and moderately useful warrior trick? Sure, that's worth a feat (but you have to take three useless prerequisite feats first, sucker). Oh, you want to use the dragon corpse to make a cool looking suit of "hide armor +1". Ok. That's not too powerful for a low level character. All you need to do is kill a CR15 dragon which will require you to have far superior protection already thus making the dragon hide armor redundant.

This is one of the things I love about Whitehack. It's D&D where a fighter can kill a dragon and just say "I take its hide to make a leather jacket, so now I have its fire resistance ability", because that's what a dragonslayer should do.

The game is called "Dungeons & Dragons" but then they put dragons on a pedestal and made them rare. St. George is famous for killing a dragon but every painting shows the dragon being the size of a komodo lizard. It's scary in a world of 0-level peasants, but simply being 1st level PCs should put you in the dragon slaying league.

What works for the dragon isn't necessarily going to work for a human. We bend in different places, and the scales best suited for use in scale armor will also be the smallest scales on the most flexible parts of the dragon. Youre not going to tug off a scale the size of your head and have that worked into armor. A shield, maybe.

Telok
2019-03-09, 03:01 PM
I have part of my home setting (because FR is a dull/inane/badly done) where lesser dragons (the color coded ones) are a protected species/ethnic group, because they're the only things that kill and eat the giant flail snails.

Often, if a snail is killed near a town, or in town during a rampage, it's shell is hollowed out and turned into a 4 to 6 storey high building.

Resileaf
2019-03-09, 03:02 PM
But, in the real imaginary world, evil dragons don't care about their young, and said young dragons are trivially easily poached by mid to high level adventurers.


That seems doubtful.

noob
2019-03-09, 03:09 PM
That seems doubtful.

Simply read the fluff of the dozens of manuals about dragons and you will find that thing.
I can confirm it is somewhere in the dnd manuals about dragons.

Quertus
2019-03-09, 03:13 PM
There was enough to armor the dragon. If the dragon was at least the size of a cow, then you could make at least one suit of armor for a big brawny fighter.

All the excuses like "only some of the scales are good enough to make armor" are just that: excuses. It's part of a long pattern in D&D of designers and DM making cool stuff for settings but then restricting PC access to it because it's "too powerful" or "unbalanced" or "I don't want those players to put their filthy peasant hands on my precious creation".

Their attempts at balance overcorrect for the "problem" and came the cool things useless. You want to play a thief that knows a handful of spells? Sure, here are rules for making a custom class that will let you make exactly what you want at only double the normal cost so you'll fall behind and suck after a couple levels. Oh, you want to do that cool-looking and moderately useful warrior trick? Sure, that's worth a feat (but you have to take three useless prerequisite feats first, sucker). Oh, you want to use the dragon corpse to make a cool looking suit of "hide armor +1". Ok. That's not too powerful for a low level character. All you need to do is kill a CR15 dragon which will require you to have far superior protection already thus making the dragon hide armor redundant.

This is one of the things I love about Whitehack. It's D&D where a fighter can kill a dragon and just say "I take its hide to make a leather jacket, so now I have its fire resistance ability", because that's what a dragonslayer should do.

The game is called "Dungeons & Dragons" but then they put dragons on a pedestal and made them rare. St. George is famous for killing a dragon but every painting shows the dragon being the size of a komodo lizard. It's scary in a world of 0-level peasants, but simply being 1st level PCs should put you in the dragon slaying league.

I don't completely disagree, but, then, I don't completely agree, either.

So, as has already been said,



What works for the dragon isn't necessarily going to work for a human. We bend in different places, and the scales best suited for use in scale armor will also be the smallest scales on the most flexible parts of the dragon. Youre not going to tug off a scale the size of your head and have that worked into armor. A shield, maybe.

Dragon scales are just too big. Most of them are just not usable to make human-sized armor.

I like the way 2e handled it, where the armor you made gave you 4 less protection than it did the Dragon it came from (which, once you enchanted it to +5, meant 1 more protection than it gave its donor). 2e let the PCs have nice things, in a lot of ways.

Keltest
2019-03-09, 03:16 PM
Simply read the fluff of the dozens of manuals about dragons and you will find that thing.
I can confirm it is somewhere in the dnd manuals about dragons.

I believe it was more the "trivially easily poached" bit they take issue with. A dragon's nest is going to be difficult to find and locate even if it doesn't have an active dragon mother hanging out there.

The Jack
2019-03-09, 03:39 PM
I don't completely disagree, but, then, I don't completely agree, either.

So, as has already been said,




Dragon scales are just too big. Most of them are just not usable to make human-sized armor.


The dragon will need a well articulated neck, arms and tail. So even if the torso armour is too big, you've still got all the limbs.

You could also grind the too-big ones down, or mix it up with mail.


Look, there's no good excuse for not being able to use the whole dragon should all the dragon be good quality stuff. In many stories, every part of the dragon is useful. The bones could be alchemically great or absurdly strong, the blood is a super serum of help or harm, the teeth are good, the eyes are good, the guts are good, oh lorde they even value the...


=Dragons are extremely rare. (possibly because we've already wiped em out for their livers)
-Dragons are super unionized about this sort of matter, which is unlikely cause they're pretty isolationist in base DnD.

If dragons are 'uncommon' and we can sustainably kill them or await their death, humans would slowly amass a stockpile of dragon armour over the centuries, to the point where people don't bother with metal.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-09, 03:40 PM
Maybe it's monster hunter flashbacks, where you'd capture a wyvern the size of a house and get two scales and a tooth, but it just came to me the thought that well, if anything were done sensibly in DnD...

Dragon scale armour would be very, very common. Probably as common as plate. Every dead adult dragon would leave a scale,hide,claw,horn and so on behind to arm a platoon. Dragon scale stuff, which is prized for goodness, assuming it doesn't degrade super fast, would be more common than steel if society looks after it.
Expensive poisons like that of the wyvern could be farmed. Not everything, I can't imagine much luck farming a purple worm, but wyverns... why's that so expensive in at least 5e?

It's not just dragons, you've got snail flails and stuff that're made of magically useful stuff, and somehow humans don't go gonzo and use everything they can.

Yes, no, it is a choice of worldbuilding.

Other talked about the fact the number of dragons is highly dependent on the setting.
In some settings, the death of a dragon tend to create a local natural catastrophy (like lava for a red dragon), so looting the dragon can be quite difficult.
It is unclear what quantity of scales that can be used to make a dragon armor is available per dragon. (I mean, sure, you have the ressources to make a lot of armors, but some of them will probably be just funny-looking lether armors).

But another point is that ressource scarity is far from the only problem to create a dragon armor. It may require a great skill to do, and maybe a magical forge or something like that. (I mean, steel armors does not require ressources that are rare, but good steel armors are not common in a medidieval world)

You can rule in your campaign than dragon armor is common and easy to make. If you play a rule-heavy RPG like D&D, you should consider the consequences of the choice on the balance between armors, and maybe consider lowering the AC of dragon armors to compensate, though it might not be needed, because peoples will use magic armors at the end, and high level magic armors are rare enough to make the rarity of dragon scales not really relevant.

Note that a lot of "standard D&D" isn't logical by design. Because it wasn't created by chosing few axioms like "magic exists", "dragon exists", and then building a world from that. No, it was build by saying "I want a world that look exactly like I think our medieval time used to look like, except that there are magic and dragons in it, but it doesn't have that much influence overhaul".
A lot of the "looking like medieval europe" just go out of the window if you try to apply logically the consequences of "there is a cleric able to do magic in every village", "there are magical creatures everywhere", and other similar stuffs. And in medieval europe, there was tales of dragons, but no dragon armors, so it is the same in D&D, except dragons do exist because you want to fight against them.
(A good example of this are castle. Castle probably would not have looked anything near medieval castles in a world with magic, including teleportation, and flying monsters like dragons, and everything else D&D has)

Pleh
2019-03-09, 03:44 PM
I believe it was more the "trivially easily poached" bit they take issue with. A dragon's nest is going to be difficult to find and locate even if it doesn't have an active dragon mother hanging out there.

"Young" dragon may not refer to one still under its mother's ward. They may be more of the Horse sized variety, too big to stay home with momma and too small to have seized a lair for itself.

And the comment mentioned "trivially easily poached" but it also said, "mid to high level adventurers." We're talking parties with access to divination magic that can scry the nearest dragon too young to have SR and watch it a few weeks to make sure it's alone and vulnerable. Then the actual combat is trivial because a dragon that young isn't high enough CR to be a threat to a high level party with access to that kind of magical firepower. These are adventurers who likely COULD kill Momma, but realize they have no need to work that hard. Why kill the golden goose when you can just harvest the eggs?

Keltest
2019-03-09, 03:49 PM
If dragons are 'uncommon' and we can sustainably kill them or await their death, humans would slowly amass a stockpile of dragon armour over the centuries, to the point where people don't bother with metal.

Well theres the rub, isn't it? Dragons typically ARENT sustainable killable. Theyre functionally immortal age wise and deadly dangerous to all but the most exceptional and well prepared of parties. It may seem like PCs go around killing them left and right, but you have to remember that PCs are A: universally exceptional people and B: frequently completely insane. Nobody except a PC looks at a dragon and thinks "this is a creature that should routinely be killed and harvested from". Everybody sane thinks "this is a creature to avoid at all costs."

Resileaf
2019-03-09, 03:58 PM
Simply read the fluff of the dozens of manuals about dragons and you will find that thing.
I can confirm it is somewhere in the dnd manuals about dragons.

Dragon mothers may not care all that much about their young, but that does not make them any less vengeful. I do not see how a dragon could think "Yeah, I'm fine with letting mortals poach my flesh and blood over and over again without any retaliation".

Quertus
2019-03-09, 05:41 PM
That seems doubtful.


"Young" dragon may not refer to one still under its mother's ward. They may be more of the Horse sized variety, too big to stay home with momma and too small to have seized a lair for itself.

And the comment mentioned "trivially easily poached" but it also said, "mid to high level adventurers." We're talking parties with access to divination magic that can scry the nearest dragon too young to have SR and watch it a few weeks to make sure it's alone and vulnerable. Then the actual combat is trivial because a dragon that young isn't high enough CR to be a threat to a high level party with access to that kind of magical firepower. These are adventurers who likely COULD kill Momma, but realize they have no need to work that hard. Why kill the golden goose when you can just harvest the eggs?

That's it exactly.

To break it down a different way, in CaS, the encounters are always sporting, so of course dragons can be hunted. In CaW (which seems more appropriate to discuss when talking about what is "realistic"), 12th level parties can roflstomp CR 2-3 wyrmlings.


Look, there's no good excuse for not being able to use the whole dragon should all the dragon be good quality stuff. In many stories, every part of the dragon is useful. The bones could be alchemically great or absurdly strong, the blood is a super serum of help or harm, the teeth are good, the eyes are good, the guts are good, oh lorde they even value the...

Oh, I agree - you should be able to use the whole dragon for something. But not necessarily the whole hide for the creation of optimized human-sized armor.


Dragon mothers may not care all that much about their young, but that does not make them any less vengeful. I do not see how a dragon could think "Yeah, I'm fine with letting mortals poach my flesh and blood over and over again without any retaliation".

IIRC, evil Dragons canonically abandon their young before they're even hatched. How would they even know whose young you're wearing to feel vengeful in the first place?

Pleh
2019-03-09, 06:46 PM
Oh, I agree - you should be able to use the whole dragon for something. But not necessarily the whole hide for the creation of optimized human-sized armor.

I'm not entirely sure that any part of any monster should be useful if it isn't outlined in RAW or declared with house rules at session 0.

I'm all for wacky improvisation, but down that path there be munchkins. Best to keep monster byproducts a limited factor so things don't spiral out of control.


IIRC, evil Dragons canonically abandon their young before they're even hatched. How would they even know whose young you're wearing to feel vengeful in the first place?

They don't have to be personally vengeful. They may take it as an expression of your hubris ("I'm wearing a piece of your ilk as my garments, so you don't scare me.")

That could easily invoke their own arrogance to rise to meet the arrogance they perceive from you. "You think because you butchered some wyrmlings that you have no reason to fear me?"

I mean, imagine (in a modern setting TTRPG, to keep it simple) your character was sent to jail for killing a gangster from an especially ruthless gang, for which you had gotten tattoos that proclaim the body count for those that know how to interpret the tattoos. Then you meet members of that gang in prison. Will they be fearful? Ambivalent? Nah, more likely they'll see it as a challenge they can't pass up.

LordCdrMilitant
2019-03-09, 07:20 PM
Maybe it's monster hunter flashbacks, where you'd capture a wyvern the size of a house and get two scales and a tooth, but it just came to me the thought that well, if anything were done sensibly in DnD...

Dragon scale armour would be very, very common. Probably as common as plate. Every dead adult dragon would leave a scale,hide,claw,horn and so on behind to arm a platoon. Dragon scale stuff, which is prized for goodness, assuming it doesn't degrade super fast, would be more common than steel if society looks after it.
Expensive poisons like that of the wyvern could be farmed. Not everything, I can't imagine much luck farming a purple worm, but wyverns... why's that so expensive in at least 5e?

It's not just dragons, you've got snail flails and stuff that're made of magically useful stuff, and somehow humans don't go gonzo and use everything they can.

A dragon isn't that big. A platoon of 35-odd soldiers would require a multiple dozen slain dragons, if not more. And that's assuming that all the dragonscales are created equal, because they're not. some are too small and fragile, because dragons have weakspots where arrows penetrate them, and some are too large, thick, and heavy to make into a set of armor.


Your view is skewed - because you've played PC's, and your GM has let you fight dragons and win, you think that is something that really happens.

In the real imaginary world, adventurers go to dragons lairs and die. Dragons win. Eat adventurers. Drive up the price of platemail, too. There are no 'dead adult dragons' to loot. But if you manage to kill one, you get a lot of antique suits of armor, as well as - possibly - a set of dragon armor.

And why only one? Well, you did cut up the best parts of the skin to kill the dragon, after all.

I think that if that was what happened, society would collapse. If wandering monsters were actually kingdom scale threats, society would collapse. You wouldn't be able to have cities if random sky-lizards torched your crops every tuesday, or trade if every third caravan got eaten by roving monsters. A walled city should have the defensive capability to protect it and its domain from the majority of monster threats [canonically apocalyptic once-in-several-era threats like a Tarrasque notwithstanding]. I don't feel like dragons are presented as apocalyptic threats in D&D; they're more like town-level threats. More threatening than a Skyrim dragon [which is more of a momentary inconvenience], but much less threatening than Smaug [which is a regional catastrophe with effects for multiple generations].

Anyway, back around, Dragons aren't something you could conceivably farm and breed. For one, they're intelligent enough to seek their own mates. For two, it would require a hell of a containment mechanism. For three, they're reproductive cycle is far too long to breed them and actually have a return-on-investment. Also, they're antisocial, so you can't keep a bunch of them in a big pen without them killing each other.

So getting dragonscale armor is a matter of tracking them down [which is difficult, since they're intelligent and don't leave tracks], invading their lairs, and then successfully engaging them [which a small team might not be able to do without the aid of emplaced weapons]. The pay off would be the ability to make a few sets of armor out of them. That is to say, the reward is definitely not worth the investment for a kingdom-sized state, which can achieve its ends by working serfs to death in mines to quarry iron and coal. It takes much less skill to break rocks than it does to slay dragons, and serfs are cheaper than soldiers.

Also, Kingdoms would definitely not want to encourage their men to engage in activities like adventuring. If every soldier and peasant decided to try their hand at being a fighter or wizard or rouge, ideas such as independence and rights and fair treatment and equality might start to develop if institutionalized control over wealth and land could be broken by a squad or platoon getting lucky in a dragon lair.

Recherché
2019-03-09, 07:56 PM
If dragons are 'uncommon' and we can sustainably kill them or await their death, humans would slowly amass a stockpile of dragon armour over the centuries, to the point where people don't bother with metal.

You're assuming dragon scale armor lasts forever. The reenactors I know constantly damage and dent their armor. This is fine when it's steel armor and the repair work can be done by the local smith with steel or by replacing a few rings of chainmail. With dragon scale, how do you repair it? Maybe a lot of the scales from each dragon are being used to repair older suits of armor or maybe older dragon based armor just gets thrown out or cannibalized for parts often enough due to being damaged that humans can't amass a giant stockpile.

Hackulator
2019-03-09, 09:40 PM
Humans don't kill dragons, dragons kill humans. PCs are incredibly rare entities who are in many ways the biggest and most important movers and shakers in their worlds. THe fact that PCs occasionally kill dragons should not lead you to believe that is how things happen in a fantasy world. Smaug literally kicked the **** out of an entire nation of dwarves and took their home and he didn't die til the PCs showed up.

Add that to the fact that dragons are rare and per the books it actually takes a big ****ing dragon to make a suit of plate out of and dragon gear is not going to be common.

Plus dragons will probably murder you for wearing it so that reduces demand.

Cluedrew
2019-03-09, 10:32 PM
Well maybe I can think of a number of assumptions needed for that to be true:
Dragons are plentiful enough to be hunted.
People who can hunt dragons exist in the world.
Those people are interested in hunting dragons to make goods out of them.
There is no additional moral issues with hunting dragons.
Dragon stuff has significant additional value above more available options.
Killing a dragon produces enough goods for it to be hunt for that reason. (Alt. There are plenty of other reasons to kill dragons.)
For example I would consider wearing dragon hide in any setting where dragons have human level intelligence roughly equivalent to wearing human skin. In the Iron Kingdom the known dragons all created there own factions, so great is their power. Others they could be a kind of element, or dragon hide could be roughly equitant to the hide of any lizard.

So in some settings yes, others not so much.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-09, 11:06 PM
Now see, none of this is thinking of how to get dragonscale armor and such very well. hunting? Pffh! what are you, hunter-scavengers? go out, TAME and DOMESTICATE the dragons so that they are your slaves, make them breed, slaughter the mother and father when you have no more use for them, raise the kids to be docile slave/animals to your needs, and repeat the cycle over and over again to get more sustainable source of scales for everyone.

Yes this is evil. nothing in DnD's cosmic morality prevents this from happening, all that changes the consequences of making it happen. But thats not the point. hunting things for their hide and pelts is the amateurs way of making pelts from slaughtering other life forms. the masters raise them to the point where they can get the best scales at the best times, calculating just right when to slaughter them and skin their corpse while making that life love them just for giving them food. thats the real way you get common dragon scale armor- like y'know, sheep.

the fact that Dragons are not in farms being exploited like this, tells you all you need to know. bear pelt rugs and trophies of dead animal heads and taxidermied stuff are things big game hunters bring back to prove that they actually went out of their way to get this stuff themselves, not something you turn into industry. because bears and whatnot are not domesticate-able. nor are dragons, and dragons are basically bears x 10 or x20 or something, and you don't screw with bears. you go out and try and make bears into a farm animal, see what it gets you. now try the same with dragons. neither works? EXACTLY.

The Glyphstone
2019-03-09, 11:52 PM
I feel like humans attempting to make an industry out of taming+domesticating dragons would go remarkably poorly. Every species except Whites and Blacks are as smart as humans literally from birth, and grow more intelligent as they get older. The nature of who is the tamer and who is the pet might end up being subverted in very short order.

Mechalich
2019-03-10, 01:00 AM
the fact that Dragons are not in farms being exploited like this, tells you all you need to know. bear pelt rugs and trophies of dead animal heads and taxidermied stuff are things big game hunters bring back to prove that they actually went out of their way to get this stuff themselves, not something you turn into industry. because bears and whatnot are not domesticate-able. nor are dragons, and dragons are basically bears x 10 or x20 or something, and you don't screw with bears. you go out and try and make bears into a farm animal, see what it gets you. now try the same with dragons. neither works? EXACTLY.

Humans actually do farm bears, in order to extract their bile. It's a horrific practice, but just because an animal can't be domesticated doesn't mean humans cannot or will not farm them as a resource, often unsustainably to the point of extinction.

But, in D&D neither domestication or destruction farming or sustained hunting is at all necessary.

You can create a functionally infinite supply of any corporeal monster parts by subduing one specimen, cutting off all the limbs and dicing them into nice 1-cubic-inch pieces, and then putting the helpless creature into Temporal Stasis. Then you just Clone away, producing all the specialized biomass you'll ever need from base precursors.

So, if dragon-based armor is the best armor, there should be someone out there running a highly efficient factory full of dragon-cloning tanks for the purpose in order to churn out the requisite scales. You only need a single 13th-level wizard to set it up, and it's not a full time gig.

Psyren
2019-03-10, 02:59 AM
In most settings, dragons aren't just tough to take down, they're pretty rare. The living ones mostly avoid mortal races, and coming across the dead ones wouldn't be that far off from coming across intact dinosaur fossils/skeletons. So getting enough remains to craft more than a handful of armor and weapon pieces would be a lot less likely than you'd think.

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-10, 03:16 AM
I think that if that was what happened, society would collapse. If wandering monsters were actually kingdom scale threats, society would collapse. You wouldn't be able to have cities if random sky-lizards torched your crops every tuesday, or trade if every third caravan got eaten by roving monsters. A walled city should have the defensive capability to protect it and its domain from the majority of monster threats [canonically apocalyptic once-in-several-era threats like a Tarrasque notwithstanding]. I don't feel like dragons are presented as apocalyptic threats in D&D; they're more like town-level threats. More threatening than a Skyrim dragon [which is more of a momentary inconvenience], but much less threatening than Smaug [which is a regional catastrophe with effects for multiple generations].

Anyway, back around, Dragons aren't something you could conceivably farm and breed. For one, they're intelligent enough to seek their own mates. For two, it would require a hell of a containment mechanism. For three, they're reproductive cycle is far too long to breed them and actually have a return-on-investment. Also, they're antisocial, so you can't keep a bunch of them in a big pen without them killing each other.

So getting dragonscale armor is a matter of tracking them down [which is difficult, since they're intelligent and don't leave tracks], invading their lairs, and then successfully engaging them [which a small team might not be able to do without the aid of emplaced weapons]. The pay off would be the ability to make a few sets of armor out of them. That is to say, the reward is definitely not worth the investment for a kingdom-sized state, which can achieve its ends by working serfs to death in mines to quarry iron and coal. It takes much less skill to break rocks than it does to slay dragons, and serfs are cheaper than soldiers.

Also, Kingdoms would definitely not want to encourage their men to engage in activities like adventuring. If every soldier and peasant decided to try their hand at being a fighter or wizard or rouge, ideas such as independence and rights and fair treatment and equality might start to develop if institutionalized control over wealth and land could be broken by a squad or platoon getting lucky in a dragon lair.

All of that is at best tangentially related to what I said, so I have no idea why you chose to quote me. But I'll just leave it at - yes, Smaug is what a dragon should be. Nigh-invincible, living at the heart of a distant region sane people don't chose to live in, because every once in a long while, he wakes and burns anything he considers insulting - or edible.

noob
2019-03-10, 05:34 AM
All of that is at best tangentially related to what I said, so I have no idea why you chose to quote me. But I'll just leave it at - yes, Smaug is what a dragon should be. Nigh-invincible, living at the heart of a distant region sane people don't chose to live in, because every once in a long while, he wakes and burns anything he considers insulting - or edible.

Dragons as well as everything else all die to sarruks if we are in full dnd logic.

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-10, 10:02 AM
Dragons as well as everything else all die to sarruks if we are in full dnd logic.

Well - that depends, I'd say. I have no idea what a sarruk is, meaning it's from a source I don't own, and sources I don't own, don't exist. So in a fairly specific light, that's definitely not true.

But I guess the point you're making is that 'there are bigger fish out there'. And ... that's potentially true. Dragons are sort of assumed (those, and dungeons), but even dragons and dungeons are up to the GM and group in question. For instance, I haven't used a dragon in a game for ... oh, 20 years I guess, it's propably back in the mid-90's.

But it doesn't feel like that's the point we're arguing. If the GM so desires, then there are bigger fish in the sea - but what we're arguing is how common dragon scales are, and by extension how common dragons are, and my point is that just because we've killed dragons before, we assume dragons generally die when visited by adventureres. This is a clear case of confirmation bias, and should be quite obviously wrong with even the slightest bit of work: Dragons tend to grow very old indeed, which in itself is an indication that the vast majority of Adventurer Vs Dragon fights end with the dragon still alive.

Many more arguments could be added, but I'm not going to. I'll just say that ... unless you deliberately make monsters rare, and unique, and exciting - they automatically become common, and repetitive, and dull. This is the primary reason why Dragonlance is such an utterly crappy setting =)

Resileaf
2019-03-10, 10:35 AM
My headcanon is that most dragon deaths come from each other. Chromatic and metallics are in a constant warring state, so they tend to fight each other whenever they cross paths. Those that adventurers kill are those that beat all their rivals in a given region, allowing them to become a threat.

OmSwaOperations
2019-03-10, 10:36 AM
Yeah, very confused by this thread...

Yet another reason why Dragon stuff shouldn't be absurdly common is that its probably absurdly valuable as well. In the lore of most fantasy worlds, dragon hide and scales are amongst the most impenetrable materials out there; and Dragon-bits are also often very potent magical ingredients. So even if there was a *decent* amount of Dragon-offcuts around, there would be a *lot* of people after them, which would make them very expensive (and very rare) on the open market.

Pleh
2019-03-10, 12:15 PM
My headcanon is that most dragon deaths come from each other. Chromatic and metallics are in a constant warring state, so they tend to fight each other whenever they cross paths. Those that adventurers kill are those that beat all their rivals in a given region, allowing them to become a threat.

Also, dragons hoard wealth. When a dragon slays a fellow dragon, they're not abandoning a fortune in dead dragon bits for peasant humanoids to profit by. They probably breathe on the remains to get them into a preserved state and hoard it in their lair with the rest of their treasure.

LordCdrMilitant
2019-03-10, 01:58 PM
All of that is at best tangentially related to what I said, so I have no idea why you chose to quote me. But I'll just leave it at - yes, Smaug is what a dragon should be. Nigh-invincible, living at the heart of a distant region sane people don't chose to live in, because every once in a long while, he wakes and burns anything he considers insulting - or edible.

D&D dragons aren't Smaug, though. They're considerably less threatening, and more common. I personally prefer to have dragons acting overtly become target practice for air defense batteries, and dragons generally achieve their ends by using their shapeshifting powers and natural spellcasting to blend in with humanity and become mayors and things [after all, why would you live in a cave on a mountainside and steal gold from prickly things when you can literally have all the little people just give you gold?].


However, how we personally use Dragons isn't particularly relevant, so much as how they're generically presented. An adult red dragon is CR 14 as per the PFSRD, which is threatening, but not that threatening. Modelled with the half-and-half-again model that seems somewhat popular [though simplistic and probably overestimating], that's still in the range where a large city could muster up a group of people with levels and classes of adequate level to drive it off, and a kingdom could easily protect itself.

An adult red dragon in 5e is CR 17, which is both scarier and not, because in 5e almost anything can be overwhelmed by enough archers. If it helps, it would take about 550 peasant archers to pincushion a dragon in a round. If the city in question can muster up a small army, it can definitely down a dragon [250HP, average 4.5 damage, hit on a 19 or 20].


That said, while a kingdom or city may be able to defend itself from a dragon, smoking them out of their lair is another matter entirely, and they're rare, antisocial, and slow-breeding enough that you probably couldn't farm them.

Quertus
2019-03-10, 01:59 PM
Anyway, back around, Dragons aren't something you could conceivably farm and breed. For one, they're intelligent enough to seek their own mates. For two, it would require a hell of a containment mechanism. For three, they're reproductive cycle is far too long to breed them and actually have a return-on-investment. Also, they're antisocial, so you can't keep a bunch of them in a big pen without them killing each other.

So getting dragonscale armor is a matter of tracking them down [which is difficult, since they're intelligent and don't leave tracks], invading their lairs, and then successfully engaging them [which a small team might not be able to do without the aid of emplaced weapons]. The pay off would be the ability to make a few sets of armor out of them. That is to say, the reward is definitely not worth the investment for a kingdom-sized state, which can achieve its ends by working serfs to death in mines to quarry iron and coal. It takes much less skill to break rocks than it does to slay dragons, and serfs are cheaper than soldiers.


Mindrape. Feeble-mind.


You're assuming dragon scale armor lasts forever. The reenactors I know constantly damage and dent their armor. This is fine when it's steel armor and the repair work can be done by the local smith with steel or by replacing a few rings of chainmail. With dragon scale, how do you repair it? Maybe a lot of the scales from each dragon are being used to repair older suits of armor or maybe older dragon based armor just gets thrown out or cannibalized for parts often enough due to being damaged that humans can't amass a giant stockpile.

Regeneration.


Well maybe I can think of a number of assumptions needed for that to be true:
Dragons are plentiful enough to be hunted.
People who can hunt dragons exist in the world.
Those people are interested in hunting dragons to make goods out of them.
There is no additional moral issues with hunting dragons.
Dragon stuff has significant additional value above more available options.
Killing a dragon produces enough goods for it to be hunt for that reason. (Alt. There are plenty of other reasons to kill dragons.)
For example I would consider wearing dragon hide in any setting where dragons have human level intelligence roughly equivalent to wearing human skin. In the Iron Kingdom the known dragons all created there own factions, so great is their power. Others they could be a kind of element, or dragon hide could be roughly equitant to the hide of any lizard.

So in some settings yes, others not so much.

1 Dragon, Regeneration, done.


Now see, none of this is thinking of how to get dragonscale armor and such very well. hunting? Pffh! what are you, hunter-scavengers? go out, TAME and DOMESTICATE the dragons so that they are your slaves, make them breed, slaughter the mother and father when you have no more use for them, raise the kids to be docile slave/animals to your needs, and repeat the cycle over and over again to get more sustainable source of scales for everyone.

Yes this is evil. nothing in DnD's cosmic morality prevents this from happening, all that changes the consequences of making it happen. But thats not the point. hunting things for their hide and pelts is the amateurs way of making pelts from slaughtering other life forms. the masters raise them to the point where they can get the best scales at the best times, calculating just right when to slaughter them and skin their corpse while making that life love them just for giving them food. thats the real way you get common dragon scale armor- like y'know, sheep.

the fact that Dragons are not in farms being exploited like this, tells you all you need to know. bear pelt rugs and trophies of dead animal heads and taxidermied stuff are things big game hunters bring back to prove that they actually went out of their way to get this stuff themselves, not something you turn into industry. because bears and whatnot are not domesticate-able. nor are dragons, and dragons are basically bears x 10 or x20 or something, and you don't screw with bears. you go out and try and make bears into a farm animal, see what it gets you. now try the same with dragons. neither works? EXACTLY.

Feeble-mind, Mindrape.


I feel like humans attempting to make an industry out of taming+domesticating dragons would go remarkably poorly. Every species except Whites and Blacks are as smart as humans literally from birth, and grow more intelligent as they get older. The nature of who is the tamer and who is the pet might end up being subverted in very short order.

Feeble-mind. Also, Mindrape.


Humans actually do farm bears, in order to extract their bile. It's a horrific practice, but just because an animal can't be domesticated doesn't mean humans cannot or will not farm them as a resource, often unsustainably to the point of extinction.

But, in D&D neither domestication or destruction farming or sustained hunting is at all necessary.

You can create a functionally infinite supply of any corporeal monster parts by subduing one specimen, cutting off all the limbs and dicing them into nice 1-cubic-inch pieces, and then putting the helpless creature into Temporal Stasis. Then you just Clone away, producing all the specialized biomass you'll ever need from base precursors.

So, if dragon-based armor is the best armor, there should be someone out there running a highly efficient factory full of dragon-cloning tanks for the purpose in order to churn out the requisite scales. You only need a single 13th-level wizard to set it up, and it's not a full time gig.

Or Regeneration.

King of Nowhere
2019-03-10, 02:49 PM
actually, looting dragons that die of natural causes should be a major source of dragon hide. it makes sense.
however, if we consider degradation and damage, some of those armors should be lost over time. they could be less rare, but still not common.

regarding dragons, i don't see why they should care that much about the use of their dead, if they died of natural causes and have huge magical power. human leather was sometimes used in the past. in fact, if dragons want treasure, many of them would be willing to sell some scales. you could have a whole economy based on it.

evil dragons may also not care about their kin. But if someone was exterminating dragons wholesale, they would be smart enough to unite against the threat. so yoou woulnd't have to deal with one single angry dragon, but with dozens of angry dragons.

The Jack
2019-03-10, 03:54 PM
Since dragon scale is better than steel and is, well, armour composed of lots of little pieces it's far more likely that you'll knock a scale off and have to reattach it than actually break a scale.


Acid dragon scales, if not all dragon scales, would last forever too, as they wouldn't corrode.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-10, 04:25 PM
Feeble-mind, Mindrape.

Burn books. 10char.

Cikomyr
2019-03-10, 04:30 PM
The way I see it, even if dragons are "good", they won't be any less greedy or proud.

If the uplifted monkeys that like to call themselves "civilized" start cutting up pieces of Dragons to make armor in anything remotely resembling a large/industrial size, there will be hell to pay. Same reason someone should be wary to declare as moniker of "Dragonslayer". Advertising you killed as supergenius arrogant magical lizard is a good way for you to draw another one's ire.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-10, 05:02 PM
Regeneration.

If you are in a setting where lv15 (edit: I mean Lv13) casters are common enough, then I don't think any ressource scarity exist (unless artificially maintained by some guilds, and with the exception of some magical ressources), including dragon scales.

I mean, if you take 5e, a lv 14 transmutation mage can transform a 5x5x5 cube of any nonmagic stuff into any other nonmagic stuff once per day.
(And, by the way on similar stupid consequences, a lv14 mage of transmutation magic can maintain a community of 6026 = 3d10 x 365.25 persons eternally young, if that's the only use of its stone he makes.)

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-10, 05:05 PM
D&D dragons aren't Smaug, though. They're considerably less threatening, and more common.

That's only true if you make it so. Pump up levels and fight fledgeling dragons, then yes, this happens:


I personally prefer to have dragons acting overtly become target practice for air defense batteries

And as should be clear, that's what I'm arguing against.

But it's symptomatic, I agree with you on that: I play a lot of E6, and I play dragons as being significantly more intelligent than the average human. The vast majority of them advance to ripe old age, and are easily a match for any mid-sized nation.

Of course, when I say I play them, what I mean is I really don't. I hate dragons, and they're not useful for games as anything but legends and myths. But for all intents and purposes, if there were any dragons in my games (outside whispered stories at the Foaming Mug tavern), that's how they'd be.

noob
2019-03-10, 05:06 PM
If you are in a setting where lv15 casters are common enough, then I don't think any ressource scarity exist (unless artificially maintained by some guilds, and with the exception of some magical ressources), including dragon scales.

I mean, if you take 5e, a lv 14 transmutation mage can transform a 5x5x5 cube of any nonmagic stuff into any other nonmagic stuff once per day.
(And, by the way on similar stupid consequences, a lv14 mage of transmutation magic can maintain a community of 6026 = 3d10 x 365.25 persons eternally young, if that's the only use of its stone he makes.)

Then afterwards if all those people go to transmutation wizard school or cleric school it might slowly start turning the whole population in immortal transmutation wizards or clerics(over a very long time and only if there is also some people able to resurrect those who gets assassinated).
The people with no ability to become a cleric or wizard or simply of high level will progressively get killed and not resurrected because they are poorer and of no strong benefit to the immortal society

Quertus
2019-03-10, 05:15 PM
Burn books. 10char.

Eh?

One Dragon, chained up with a feeding tube Ring of Sustenance, unconscious through multiple means (including Feeble-mind + Greater Bestow Curse), Mindraped just in case, can, via Regeneration, provide a NI supply. Get a few like that, artificial insemination, keep a breeding population, and you're Golden. Or Chromatic. :smallwink:

Make it very common knowledge exactly what the Dragon(s)'s crime(s) were, to discourage further lawbreaking.

Sure, some band of plucky young heroes may come for you some day, but, let's be honest, if you wanted to outfit your army in dead sentient being, it was probably going to happen anyway.

noob
2019-03-10, 05:17 PM
Eh?

One Dragon, chained up with a feeding tube, unconscious through multiple means (including Feeble-mind + Greater Bestow Curse), Mindraped just in case, can, via Regeneration, provide a NI supply. Get a few like that, artificial insemination, keep a breeding population, and you're Golden. Or Chromatic. :smallwink:

Make it very common knowledge exactly what the Dragon(s)'s crime(s) were, to discourage further lawbreaking.

Sure, some band of plucky young heroes may come for you some day, but, let's be honest, if you wanted to outfit your army in dead sentient being, it was probably going to happen anyway.
I am quite sure that there is some sort of "conjure opposing band of hero" spell that is in the list of all the evil spellcasters.

Recherché
2019-03-10, 05:31 PM
Since dragon scale is better than steel and is, well, armour composed of lots of little pieces it's far more likely that you'll knock a scale off and have to reattach it than actually break a scale.


Acid dragon scales, if not all dragon scales, would last forever too, as they wouldn't corrode.


Have you tried searching a practice rink for chainmail rings? I can only imagine that searching an active battlefield for your scales would be worse. Also given that that dragons do not have infinite DR I'm going to assume that the scales are not indestructible and can split, get chipped or otherwise become damaged. While they're on the dragon this won't matter too much because the dragon will shed them and regrow them. Humans can't exactly do that though.

Quertus
2019-03-10, 05:50 PM
Have you tried searching a practice rink for chainmail rings? I can only imagine that searching an active battlefield for your scales would be worse. Also given that that dragons do not have infinite DR I'm going to assume that the scales are not indestructible and can split, get chipped or otherwise become damaged. While they're on the dragon this won't matter too much because the dragon will shed them and regrow them. Humans can't exactly do that though.

Detect Dragon Scales (or Locate Object). Mending / Make Whole.

Bacon Elemental
2019-03-10, 06:23 PM
Detect Dragon Scales (or Locate Object). Mending / Make Whole.
Considering that the whole point of this thought experiment is about the large-scale equipping of armed forces with dragonscale armour, it seems highly impractical to have a cohort of wizards to follow them around using magic to pick up all the missing scales after every scrap.

King of Nowhere
2019-03-10, 06:28 PM
Acid dragon scales, if not all dragon scales, would last forever too, as they wouldn't corrode.

glass is immune to acid, but it scratches and slowly grinds to dust.
plastic is immune to acid, but it gradually crumbles in sunlight.

immunity to corrosion does not make something everlasting

The Glyphstone
2019-03-10, 07:05 PM
Decomposition and corrosion are two completely different processes anyways. Chitin/keratin is highly resistant to decomposition, but not invincible to it with sufficient heat and moisture, and I could see dragonscales behaving in a similar fashion.

Spore
2019-03-10, 07:33 PM
Right. Good and evil dragons would probably be a bit miffed at the thought of being turned into suits.

On this note: Id love to see a dragon wearing a studded gnomeskin armor, or a dwarf hair breastplate.


"Your new beard looks very good, Dagurashibanipal!"
"Thank you, it is a beard toupé made from REAL dwarven hair, Slathborg."

Quertus
2019-03-10, 07:46 PM
Considering that the whole point of this thought experiment is about the large-scale equipping of armed forces with dragonscale armour, it seems highly impractical to have a cohort of wizards to follow them around using magic to pick up all the missing scales after every scrap.

Agreed. I had come back fix that, and saw that you've already called me on it. Far better, given the efficiency of creating it, to just send them into battle with a few spare suits each.

Bacon Elemental
2019-03-11, 05:21 AM
Agreed. I had come back fix that, and saw that you've already called me on it. Far better, given the efficiency of creating it, to just send them into battle with a few spare suits each.

Forgive me if I've missed something but where are you getting the tens of thousands of dead dragons to equip your entire army with multiple suits of full-body dragonscale armour again? This thread is quite hard to follow so I might have missed your suggestion if it was one of the weirder ones.

Edit: A single suit of dragonscale plate armour + shield in 3.5e requires the entire corpse of a Gargantuan dragon (if you're willing to settle for lighter armours smaller dragons may be substituted), and costs more than twice as much gold to make as said plate, and I dont think that having the dragonscales reduces the cost by more than half any way more than showing up at the smithy with a biunch of steel sheets reduces the cost of making plate.

Edit Edit: Also magical means of dragon duplication run into the issue that spells are expensive, especially from high-level casters! The stasis + clone method from last page would cost 1,000 gp in consumed components + a minimum of 1200gp per casting from hiring the 15th-level spellcaster to do it (and said spellcaster can only do it once per day. Even a 20th-level wizard can only provide the raw materials for 8 suits of armour a day (at the slightly pricier 2520 a pop), which is a lot for an elite force but not a lot for an army. And just like that, your dragonscale armour is now MORE expensive than full plate (not even counting labour), and only the richest kingdoms would be able to afford an army fully clad in plate anyway

noob
2019-03-11, 05:33 AM
Forgive me if I've missed something but where are you getting the tens of thousands of dead dragons to equip your entire army with multiple suits of full-body dragonscale armour again? This thread is quite hard to follow so I might have missed your suggestion if it was one of the weirder ones.

Edit: A single suit of dragonscale plate armour + shield in 3.5e requires the entire corpse of a Gargantuan dragon (if you're willing to settle for lighter armours smaller dragons may be substituted), and costs more than twice as much gold to make as said plate, and I dont think that having the dragonscales reduces the cost by more than half any way more than showing up at the smithy with a biunch of steel sheets reduces the cost of making plate.

His suggestion was to skin an unconscious mind raped feeble minded trapped dragon repetitively by using regenerate between two skinning.

Bacon Elemental
2019-03-11, 05:47 AM
Ah, thats noticably cheaper. Still not cheap unless for some reason this 17th-level+ wizard has nothing better to do than pump out armour pro bono, at a minimum of 1190 per casting plus labour. (Although I'm not convinced that Regenerate would cover being literally flayed alive by the spell description, it seems like a reasonable extension of the rules )

Still, this leaves the cost of obtaining one dragonhide at the bargain cost of 1200 gold plus the labour of skinning the dragon nonfatally each time plus the labour of making the dragonscale armour. Which is probbably now yes, cheaper than plate. But not a LOT cheaper, and probbably still not cheap enough to equip everyone in your army with it, or make it more common than 200gp chainmail.

Edit: This method is more economical due to using a lower-level spellslot too. If the 17th level wizard spends all his slots of 7 or higher every day for a year, he can produce the quite respectable number of 2190 dragonhides, enough to equip a small, elite army, at the minimum cost to his ambitious employers of ~2.6 million gp

The Jack
2019-03-11, 06:27 AM
Medieval armies were kinda small.
I'm not saying every man and his dog should have dragon-scale
But warrior elites such as knights and many full-time warriors should be rocking dragon scale.



RE;DR
Looking at Red dragons in 5e, their natural armour is +7, +8, +9 and +12 (as they grow older) and at +7 they're medium sized creatures. They have no dex bonus, green dragons are +1 and black dragons are +2 dex. Black, Green and white dragons have weaker scales. at ancient levels natural armour bonuses are as follows: Black +10, Green +10 and white +10. At wyrmling the black is +5, green is +6 and white is +6. They all seem to follow +1 for every age bracket except for ancient, so we can probably conclude that the scales, while they do get thicker over the years, don't get thick enough to be a problem. It seems more the case that the dragon gets longer or more scales as it ages, the change is too small for the exponential increase in size.

Red/Blue
Green/White
Black.

Only Green/Black have dexterity bonuses. Does black have the most dexterity because it's got the lightest armour, maybe. Do Red/Blue have more armour because they're stronger and less dexterous? White dragons are an outlier, but the others have a pattern.

Green/White wyrmling scales are as good as a full suit of mail without any of the heavy armour drawbacks. I'm only not comparing them to half-plate because they cover the entirity of the body whilst half plate does not. So the scales, against physical trauma, are at least as good as steel and are constructed more flexibly besides. The armour in the MM is superior to half plate. Everything about the physicality suggests that in green/white dragon armour, you really don't need to worry about the armour being damaged, your threat is something getting around the armour, or like a scale falls off completely intact and you need to tie it back in...

I wouldn't worry expensive repairs. Maybe for black or whatever metalic shares the weakness..
plus Mending is a cantrip and can be used as often as you like. one caster can serve hundreds in a day.


Now, for non-traumatic damage...
Alright, points made. We don't know. But I'd think there'd be spells and methods for whatever problem comes up.

Keltest
2019-03-11, 06:51 AM
Medieval armies were kinda small.
I'm not saying every man and his dog should have dragon-scale
But warrior elites such as knights and many full-time warriors should be rocking dragon scale.



RE;DR
Looking at Red dragons in 5e, their natural armour is +7, +8, +9 and +12 (as they grow older) and at +7 they're medium sized creatures. They have no dex bonus, green dragons are +1 and black dragons are +2 dex. Black, Green and white dragons have weaker scales. at ancient levels natural armour bonuses are as follows: Black +10, Green +10 and white +10. At wyrmling the black is +5, green is +6 and white is +6. They all seem to follow +1 for every age bracket except for ancient, so we can probably conclude that the scales, while they do get thicker over the years, don't get thick enough to be a problem. It seems more the case that the dragon gets longer or more scales as it ages, the change is too small for the exponential increase in size.

Red/Blue
Green/White
Black.

Only Green/Black have dexterity bonuses. Does black have the most dexterity because it's got the lightest armour, maybe. Do Red/Blue have more armour because they're stronger and less dexterous? White dragons are an outlier, but the others have a pattern.

Green/White wyrmling scales are as good as a full suit of mail without any of the heavy armour drawbacks. I'm only not comparing them to half-plate because they cover the entirity of the body whilst half plate does not. So the scales, against physical trauma, are at least as good as steel and are constructed more flexibly besides. The armour in the MM is superior to half plate. Everything about the physicality suggests that in green/white dragon armour, you really don't need to worry about the armour being damaged, your threat is something getting around the armour, or like a scale falls off completely intact and you need to tie it back in...

I wouldn't worry expensive repairs. Maybe for black or whatever metalic shares the weakness..
plus Mending is a cantrip and can be used as often as you like. one caster can serve hundreds in a day.


Now, for non-traumatic damage...
Alright, points made. We don't know. But I'd think there'd be spells and methods for whatever problem comes up.

Youre still looking at hundreds of suits of armor per country, and if theyre elite knights then you probably want barding for their horses too. If you have enough wizards to facilitate that sort of production, you aren't fighting wars with soldiers, youre dropping wizard nukes on your enemy's capital.

Lord Torath
2019-03-11, 08:45 AM
Dragon scales are just too big. Most of them are just not usable to make human-sized armor.

I like the way 2e handled it, where the armor you made gave you 4 less protection than it did the Dragon it came from (which, once you enchanted it to +5, meant 1 more protection than it gave its donor). 2e let the PCs have nice things, in a lot of ways.I actually like this, too. The worst dragonhide you could get would be from a white hatching (AC:4, which I think translates to AC:16 in later versions) which would grant AC:8(12). Since regular hide armor is AC:6(14), you wouldn't even bother with that. But an Ancient Gold dragon had AC:-12, so armor made from that would be AC:-8.


Simply read the fluff of the dozens of manuals about dragons and you will find that thing.
I can confirm it is somewhere in the dnd manuals about dragons.The 2E "mega" module Dragon Mountain had a dragon that killed her mate, and ignored her eggs so that they died. Of course, this is a sample-size of one, and if all red dragons felt this way, they'd have gone extinct when the first two died (assuming all red dragons are descendants of the first two red dragons).


A dragon isn't that big. A platoon of 35-odd soldiers would require a multiple dozen slain dragons, if not more. And that's assuming that all the dragonscales are created equal, because they're not. some are too small and fragile, because dragons have weakspots where arrows penetrate them, and some are too large, thick, and heavy to make into a set of armor.Depends on edition. In 2E, a 5-year-old red dragon was about 12 feet long with a 12-foot tail. An ancient red is 174-183 feet long (with a matching wingspan) and a tail 162-171 feet long. You can make a LOT of armor from a beast that big. White dragons (the smallest of the metallic and chromatic dragons) still have 104 feet of body and 94 feet of tail when fully grown.

Also, some dragons (Again, 2E AD&D) have scales that get larger as they age (red dragons), while others get smaller (silver), and some stay roughly the same size (blue). Green dragon scales stay flexible (but tough, only 2 AC worse than red dragons of the same age) their entire lives.

So in the real imaginary world, it totally depends on which real imaginary world you're in, and the rules that apply in that real imaginary world. :smallamused:

awa
2019-03-11, 08:58 AM
Medieval armies were kinda small.
I'm not saying every man and his dog should have dragon-scale
But warrior elites such as knights and many full-time warriors should be rocking dragon scale.



RE;DR
Looking at Red dragons in 5e, their natural armour is +7, +8, +9 and +12 (as they grow older) and at +7 they're medium sized creatures. They have no dex bonus, green dragons are +1 and black dragons are +2 dex. Black, Green and white dragons have weaker scales. at ancient levels natural armour bonuses are as follows: Black +10, Green +10 and white +10. At wyrmling the black is +5, green is +6 and white is +6. They all seem to follow +1 for every age bracket except for ancient, so we can probably conclude that the scales, while they do get thicker over the years, don't get thick enough to be a problem. It seems more the case that the dragon gets longer or more scales as it ages, the change is too small for the exponential increase in size.

Red/Blue
Green/White
Black.

Only Green/Black have dexterity bonuses. Does black have the most dexterity because it's got the lightest armour, maybe. Do Red/Blue have more armour because they're stronger and less dexterous? White dragons are an outlier, but the others have a pattern.

Green/White wyrmling scales are as good as a full suit of mail without any of the heavy armour drawbacks. I'm only not comparing them to half-plate because they cover the entirity of the body whilst half plate does not. So the scales, against physical trauma, are at least as good as steel and are constructed more flexibly besides. The armour in the MM is superior to half plate. Everything about the physicality suggests that in green/white dragon Armour, you really don't need to worry about the armour being damaged, your threat is something getting around the armour, or like a scale falls off completely intact and you need to tie it back in...

I wouldn't worry expensive repairs. Maybe for black or whatever metalic shares the weakness..
plus Mending is a cantrip and can be used as often as you like. one caster can serve hundreds in a day.


Now, for non-traumatic damage...
Alright, points made. We don't know. But I'd think there'd be spells and methods for whatever problem comes up.

your assuming that armor made from dragon scales grants 100% of the dragons nat armor an assumption with no backing. While you could make a setting where this is the case it could be just as easy to say that dragon scale gets most of its resilience from the dragons magical nature, or that nonscale aspects of the dragons body contribute to it resistance.

Additionally how hard the scale is doesn't actually matter, you don't take a long sword and cleave through full plate anyway so making your full plate even harder would have only minimal impact on how much it protects a human wearing it. Also who says dragon scale is lighter than steel.

In regards to 3rd edition dragon scale is light non metal armor, useful for druids but it provides no additional ac unless enchanted.

if you have a dedicated craftsmen than each set of full plate armor is only 550 gold, and dragon scale is lighter but not actually better than steel unless your army is made up of druids.
considering the number of spells needed to keep a dragon subdued for basically no actual benefit its a niche thing at best and probably not worth the effort

Quertus
2019-03-11, 09:56 AM
Forgive me if I've missed something but where are you getting the tens of thousands of dead dragons to equip your entire army with multiple suits of full-body dragonscale armour again?


His suggestion was to skin an unconscious mind raped feeble minded trapped dragon repetitively by using regenerate between two skinning.


Ah, thats noticably cheaper. Still not cheap unless for some reason this 17th-level+ wizard has nothing better to do than pump out armour pro bono, at a minimum of 1190 per casting plus labour. (Although I'm not convinced that Regenerate would cover being literally flayed alive by the spell description, it seems like a reasonable extension of the rules )

Still, this leaves the cost of obtaining one dragonhide at the bargain cost of 1200 gold plus the labour of skinning the dragon nonfatally each time plus the labour of making the dragonscale armour. Which is probbably now yes, cheaper than plate. But not a LOT cheaper, and probbably still not cheap enough to equip everyone in your army with it, or make it more common than 200gp chainmail.

Edit: This method is more economical due to using a lower-level spellslot too. If the 17th level wizard spends all his slots of 7 or higher every day for a year, he can produce the quite respectable number of 2190 dragonhides, enough to equip a small, elite army, at the minimum cost to his ambitious employers of ~2.6 million gp

It's nice to know that, in your world, my Wizard would be up 2.6 million GP.

In mine, said Wizard simply is the head-of-state. Or the royal Wizard / advisor. Which I guess explains all the traitorous advisors, if getting "prestige" and a stipend instead of that sweet 2.6 million GP apparently does not breed the same level of loyalty. :smalltongue:

hamishspence
2019-03-11, 10:13 AM
Simply read the fluff of the dozens of manuals about dragons and you will find that thing.
I can confirm it is somewhere in the dnd manuals about dragons.

Some chromatic dragons follow the "lay lots of eggs and abandon them" strategy (mostly ones that are only just old enough to lay eggs in the first place), and others are prone to forcing their young to abandon the nest extremely early - but, at least according to the 4e Draconomicon, the "force young to abandon nest early" chromatics are portrayed as abnormal - suffering from a mild form of insanity.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-11, 11:46 AM
Acid dragon scales, if not all dragon scales, would last forever too, as they wouldn't corrode.

Decomposition and corrosion are two completely different processes anyways. Chitin/keratin is highly resistant to decomposition, but not invincible to it with sufficient heat and moisture, and I could see dragonscales behaving in a similar fashion.

Even chitin pretty much degrades in a season in a moist, oxygen-fed environment (it is a huge nitrogen sink, for instance, if it were being long-term sequestered from a biome, something would evolve to capitalize on that, and many decomposers have). Of course, dragons are going to follow their own rules, since mythic beasts and all.



Edit: A single suit of dragonscale plate armour + shield in 3.5e requires the entire corpse of a Gargantuan dragon (if you're willing to settle for lighter armours smaller dragons may be substituted), and costs more than twice as much gold to make as said plate, and I dont think that having the dragonscales reduces the cost by more than half any way more than showing up at the smithy with a biunch of steel sheets reduces the cost of making plate.

I think 3e was working on the logic that if you wanted scale mail, you would take it from a dragon where the scales were as large as scalemail scales. If you were making plate mail armor, you would make it from dragons big enough that a single scale would work as a cuirass* for it (!), as the same size of dragon was needed for crafting a shield. I don't think other editions have used that interpretation (artistically, it was always just a suit made of dragonhide, at least).
*well, one for the front, one for the back.


Alright, points made. We don't know. But I'd think there'd be spells and methods for whatever problem comes up.

Sure, we can make something up if you want to make that world. That's no problem. The original topic was more along, 'why isn't there,' so we can't just hand-wave the 'they'd come up with something' (as that something is the topic at hand).


Depends on edition. In 2E, a 5-year-old red dragon was about 12 feet long with a 12-foot tail. An ancient red is 174-183 feet long (with a matching wingspan) and a tail 162-171 feet long. You can make a LOT of armor from a beast that big. White dragons (the smallest of the metallic and chromatic dragons) still have 104 feet of body and 94 feet of tail when fully grown.

Even in editions where the actual sizes are theoretically spelled out, both art and adventure modules routinely seemed to violate any given rules. And there I think lies the biggest problem. I don't think the game itself (much less the game as interpreted by four decades of gamers) has been remotely consistent on how big dragons are supposed to be, how common they are supposed to be (regardless of frequency on wandering monster tables), nor how big a deal they are supposed to be (also regardless of their actual mechanical presentation).

noob
2019-03-11, 11:54 AM
Some chromatic dragons follow the "lay lots of eggs and abandon them" strategy (mostly ones that are only just old enough to lay eggs in the first place), and others are prone to forcing their young to abandon the nest extremely early - but, at least according to the 4e Draconomicon, the "force young to abandon nest early" chromatics are portrayed as abnormal - suffering from a mild form of insanity.

I believe that in the 3.5 draconomicon those chromatics are supposed to be the norm.

The Jack
2019-03-11, 12:06 PM
Sure, we can make something up if you want to make that world. That's no problem. The original topic was more along, 'why isn't there,' so we can't just hand-wave the 'they'd come up with something' (as that something is the topic at hand).
.

It's more that I don't want to delve into the tomes of spells or ask historians and scientists for answers, less that I actually want to handwave things. People tend to come up with solutions to things when they're a big enough problem, so they'd probably figure out what's wrong and come up with measures to improve. Most generic DnD stuff happens in a timeless void where they've been pre-combustion for years but somehow they've got good textiles... I'd imagine they'd figure something out, people are like that.

hamishspence
2019-03-11, 12:17 PM
I believe that in the 3.5 draconomicon those chromatics are supposed to be the norm.

The cover image does show what looks like a mated pair - one parent guarding the babies, the other (on the back cover) bringing food to the lair.

However, at least in the case of red dragons specifically, it said "most red wyrmlings are left to fend for themselves" (although other chromatics are portrayed as more protective).

Bacon Elemental
2019-03-11, 12:35 PM
It's more that I don't want to delve into the tomes of spells or ask historians and scientists for answers, less that I actually want to handwave things. People tend to come up with solutions to things when they're a big enough problem, so they'd probably figure out what's wrong and come up with measures to improve. Most generic DnD stuff happens in a timeless void where they've been pre-combustion for years but somehow they've got good textiles... I'd imagine they'd figure something out, people are like that.

Well what's the point of asking the forum "Shouldn't dragon stuff be absurdly common" if your response to people pointing out that even by using abhorently evil and vile magic to flay a lobotomised gargantuan dragon multiple times every day or to factory-farm clone a dragon frozen in time it's still not actually very cheap and is comparably expensive to full-plate even if one goes full Tippyverse on it is to shrug and say "I'm sure people would find a way"?

If you want to run your games in a universe where the process of mass-producing material from sentient dragons magically or physically has been sufficently streamlined via unmentioned methods such that everyone wears dragonleather clothing everywhere, there's nothing to stop you! In fact, it sounds like an interesting adventure hook for some PCs. ("The neighbouring Empire of Shadows has mysteriously begun equipping every one of its soldiers with what the mayor says looks suspiciously like dragon-scale armour. Go find out how any mortal nation could possibly afford such largesse"). But your OP supposed that the fact that this is not the case is an example of the standard D&D setting being silly and unrealistic, which in this case it does in fact seem justified. Dragons aren't that common, and are very dangerous. You don't get very much dragon armour from even a gigantic dragon. And high-level magical means of producing dragons artificially are expensive.

noob
2019-03-11, 12:45 PM
Well what's the point of asking the forum "Shouldn't dragon stuff be absurdly common" if your response to people pointing out that even by using abhorently evil and vile magic to flay a lobotomised gargantuan dragon multiple times every day or to factory-farm clone a dragon frozen in time it's still not actually very cheap and is comparably expensive to full-plate even if one goes full Tippyverse on it is to shrug and say "I'm sure people would find a way"?

If you want to run your games in a universe where the process of mass-producing material from sentient dragons magically or physically has been sufficently streamlined via unmentioned methods such that everyone wears dragonleather clothing everywhere, there's nothing to stop you! In fact, it sounds like an interesting adventure hook for some PCs. ("The neighbouring Empire of Shadows has mysteriously begun equipping every one of its soldiers with what the mayor says looks suspiciously like dragon-scale armour. Go find out how any mortal nation could possibly afford such largesse"). But your OP supposed that the fact that this is not the case is an example of the standard D&D setting being silly and unrealistic, which in this case it does in fact seem justified. Dragons aren't that common, and are very dangerous. You don't get very much dragon armour from even a gigantic dragon. And high-level magical means of producing dragons artificially are expensive.
They are not expensive: it is just that the casters are supposed to sell the spellcasting service at a high cost but in practice if it was players who did try doing that they would be unable to sell the hide more than 0.000000000000000001 gp per tons of dragonscale because gms hate players doing actual businesses because it "throws out the wbl"

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-11, 01:27 PM
Given that in many game settings, dragons are intelligent, especially by the time they're big enough to hunt for their skins... this is pretty horrific, like "lampshades made from human skin" horrific.

But setting that aside... even with cows, where sizing and quality-checking solid scales isn't a concern, I'm reading that it takes about 2 cows to get enough leather just for a jacket, or more cows if there are defects in the hides. So, it wouldn't be that odd if it took at multiple juvenile dragons to get enough material for a single suit of armor.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-11, 01:34 PM
Given that in many game settings, dragons are intelligent, especially by the time they're big enough to hunt for their skins... this is pretty horrific, like "lampshades made from human skin" horrific.

But setting that aside... even with cows, where sizing and quality-checking solid scales isn't a concern, I'm reading that it takes about 2 cows to get enough leather just for a jacket, or more cows if there are defects in the hides. So, it wouldn't be that odd if it took at multiple juvenile dragons to get enough material for a single suit of armor.

Especially after you poke it full of holes/burn it/blast it/etc to kill it. Cows are killed with a captive bolt to the face, so don't face this issue.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-11, 01:38 PM
They are not expensive: it is just that the casters are supposed to sell the spellcasting service at a high cost but in practice if it was players who did try doing that they would be unable to sell the hide more than 0.000000000000000001 gp per tons of dragonscale because gms hate players doing actual businesses because it "throws out the wbl"

That might have been true in 3e, but I never saw it in other editions. Now, that's if the party actually has to do some risk taking or spend their character's lives making the money (in which case it just becomes an alternate form of treasure generation). If the players find an infinite wealth loop based simply on 'the rules don't specifically exclude...,' well then I'm sure there is plenty of DM clamp-down.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-11, 02:22 PM
This seems to have been answered pretty solidly, but I'll repeat what has been said.

1. Hunting dragons is insanely dangerous.

2. There isn't that much stuff out of each dragon

3. The stuff isn't eternal anyways. Dragon's aren't immortal and neither are their leavings

4. It's also a good way to anger any dragon that sees you. It might not care about the dragon killed, but it's a pretty big insult regardless.

5. Even keeping a captive dragon is likely insanely dangerous because dragons are magic resistant, hyper intelligent, death machines, who can likely figure a way out of whatever prison you've got them in.


Of course most of that is setting dependent. But dragons being the top of the food chain, and the PCs being exceptional individuals (rather than adventurers being dime-a-dozen workers) are commonly shared traits between many settings.

Malphegor
2019-03-11, 02:29 PM
It’s probably relevant too that the dragons might not be too happy with an army clad in their fallen kin, friendly or not, and might band together where naturally they would not to end this dragonslaying craze once and for all.

Imagine if cockroaches started wearing bits of human corpse flesh, bone armour, and wielded maces made out of teeth and fingerbones. You’re going to exterminate those bugs!

MoiMagnus
2019-03-11, 02:56 PM
They are not expensive: it is just that the casters are supposed to sell the spellcasting service at a high cost but in practice if it was players who did try doing that they would be unable to sell the hide more than 0.000000000000000001 gp per tons of dragonscale because gms hate players doing actual businesses because it "throws out the wbl"

You seems to have a problem with the concept of "The economic system of this world does not work as written, and can obviously be broken and exploited, as it was written to be simple instead of being good, but the DM should not let the players exploit the system, and either offer a more realistic economic system instead (which very few DM will even care to think about, not even taking in account the missing economical knowledges to build one) or kindly explain to the player that they don't plan to DM a game of Banks & Merchants"

You seems to have escalated your relationship with DMs as a "confrontationnal" one, instead of a "collaborative" one (i.e the DM build a game for the fun of the players, trying to target what they would like to see in the game within the limit of what he want to DM, while the players don't try to exploit the game in order to not inadvertedly break the fun of other players/DM)

The Jack
2019-03-11, 03:28 PM
This seems to have been answered pretty solidly, but I'll repeat what has been said.

1. Hunting dragons is insanely dangerous.

2. There isn't that much stuff out of each dragon

3. The stuff isn't eternal anyways. Dragon's aren't immortal and neither are their leavings

4. It's also a good way to anger any dragon that sees you. It might not care about the dragon killed, but it's a pretty big insult regardless.

5. Even keeping a captive dragon is likely insanely dangerous because dragons are magic resistant, hyper intelligent, death machines, who can likely figure a way out of whatever prison you've got them in.


Of course most of that is setting dependent. But dragons being the top of the food chain, and the PCs being exceptional individuals (rather than adventurers being dime-a-dozen workers) are commonly shared traits between many settings.

1. Large parties of high level characters. Eight stronks, specialized equipment, yade yada... Characters after a certain level don't have the same concerns.

2- Each dragon age bracket is exponentially larger than the last.

3-gotta last a long, long time though. Unless the scales rely on the magic for longevity or the dragons molt

4- dragons hate eachother. Sure, maybe metalics might unionize, but I think if a red saw you wearing blue dragon... well, it's a red so she'd be killing you anyway, but you really just killed a competitor that was doubtlessly not related to her.

5- are they magic resistant? sure they have prof in a lot of saves, but that's not so much... you're probs thinking of another edition. Also whites are dumb, the young aren't very intelligent. Plus, sometimes, intelligence just doesn't get you out of somewhere (real intelligence is not getting there in the first place!). Maybe they're like sharks and'll die from confined captivity, the dragon gods ensure they can't be resurrected but...

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-11, 03:42 PM
It depends a lot on your assumptions. And, bluntly put, the assumptions which can be derived from D&D don't make a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure they've fixed the most blatant issues (e.g, 10-foot ladders aren't cheaper than the 10-foot poles which make up each side), there are still a lot of issues.

The big one is fundamental to D&D's large-scale gameplay loop. For a PC, leveling up is safe and easy; it doesn't take long to reach a point where monsters that should be able to threaten a small town with destruction go down with barely more effort than cannon fodder.
Since in-world adventurers presumably don't get bored of their profession and abandon the commoners as readily as the players get bored of and abandon campaigns (or finish them, for that matter), it seems like there should be loads of mid-level adventurers and a decent number of high-level ones. But the world relies on there not being taverns full of world-shaping demigods, ready to fight whatever foe threatens the kingdom.
The only way D&D worlds can work is if PCs do not follow the same rules as everyone else. This is problematic for any adventurers who don't get some kind of Chosen One designation to justify this...but most groups are willing to ignore this.

That said, I'd love to see a well-designed world based on the idea that there are tons of mid- to high-level adventurers around.

Recherché
2019-03-11, 03:47 PM
1. Large parties of high level characters. Eight stronks, specialized equipment, yade yada... Characters after a certain level don't have the same concerns.

2- Each dragon age bracket is exponentially larger than the last.

3-gotta last a long, long time though. Unless the scales rely on the magic for longevity or the dragons molt

4- dragons hate eachother. Sure, maybe metalics might unionize, but I think if a red saw you wearing blue dragon... well, it's a red so she'd be killing you anyway, but you really just killed a competitor that was doubtlessly not related to her.

5- are they magic resistant? sure they have prof in a lot of saves, but that's not so much... you're probs thinking of another edition. Also whites are dumb, the young aren't very intelligent. Plus, sometimes, intelligence just doesn't get you out of somewhere (real intelligence is not getting there in the first place!). Maybe they're like sharks and'll die from confined captivity, the dragon gods ensure they can't be resurrected but...

1: Why are high level characters spending all their time murdering dragons for their skins and making more suits of armor from it than they could possibly wear?

2: Each dragon age bracket is also much harder to kill than the last.

3: Why wouldn't dragons molt or otherwise replace damaged scales? Real world animals with scales certainly do.

4: If I see you wearing the skin of a notorious dictator, I'd still be concerned about you wearing human skin regardless of the source. Also unless you manage to outfit your entire theoretical army in one color of dragon scales, you're probably wearing one of your average dragon's relatives somewhere in your army.

5: "Another edition" This thread is in the general games forum. People are replying using info from 2nd, 3.5 and 5 already. If you want to limit your argument to a single edition repost in that forum's thread.

And for good measure 6: If dragon scales are so gorram indestructible how exactly are you drilling holes in the scales to string them for scale mail? I don't think diamond topped drill bits are common in ye old medieval armor smith's shop.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-11, 03:51 PM
If dragon scales are this great as armor, how are people killing enough dragons to get tons of them?

Lord Raziere
2019-03-11, 04:59 PM
and if they are so successful, what are they using to pierce said armor? y'know because even if magical mind shenanigans, you need something sharp to cut through the scales without breaking the blade- and if you using hammers to break the armor, thats cracking valuable scales which produces waste. so you'd have to find a material to pierce through dragon scales, produce it enough to make it an industry, but not enough to somehow just give that material as swords to everyone so they can just use that to kill dragons all the time, because if have that material, why do you need the armor? people will just use the same material that killed the dragons to kill people with dragon armor.

so by having the industry to make dragon armor, you have the industry to kill people with dragon armor, which makes dragon armor kind of pointless, because then you need to make better armor, to out protect dragon armor in the arms race.

noob
2019-03-11, 05:13 PM
and if they are so successful, what are they using to pierce said armor? y'know because even if magical mind shenanigans, you need something sharp to cut through the scales without breaking the blade- and if you using hammers to break the armor, thats cracking valuable scales which produces waste. so you'd have to find a material to pierce through dragon scales, produce it enough to make it an industry, but not enough to somehow just give that material as swords to everyone so they can just use that to kill dragons all the time, because if have that material, why do you need the armor? people will just use the same material that killed the dragons to kill people with dragon armor.

so by having the industry to make dragon armor, you have the industry to kill people with dragon armor, which makes dragon armor kind of pointless, because then you need to make better armor, to out protect dragon armor in the arms race.

Adamentine or diamond could probably work for cutting the scales but adamentine does not allows weapons to ignore armor the same way diamonds does not allows to cut through steel during a fight: it is harder than steel(or dragon scales) but it does not just allows to cut things like starwars lightsabers.
So you can with a diamond dust saw or adamentine saw cut progressively most things but not magically ignore armor.
On the other hand the whole thing is that armors does not protect against everything stuff in real life but it worked great against melee weapons but it got obsolete once we got efficient piercing stuff such as good crossbows and rifles.

halfeye
2019-03-11, 08:09 PM
and if they are so successful, what are they using to pierce said armor?


Other dragon scales? if you put the edge of one against the surface of another and rotate it, it should eventually go through. Might take a long time.

Mechalich
2019-03-11, 09:08 PM
Given that in many game settings, dragons are intelligent, especially by the time they're big enough to hunt for their skins... this is pretty horrific, like "lampshades made from human skin" horrific.

Well, there are ways around that. With Clone, if you clone something that's already alive all you get is a soulless, lifeless fleshy mass in the appropriate shape. So you can produce refined organic matter without ever producing a living being of any kind. Mechanistically, this is almost exactly identical to taking some stem cells (Clone requires a tissue sample) and vat-growing organs or even an entire replacement body.

Xuc Xac
2019-03-11, 10:04 PM
Maybe "dragon hide" armor is really common, but most of the suits are just cheap knockoffs made out of kobold skin.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-11, 10:38 PM
1. Large parties of high level characters. Eight stronks, specialized equipment, yade yada... Characters after a certain level don't have the same concerns.

2- Each dragon age bracket is exponentially larger than the last.

3-gotta last a long, long time though. Unless the scales rely on the magic for longevity or the dragons molt

4- dragons hate eachother. Sure, maybe metalics might unionize, but I think if a red saw you wearing blue dragon... well, it's a red so she'd be killing you anyway, but you really just killed a competitor that was doubtlessly not related to her.

5- are they magic resistant? sure they have prof in a lot of saves, but that's not so much... you're probs thinking of another edition. Also whites are dumb, the young aren't very intelligent. Plus, sometimes, intelligence just doesn't get you out of somewhere (real intelligence is not getting there in the first place!). Maybe they're like sharks and'll die from confined captivity, the dragon gods ensure they can't be resurrected but...

1. What large parties of high level characters? There's the PCs. And then there's the BBEG's super elite minions. A kingdom might also have a few elite soldiers that hit high level as well, particularly if the king is some kind of famous general/warlord. Gather all of these people from across the entire world, you might have slightly over hundred people. All of which have much better things to do, many of which is trying to kill the other high level characters.

2. Also exponentially rarer and more dangerous.

3. You bones can last for over a hundred years in your body. Yet they'll rot exponentially faster outside of it, and bones last decently long before being replaced. Nearly everything in your body is being constantly replaced. Stuff like skin, that has to deal with the constant wear and tear of the outside environment? Is replaced every few weeks. Scales last longer to be sure, but they'll still be replaced continuously, likely multiple times a year.

Now, you can treat skin and scales so it'll last longer (IE Leather), but it's still not eternal. Not by a long shot. Particularly if it's going into battle.

4. Not really? Dragons don't really hate each other besides Metallics vs Chromatics. It's just that the Chromatics are all evil, and evil people are kinda ********, so they don't really get along with each other. But even evil dragons will work together sometimes. And they do respect each other, at least enough to take insult that some monkey is arrogant enough to wear their corpse as a prize.

5. Which edition are you talking about? For that matter, which setting? Some editions they were certainly magic resistant. And some settings have really obvious answers on why people don't mass hunt dragons. Here, I'll go through a few of the more common ones I'm familiar with.

Dragonlance: The dragons are very united. So much so that for a period of time they ruled basically the entire world. And that any military worth anything depends on dragons as it's airforce.

Faerun: Not only are the dragons willing to unite, but they can have class levels to boot. It's all fun and games until you are facing a 20 level Sorcerer/20 Fighter Ancient Black Dragon. To boot there is a major cult running around worshiping the dragons and trying to empower them.

Ebberon: The dragons fill the same basic role of gods in Faerun. So there's that. They also do seem to be relatively united as a faction, considering they bound everything nasty beneath the planet's surface, and defeated the giant civilization.


In fact, that brings up a few common things that are pretty common in the majority of settings

Dragon Descended races: these are quite often relatively loyal to dragons, at least somewhat.

Kobolds: Have become pretty associated with dragons since 3.5, and would also do everything to protect them, including fighting a war against anyone who would try a plan like you suggest.

Dragon Gods: Balmaunt and Tiamat are considered 'default' gods in the patheons of D&D, and they would certainly do something about even small scale dragon farming. Some settings have full dragon patheons of nothing but dragons. Other times (IE Dragonlance), the dragons are basically the chosen people of the gods.

Quertus
2019-03-11, 10:49 PM
This seems to have been answered pretty solidly, but I'll repeat what has been said.

1. Hunting dragons is insanely dangerous.

2. There isn't that much stuff out of each dragon

3. The stuff isn't eternal anyways. Dragon's aren't immortal and neither are their leavings

4. It's also a good way to anger any dragon that sees you. It might not care about the dragon killed, but it's a pretty big insult regardless.

5. Even keeping a captive dragon is likely insanely dangerous because dragons are magic resistant, hyper intelligent, death machines, who can likely figure a way out of whatever prison you've got them in.


Of course most of that is setting dependent. But dragons being the top of the food chain, and the PCs being exceptional individuals (rather than adventurers being dime-a-dozen workers) are commonly shared traits between many settings.

#3 is true.

#5 is, under several plans, including mine, very false.

In a modern setting, one would lobotomize the Dragons at a very young age, and just keep breeding them & harvesting them. In a D&D magical world, well, my plan has them multi-layer incapacitated. There was no risk from the Dragons themselves (beyond the initial capture of the first breeding set).


And for good measure 6: If dragon scales are so gorram indestructible how exactly are you drilling holes in the scales to string them for scale mail? I don't think diamond topped drill bits are common in ye old medieval armor smith's shop.

1-5 weren't really worth responding to; 6, at least, seems interesting.

I have always just assumed that you are cutting the "leather", and wearing the "leather", which comes with free scales.

Anyone care to comment on how reasonable my plan would be? I am neither a taxidermist, nor do I play one on TV.


If dragon scales are this great as armor, how are people killing enough dragons to get tons of them?

Magic. Psionics. Poison. Suffocation. Disease. Weak spots.

If at all possible, *not* by damaging the merchandise.


Well, there are ways around that. With Clone, if you clone something that's already alive all you get is a soulless, lifeless fleshy mass in the appropriate shape. So you can produce refined organic matter without ever producing a living being of any kind. Mechanistically, this is almost exactly identical to taking some stem cells (Clone requires a tissue sample) and vat-growing organs or even an entire replacement body.

Also a good answer for a modern setting.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-11, 10:54 PM
yeah, dragons when you think about it, aren't just a singular creature in DnD, they're a culture with various members within them to the point of having major gods on both sides of the alignment spectrum. its one thing to go around hunting dragons when they're lonesome creatures sitting in caves, but entirely another to hunt down a kobold and dragonborn's representative of their god or object of worship and thus have divine magic on their side and all that entails, and gods help you if the end up as rulers of a city with their own wizards college and army and other members of their family around to help stop you. but they don't because Bahamut and Tiamat are some of the oldest most powerful gods in existence and like their children alive and free to live as they wish, and the other gods aren't keen on ticking off each over something petty as mortals wanting to make a new protective pelt on their skins.

awa
2019-03-11, 11:01 PM
i think we need to nail down an edition. people keep using 3rd edition mechanics on how to trap dragons while ignoring the fact that you could use far simpler and cheaper methods to get steel armor which unless your a druid is just as good. In third edition dragon scale might be acquirable but why would you bother? its not very useful 1/2 weight and not made of metal thats it. No elemental resistances no bonus ac or Dr or free enhancement bonuses, its dex mod does not increase its armor check penalty is the same its just 1/2 weight.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-11, 11:33 PM
Some chromatic dragons follow the "lay lots of eggs and abandon them" strategy (mostly ones that are only just old enough to lay eggs in the first place), and others are prone to forcing their young to abandon the nest extremely early - but, at least according to the 4e Draconomicon, the "force young to abandon nest early" chromatics are portrayed as abnormal - suffering from a mild form of insanity.
Which isn't surprising. An r-strategist of that size, let alone with that balance of intelligence and instinct, is unrealistic even for a world with giant acid-breathing lizards. And when you consider their intelligence...first off, it would be impossible to talk about culture or even typical chromatic dragon worldviews if they weren't raised in a reasonably continuous community. (Even sub-human-intellect animals can have serious problems if their "culture" is disrupted.) Second off, they'd be breeding some pretty hefty resentment, and no villain should want to needlessly create enemies out of potential allies—especially not ones they know will grow to be as powerful as they are.
Then again, a lot of villains do needlessly create enemies out of potential allies, even ones which can grow to surpass the villain's power...



Even in editions where the actual sizes are theoretically spelled out, both art and adventure modules routinely seemed to violate any given rules. And there I think lies the biggest problem. I don't think the game itself (much less the game as interpreted by four decades of gamers) has been remotely consistent on how big dragons are supposed to be, how common they are supposed to be (regardless of frequency on wandering monster tables), nor how big a deal they are supposed to be (also regardless of their actual mechanical presentation).
That is also a problem. D&D has always tried to be every fantasy ever, so that it's easy to slip into the world if you've read/watched a single Tolkien-derivative book/movie. This is a good broad-scale strategy, but it means that the details are always...problematic. (I'm pretty sure this is at the root of at least 30-40% of alignment problems, for instance. They want to accommodate settings/campaigns with objective black-and-white morality, but also settings/campaigns that don't have tons of logical problems and unfortunate implications.)



Imagine if cockroaches started wearing bits of human corpse flesh, bone armour, and wielded maces made out of teeth and fingerbones. You’re going to exterminate those bugs!
No, I'm going to get the frig out of Australia and let someone else exterminate them.



You seems to have escalated your relationship with DMs as a "confrontationnal" one, instead of a "collaborative" one (i.e the DM build a game for the fun of the players, trying to target what they would like to see in the game within the limit of what he want to DM, while the players don't try to exploit the game in order to not inadvertedly break the fun of other players/DM)
I'd argue that if the players are having more fun with the world's economy than the world's dungeons, then any DM trying to run a dungeon crawl has a decent amount of blame for the confrontations that causes.



If dragon scales are this great as armor, how are people killing enough dragons to get tons of them?
1. If leather is this good as armor, how are people killing enough cows to get tons of it? If steel is this good as armor, how are people mining enough iron to get tons of it? The difficulty of gathering the raw material has little to do with the durability of the end product.
2. I'd assume the people killing the dragons are higher-level than the threats most people buy armor to protect against. Either that, or your world has a really bad bandit problem.



i think we need to nail down an edition. people keep using 3rd edition mechanics on how to trap dragons while ignoring the fact that you could use far simpler and cheaper methods to get steel armor which unless your a druid is just as good. In third edition dragon scale might be acquirable but why would you bother? its not very useful 1/2 weight and not made of metal thats it. No elemental resistances no bonus ac or Dr or free enhancement bonuses, its dex mod does not increase its armor check penalty is the same its just 1/2 weight.
If you don't see why that's a big benefit, you've clearly never been hiking. Or had to bundle up much.
(Also, I can think of a lot of tasks which I'd rather have leather for clothes/armor than metal; "Anything involving heat" is a good place to start. Leather that is as tough as metal, and which isn't damaged by one form of elemental energy, would be even better.)

Forum Explorer
2019-03-11, 11:36 PM
#3 is true.

#5 is, under several plans, including mine, very false.

In a modern setting, one would lobotomize the Dragons at a very young age, and just keep breeding them & harvesting them. In a D&D magical world, well, my plan has them multi-layer incapacitated. There was no risk from the Dragons themselves (beyond the initial capture of the first breeding set).



You know lobotomization didn't actually pacify patients? I mean, it would for some. Others would go berserk. Other people just had their inhibitions destroyed (honestly, that's likely what happened with the berserk patients). Neuroscience is not nearly advanced enough to be able to go 'destroy that part, and you basically reduce a thinking being to cattle'. I mean, you might be able to reduce them to a drooling lump, but that's a very unhealthy state to be in. Not to mention side effects include things like seizures, which have the potential to kill the dragon anyways. You'd face a lot of difficulties in actually maintaining a living dragon.

You seem to be using 3.5 spells, in which case the answer is actually it's just not worth the effort. Seriously, dragonhide is pretty garbage in 3.5. Plate armor is better, and likely less expensive. It's only really an upgrade for Druids.

Recherché
2019-03-12, 12:51 AM
1. If leather is this good as armor, how are people killing enough cows to get tons of it? If steel is this good as armor, how are people mining enough iron to get tons of it? The difficulty of gathering the raw material has little to do with the durability of the end product.

Leather and steel armor are also pretty destructible and need regular repairs (Well okay leather was never really a thing as D&D portrays it.) Its more a question of if dragon based armor is so indestructible that it never needs to be repaired, it would be extremely hard to make armor out of it. If it's destruct able enough that you can drill holes in scales and cut and sew the leather then it's also likely to get damaged in battle and need regular repairs.

The Jack
2019-03-12, 05:19 AM
In a setting where dragons are more intelligent magical beast than gods/person's in monster bodies, it makes every sense to regularly cull them. They're like wolves, they'll eat all your sheep, and unless you've got a giant/ giant spider problem you've not really got any incentive to keep them around. They also horde all your gold and ruin homes.


If they're not your massive airforce, Regularly killing them strengthens a kingdom.

Half the dragons are evil, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.
The other half are more benevolent than you, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.

awa
2019-03-12, 07:23 AM
If you don't see why that's a big benefit, you've clearly never been hiking. Or had to bundle up much.
(Also, I can think of a lot of tasks which I'd rather have leather for clothes/armor than metal; "Anything involving heat" is a good place to start. Leather that is as tough as metal, and which isn't damaged by one form of elemental energy, would be even better.)

In third edition the dragons elemental resistance does not carry over once their dead.

Yes being lighter is a small benefit but considering the elaborate methods needed to acquire it is it really worth all the extra effort and cost? I'm not saying no one would use it, the question isn't why would you use dragon armor but instead why would anyone use anything else.


In a setting where dragons are more intelligent magical beast than gods/person's in monster bodies, it makes every sense to regularly cull them. They're like wolves, they'll eat all your sheep, and unless you've got a giant/ giant spider problem you've not really got any incentive to keep them around. They also horde all your gold and ruin homes.


If they're not your massive airforce, Regularly killing them strengthens a kingdom.

Half the dragons are evil, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.
The other half are more benevolent than you, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.

Which d&d setting are you describing? Because, just random predators that can be culled like wolves does not describe any I'm familiar with. Now i'm familiar with settings where the dragons cull the humans (or at least regions within settings) but not the other way around not with true dragons.

That last bit also makes no sense

Quertus
2019-03-12, 07:31 AM
You seem to be using 3.5 spells, in which case the answer is actually it's just not worth the effort. Seriously, dragonhide is pretty garbage in 3.5. Plate armor is better, and likely less expensive. It's only really an upgrade for Druids.

3e-focused website; seemed the words people would be most likely to understand.

Yes, in 3e, Dragon armor is more "coolness points" than anything else. In 2e, the list of "what was better than Dragon armor" was very short, and pretty much all TO. Especially given that +5 Dragon armor could already break 2e's version of "Bounded Accuracy", giving you an AC of -13, which, on many worlds, was beyond the max allowed.


The other half are more benevolent than you, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.

Even ignoring the third half, who are as meh/ambivalent as possible, do you really believe that good Dragons are more good than good men?

The Jack
2019-03-12, 07:39 AM
That last bit also makes no sense
It was kind of a joke. Imagine you're a fascist leader for a moment, then read it again.




Even ignoring the third half, who are as meh/ambivalent as possible, do you really believe that good Dragons are more good than good men?

From what I've read, yeah. From what I've read of 5e Dragons, like outsiders, are naturally inclined towards extremes of alignment. So a good dragon is likely more good than any given good human.

and it's in your best interest to appear to be a 'good' civilisation, so when you fail to meet the standard and you have a golden dragon waving the bar, you've gotta make that dragon seem evil.

Keltest
2019-03-12, 07:55 AM
It was kind of a joke. Imagine you're a fascist leader for a moment, then read it again.




From what I've read, yeah. From what I've read of 5e Dragons, like outsiders, are naturally inclined towards extremes of alignment. So a good dragon is likely more good than any given good human.

and it's in your best interest to appear to be a 'good' civilisation, so when you fail to meet the standard and you have a golden dragon waving the bar, you've gotta make that dragon seem evil.

Dragons, unlike outsiders, are mortal (more or less), and therefore capable of failing to live up to their own standards.

awa
2019-03-12, 08:17 AM
depends a bit on the edition / setting. In some dragons while generally not quite as extreme as outsiders are a lot closer to an outsiders mentality than humans/demihumans.
In some editions this is justified that dragons are born fully aware and knowledgeable, basically skipping the formative years a human child would have. So in these the dragon is born with both its understanding of morality and its strong opinions about morality preformed.

The Big Bear
2019-03-12, 08:25 AM
Adventurers are not the only thing that kill dragons. I would actually argue that most dragons die relatively young and are killed by older dragons that are either protecting their turf or hunting young dragons before they turn into larger threats. And when dragons fight, I doubt there are many leftover pieces that can be made into armor.

The largest force keeping the number of dragons in check are other dragons, which is why every adventurer is not running around with dragon scale plate. The next largest force is giants, who likely do not make armor from dragon parts due to their natural hatred of them.

So, yes, there are many many dragons in Faerun, but most of them are killed while juveniles by giants and other dragons, not adventurers. Which is why dragon scale armor is still uncommon despite the number of dragons that have existed.

The Jack
2019-03-12, 09:45 AM
The next largest force is giants, who likely do not make armor from dragon parts due to their natural hatred of them.


i would, but i suppose giants have bigger material shortages than people.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-12, 11:30 AM
In third edition the dragons elemental resistance does not carry over once their dead.
I'm about 70% sure that was mentioned in a throwaway line in some book or another (maybe the Draconomicon?), because it's the sort of thing that comes up too rarely to deserve anything more.
It was a minor point anyways. Even normal leather is remarkably fire-resistant, if you don't have too hot a fire or don't stick your hand in too long.


Yes being lighter is a small benefit but considering the elaborate methods needed to acquire it is it really worth all the extra effort and cost? I'm not saying no one would use it, the question isn't why would you use dragon armor but instead why would anyone use anything else.
If we accept the premise that dragonhide is reasonably common, that getting a dragon corpse is as easy as hiring a party of adventurers, then there's not much reason not to use it. If you disagree with that premise, you should be arguing against it instead of the idea that people would find dragonhide useful.



The next largest force is giants, who likely do not make armor from dragon parts due to their natural hatred of them.
I don't follow. I mean, there are cultures where it would make sense to just ignore the corpses of things you hate, but there are also cultures where it would make sense to wear the corpses of those you hate because you hate them, never mind that they make for steel-grade armor. Given that cultures normally adapt to fit the needs of their environment, and the fact that giants need a lot of armor material...

awa
2019-03-12, 12:08 PM
If we accept the premise that dragonhide is reasonably common, that getting a dragon corpse is as easy as hiring a party of adventurers, then there's not much reason not to use it. If you disagree with that premise, you should be arguing against it instead of the idea that people would find dragonhide useful.





Its a measure of cost to benefit ratio
In third edition you need very big dragons to get decent armor this requires a lot of resources, either in the form of armies of adventures hunting down thousands of dragons. Or complex arrangements of spells cloning or regenerating said dragons.

If dragons scale was powerful enough this might be worth the effort, but its not, the scale is technically lighter but no less encumbering than normal armor.

Dragon scale is simply not a big enough improvement to bother spending the kind of additional resources necessary to acquire it on a mass production scale. The spells slots being used to imprison a dragon would be exponential more efficient if simply used to make mundane armor.

Quertus
2019-03-12, 12:26 PM
Dragon scale is simply not a big enough improvement to bother spending the kind of additional resources necessary to acquire it on a mass production scale.

It's a style (and army morale) thing. Call it "free PR for the Evil Overlord". What else are they going to do with those spell slots, that's better than torturing a sentient being - iconic of power, no less - that dared to cross them, and provide incentive for joining the legion of doom by creating cool swag?

(Also, it works well with plans to travel back in time to earlier editions, when Dragon armor was the bomb!)

Some day, I really need to run an evil counterpart to Quertus, who is busy publishing a series on "how to be an evil overlord". :smallwink:

Forum Explorer
2019-03-12, 12:31 PM
In a setting where dragons are more intelligent magical beast than gods/person's in monster bodies, it makes every sense to regularly cull them. They're like wolves, they'll eat all your sheep, and unless you've got a giant/ giant spider problem you've not really got any incentive to keep them around. They also horde all your gold and ruin homes.


If they're not your massive airforce, Regularly killing them strengthens a kingdom.

Half the dragons are evil, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.
The other half are more benevolent than you, so you can't suffer them to live and claim to be a good civilisation.

Cool. What setting is that? Because I suspect the answer is 'your own personal setting' in which case, yes there are lots of heroes with nothing better to do then hunt down dragons and skin them to make armor.

In my own personal setting, the tables are reversed. The most successful humonoids are things like Goblins and Orcs, because mass reproduction is actually a really good idea when you've got tons of predators. Or races like Kobold which shamelessly suck up to one of the top races on the planet. Most kingdoms are outright ruled by powerful monsters, with humonoid run kingdoms either being small city-states, or lead by exceptional people who killed the monster in charge and took over. Trade is done with large caravans, because leaving the city/town/village is basically suicide without large numbers unless you are a PC basically. For the record, my setting uses 5E rules with alignment removed, so numbers matter, magic items are rare, and things aren't color coded for your convenience.

And neither setting has really any relation to any official setting, which typically have pretty decent reasons why your plan wouldn't work as well.


3e-focused website; seemed the words people would be most likely to understand.

Yes, in 3e, Dragon armor is more "coolness points" than anything else. In 2e, the list of "what was better than Dragon armor" was very short, and pretty much all TO. Especially given that +5 Dragon armor could already break 2e's version of "Bounded Accuracy", giving you an AC of -13, which, on many worlds, was beyond the max allowed.


That only really holds if there are equivilant spells in other editions that can replicated the suggested 3e stuff. Which I know is false in 5e, and I suspect is false in 2e.

Quertus
2019-03-12, 01:18 PM
That only really holds if there are equivilant spells in other editions that can replicated the suggested 3e stuff. Which I know is false in 5e, and I suspect is false in 2e.

Spell research was a thing in 2e, too. Just using published spells that my senile mind remembers, I would need to use different spells, but the Dragon would be just as ****ed. Moreso, because would be larger, and it would therefore take longer to skin it alive.

Rater202
2019-03-12, 01:55 PM
From my reading of the SRD, in 3rd edition Dragonhide armor is literally just a more expensive version of a couple of very specific armor and shields.

It has no extra benefits when worn(though at the very least it has more hardness and HP than regular hide.)

Basically, if you're a druid who wants to have high-end heavy or medium armor, you go for a dragon, but other than that there's no intrisic value over steal.

There's a single magic item, Dragonskin Armor, that's full plate made explicitly from the hide of a Great Worm dragon and enchanted with Shapeshift and Protection from Energy to iminatate Dragon properties, but that's a +5 magical armor so...

Basically, it's a harder to get and more expensive hide or steal. It'snot absurdly common becuase hide and steal are easier to get.

(By RAW, you can't make LEather Armor out of Dragon Hide.)

Forum Explorer
2019-03-12, 02:49 PM
Spell research was a thing in 2e, too. Just using published spells that my senile mind remembers, I would need to use different spells, but the Dragon would be just as ****ed. Moreso, because would be larger, and it would therefore take longer to skin it alive.

Isn't spell research basically asking the GM to let you homebrew a spell?

Quertus
2019-03-12, 02:57 PM
Isn't spell research basically asking the GM to let you homebrew a spell?

Yes.

Since Mindrape does not exist by that name in 2e, creating it in 2e would require spell research.

However, in 2e, Magic Jar, would (if used intelligently) permanently give you the dragon's body (and powers, and HP, and everything else). So, rather than skin an enemy alive, you could destroy their soul, wear their body (literally) and, if you were willing to suffer the pain, let your army wear their body/skin almost as literally.

Better effect, less risk. A bit more pain.

Of course, if you used Magic Jar again, to take a new body, in theory you could be skinning the mindless, soulless body of your old foe to equip your army without the pain yourself.

And that's just one of several ways to skin this cat (pun intended).

Researching "2e Mindrape" isn't necessary to enable the dragon hide army. It would just enable you to create it the same way as I described doing in 3e.

The Jack
2019-03-12, 03:25 PM
Cool. What setting is that? Because I suspect the answer is 'your own personal setting' in which case, yes there are lots of heroes with nothing better to do then hunt down dragons and skin them to make armor.
.

More from reading the generic 5e fluff. IE Monster manual, DM's guide, volo's and mord's.

So in the most generically generic 5e DnD game what I propose is very logical.

awa
2019-03-12, 03:40 PM
the default setting is forgotten realms i dont think that will fly in the forgotten realms. If nothing else the dragons have their own gods.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-12, 03:42 PM
Yes.

Since Mindrape does not exist by that name in 2e, creating it in 2e would require spell research.

However, in 2e, Magic Jar, would (if used intelligently) permanently give you the dragon's body (and powers, and HP, and everything else). So, rather than skin an enemy alive, you could destroy their soul, wear their body (literally) and, if you were willing to suffer the pain, let your army wear their body/skin almost as literally.

Better effect, less risk. A bit more pain.

Of course, if you used Magic Jar again, to take a new body, in theory you could be skinning the mindless, soulless body of your old foe to equip your army without the pain yourself.

And that's just one of several ways to skin this cat (pun intended).

Researching "2e Mindrape" isn't necessary to enable the dragon hide army. It would just enable you to create it the same way as I described doing in 3e.

Then that's DM (and thus setting) dependent.

The magic jar is a good idea except for why the frig would I subject myself to that? I guess I'd use it again, and yeah, that's actually a pretty cool way to both get around the problem, make money, and create an epic sign of your power by degrading an old foe in such a manner.


More from reading the generic 5e fluff. IE Monster manual, DM's guide, volo's and mord's.

So in the most generically generic 5e DnD game what I propose is very logical.

I don't believe in 'generic D&D'. Everyone has their own twists and thoughts on the matter. For example, reading those same books? The impression that I get is that the PCs are literally the only ones in the world with Class Levels. Everyone else uses an entirely different system as evidenced by the NPC section in the Monster Manuel.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-12, 04:01 PM
The impression that I get is that the PCs are literally the only ones in the world with Class Levels. Everyone else uses an entirely different system as evidenced by the NPC section in the Monster Manuel.

Not quite, but PC-class people are rare. And high-level PC-class people are rare^2. I have no idea what MM or DMG he was reading, but the 5e one makes it clear that the default is that powerful magic is super rare--most people go their entire lives without ever seeing any. Most priests are not clerics. For most people, monsters beyond humanoid races (orcs and goblins, mostly) are myths and legends.

And the few high-level adventurers that exist have better things to do than genocide an endangered species[1] to make slightly better armor...that they don't really need anyway and that no one could afford. By the time you're in T4 (level 17+), you're expected to be handling threats that span planes (or at least the local regions of such things). Money, by that point, is pointless.

[1] Dragons are rare in 5e. There might be (from what I understand) hundreds or low thousands of adults on a continent. Total. Of all colors combined. And even if you get 1-2 suits per adult, you're still looking at killing the entire race to supply one small detachment, let alone a whole army.

And @Quertus--those plans seem like a good way to get all sorts of negative attention from people like adventurers, gods, angels, and other such people who are opposed to the casual soul-destruction of intelligent people. A nation that did such a thing would get mobbed out of self-defense by its neighbors, plus having all the local plot-armored do-gooders itching to take your head. Not a good plan.

awa
2019-03-12, 06:56 PM
having checked my second edition phb
magic jaring yourself to be tortured is a deeply dumb move. As a dragon is not humanoid you lose all your spells and cant fight effectively in the new body. Not to mention that you are insanely vulnerable at the moment when you are transferring yourself to or from the dragon. Like a commoner with a rock could one shot you vulnerable.

This spell is ludicrously risky to use the way you describe and requires multiple very high level characters a level 14 priest is a big deal in second edition and your asking him to cast his only 7th level slot per day to make armor. Also their is a chance that any given casting of regenerate causes the dragon to die (because the scales are not present).

So yeah this is a very expensive, very dangerous, very bad plan.

not to mention flaying yourself alive over and over again is going to leave you a gibbering wreck mr edge lord

which again feeds back into why dragon armor is not common, not many very high level wizards would say you know what sounds like a good idea subjecting myself to a fate worse then death with the aid of an evil priest of extreme power while making myself an incredible easy target to assassinate so i can get a small number of suits of armor (as the dragon eventually die from system shock rolls) thus requiring me to regularly pick fight with some of the games top tier monsters.

John Campbell
2019-03-12, 11:50 PM
So I played a crafting mage for a long while - he's the character I use for my avatar here. I had a habit of parting out the things we killed and using them for magic item crafting materials. Because your cloak of displacement is just cooler when it's made out of a displacer beast pelt, right?

We killed a couple of dragons over the course of our adventuring career. I took their hides, along with anything else I thought might be useful. But, while I used some of the other parts - the haft of my frost surge axe was made from the femur of a white dragon - I never actually did anything with the hides. Because it wasn't worth the effort. Even after having done the hard part already.

Even the druid in the party had better armor options - because she had a high Dex, because she didn't have Heavy Armor Proficiency and wasn't about to burn one of her sharply-limited feats to get it, she was better off with plain old bovine-based studded leather than with anything I could do with the dragonscale. And when she was wildshaped, it didn't matter what she was wearing anyway. The PCs that did have Heavy Armor Proficiency were using mithril, which provides benefits that dragonscale doesn't. Or, in my case, adamantine, which, likewise. (Runesmith let me basically ignore ASF.)

noob
2019-03-13, 06:11 AM
In 3.5 dungeon master guide we see that getting a city with enough humanoids spontaneously creates at least 3 full-casters with a level of 17 or more.
we also see that in a thorp with one person you can find one person of each class thus making the thorp have more than one person then those people just have to go away from each other and create more thorps to produce more people by spontaneous "one of each class from the list genesis" then they can constantly send a stream of people toward a place where they plan to make a big enough town to spontaneously generate level 17 casters.
So humanoid domination of the material plane through logistics is what happens if it does not gets invaded by an infinity of outsiders(they can not create outsiders but they start with an infinity of them having all greater teleportation) using logistics to get denser infinities and then spreading it through the planes first.
It should be called "logistics and infinities"
The reason dragons are a scarce resource is that humanoids can multiply at a high pace through "one of each class from the list genesis" while dragons are limited to regular reproduction and so dragons are vastly more rare compared to level 17 casters and level 17 casters do not have that many spells that spends dragonstuff and dragonscale armor is useful for druids only.
also dragon hunting for getting dragon parts is not needed because items with a low enough value spontaneously appear in big cities and most dragon parts falls within that threshold.

awa
2019-03-13, 07:18 AM
Also if you try to permanently take the dragon body using magic jar you are one dispel magic away from instant death (no raise dead possible), and you have a % chance of perma death on every regenerate (from system shock), you cant cast spells (not a humanoid), and have dm dependent penalties for using a body dissimilar from your own.

2nd edition is not third edition, magic is not a safe I win button.

2nd edition has no easy solutions for free dragon scale, 3rd edition has no incentive to spend the resources needed to get it. It seems pretty clear why everyone isn't using dragon scale instead of normal armor.

But that go me thinking what creatures could you hypothetically harvest? in my mind giant insect carapace makes the most sense they lack the abilities and intelligence that makes harvesting dragon so hard and are generally depicted as being far more common.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-13, 07:24 AM
In 3.5 dungeon master guide we see that getting a city with enough humanoids spontaneously creates at least 3 full-casters with a level of 17 or more.
we also see that in a thorp with one person you can find one person of each class thus making the thorp have more than one person then those people just have to go away from each other and create more thorps to produce more people by spontaneous "one of each class from the list genesis" then they can constantly send a stream of people toward a place where they plan to make a big enough town to spontaneously generate level 17 casters.

Even within the Tippy-verse logic this is predicated upon, do we know the direction of causality? Even within this paragraph you are going in both directions (city of sufficient size generated casters; sufficient classes people generate a thorp).

noob
2019-03-13, 07:31 AM
Even within the Tippy-verse logic this is predicated upon, do we know the direction of causality? Even within this paragraph you are going in both directions (city of sufficient size generated casters; sufficient classes people generate a thorp).

it is simple: they say that in any city or thorp you can find one individual of each class having a given level(and they write the recipice for getting the level of that individual)
And they define the kind of city by the number of people within it.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-13, 08:08 AM
it is simple: they say that in any city or thorp you can find one individual of each class having a given level(and they write the recipice for getting the level of that individual)
And they define the kind of city by the number of people within it.

And thus we see the folly of doing setting design backward--treating the game guidelines (which anything in the DMG certainly is) as laws of nature, rather than as guidelines that are there to give a starting position but need sanity checks.

Yes, the rules shouldn't be too far off from the intended fiction, but the rules are, were, and always will be a lens through which we see (and a tool through which we meddle) the underlying fiction in a gameable, fun, doable-by-humans-in-realtime sort of way. They are not the physical laws of the fiction.

Quertus
2019-03-13, 08:18 AM
And @Quertus--those plans seem like a good way to get all sorts of negative attention from people like adventurers, gods, angels, and other such people who are opposed to the casual soul-destruction of intelligent people. A nation that did such a thing would get mobbed out of self-defense by its neighbors, plus having all the local plot-armored do-gooders itching to take your head. Not a good plan.

Good. That's the plan. Thank you for noticing. My Evil Overlord economy is based on looting dead adventurers - they have the highest loot-to-threat ratio.

And, given what I did to this Dragon that crossed me, can you imagine what I'll do to nations that officially endorse these assassins?

No, officially crossing the benevolent (or, at the very least, diplomatic, and apathetic to the existence and sovereignty of your nation) BBEG and his Dragon hide equipped legion of doom is not in your nation's best interests.


Also if you try to permanently take the dragon body using magic jar you are one dispel magic away from instant death (no raise dead possible), and you have a % chance of perma death on every regenerate (from system shock), you cant cast spells (not a humanoid), and have dm dependent penalties for using a body dissimilar from your own.

2nd edition is not third edition, magic is not a safe I win button.

2nd edition has no easy solutions for free dragon scale, 3rd edition has no incentive to spend the resources needed to get it. It seems pretty clear why everyone isn't using dragon scale instead of normal armor.

But that go me thinking what creatures could you hypothetically harvest? in my mind giant insect carapace makes the most sense they lack the abilities and intelligence that makes harvesting dragon so hard and are generally depicted as being far more common.

Well, no, 2e has plenty of safe to safe-ish ways to get Dragon hide. I was just detailing one - the one that best paralleled my 3e example, while being mechanically quite different. You could drop the Dragon down to 0 stats in 2e, too, just... it took more effort.

Rereading Magic Jar, you are wrong on a number of points. First on what you think I'm doing, but mostly on the whole "no raise dead possible". You are technically correct that the penalties are not specified, but there are ample examples of "-2 attack" as the standard "unfamiliar form" penalty. Given that dragons can cast, I'm curious where you get the whole "cant cast spells (not a humanoid)" from - citation please?

You are correct that the Regenerate spell requires a System Shock roll. If push comes to shove, I have ways to deal with that. (although the most pedantic rules lawyer would point out that the RAW of the text makes a system shock roll unnecessary in this case (because the skin/hide is present) before they got books thrown at them).

Oh, as for incentive in 3e? How about "planning to Teleport Through Time, back into a 2e era, where this armor is the bomb"?

awa
2019-03-13, 08:39 AM
if you destroy the gem holding the dragons mind to permanently gain the dragon body, and then latter are hit with a dispel magic your mind is sent back to the gem and lost you are "dead" but in a way that cannot be fixed.

dragons cast spells but not in the way that humans do they dont use spell books and their "fingers" cannot perform the proper motions. Now some dragons through the use of a kit do cast spells like a wizard but they are very few and far between and you would have had to have found one of those rare dragons to use the powers on.

Its a bad plan with lots of points of failure requiring multiple high level characters in an edition where those are rare and does not remotely prove the thesis that dragon scale is so easy to acquire that it would replace metal as the armor material of choice.

Quertus
2019-03-13, 12:11 PM
if you destroy the gem holding the dragons mind to permanently gain the dragon body, and then latter are hit with a dispel magic your mind is sent back to the gem and lost you are "dead" but in a way that cannot be fixed.

dragons cast spells but not in the way that humans do they dont use spell books and their "fingers" cannot perform the proper motions. Now some dragons through the use of a kit do cast spells like a wizard but they are very few and far between and you would have had to have found one of those rare dragons to use the powers on.

Its a bad plan with lots of points of failure requiring multiple high level characters in an edition where those are rare and does not remotely prove the thesis that dragon scale is so easy to acquire that it would replace metal as the armor material of choice.

I mean, reading comprehension has never been my strong suit, but... I don't see what you're seeing.

That said, yes, I'm not saying that it should - only that it could.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-14, 01:49 AM
Its a measure of cost to benefit ratio
-snip-
How is this not the "disagree with that premise [that dragonhide is reasonably common, etc]"? You're directing the argument at the wrong person.



I have no idea what MM or DMG he was reading, but the 5e one makes it clear that the default is that powerful magic is super rare--most people go their entire lives without ever seeing any. Most priests are not clerics. For most people, monsters beyond humanoid races (orcs and goblins, mostly) are myths and legends.
...which doesn't stop there from being enough high-level NPCs and/or powerful monsters for at least some adventurers from easily scaling the class/level tables, usually without any indication that this is an unusual state. The fluff doesn't create a gameworld whose typical state matches the PCs' observations, nor does it provide a justification for why the PCs are unusually un/lucky in the number of powerful threats they come across.
(Also, I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating some on that last point.)



In 3.5 dungeon master guide we see that getting a city with enough humanoids spontaneously creates at least 3 full-casters with a level of 17 or more.
Or high-level characters find such areas highly attractive, and high-level characters are more common according to the DMG than most people realize. Let's try not to make this sound more ridiculous than it has to. Though I admit, a world where all major cities have a handful of casters capable of casting wish or miracle, without this having any visible effect on the world, is pretty ridiculous on its own. Still, if the DMg says that there are that many high-level casters around in a typical D&D world, then it's kinda silly to say that they're as rare as an honest politician. In that edition, at least; does 5e have a similar city-building section anywhere?



Dragons and [I]magic jar
Surely there are ways to remove a creature's soul from its body and skin it without having to flay yourself? Finger of death doesn't leave any mark, and I hear the smell is easy to wash out.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-14, 02:00 AM
In that edition, at least; does 5e have a similar city-building section anywhere?


Nope. It learned it's lesson.

Quertus
2019-03-14, 06:11 AM
Surely there are ways to remove a creature's soul from its body and skin it without having to flay yourself? Finger of death doesn't leave any mark, and I hear the smell is easy to wash out.

Would not Finger of Death leave the Dragon, you know, dead?

Still, agreed, there are other ways. Just... Magic Jar comes with the "free" infinite cosmic power of a Dragon body, that the other solutions don't.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-14, 06:49 AM
...which doesn't stop there from being enough high-level NPCs and/or powerful monsters for at least some adventurers from easily scaling the class/level tables, usually without any indication that this is an unusual state. The fluff doesn't create a gameworld whose typical state matches the PCs' observations, nor does it provide a justification for why the PCs are unusually un/lucky in the number of powerful threats they come across.
(Also, I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating some on that last point.)


5e has the concept of tiers of play (called out specifically in the DMG, pages 36-38). The headings are as follows:

Levels 1-4: Local Heroes.
Levels 5-10: Heroes of the Realm
Levels 11-16: Masters of the Realm
Levels 17-20: Masters of the World

Tier 3 is the point at which you can really start taking on an adult dragon regularly (with variations depending on optimization and magic items). At that point, you're already nation/continent-level heroes. By implication, you're unlikely to have tons of others who can claim the title of Masters of the Realm. At that level you're on an equal footing with kings and rulers--the party having asymmetric, but comparable, power to an army. So guilds or organizations full of such people with the time to go dragon-farming (at the risk that involves) are...unlikely. At least by default.

By Tier 4 you're basically unique.

By 17th level, characters have superheroic capabilities, and their deeds and adventures are the stuff of legend. Ordinary people can hardly dream of such heights of power--or such terrible dangers.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that 3e's power scales are still in effect. People don't gain levels by simply living. In fact, non-adventurers don't gain levels--they don't use the class/level paradigm at all. The number of "high-power" NPCs out there is entirely a choice made by the world-builder. And the default (based on adventures and other writings) is that you have an exponential fall-off of power levels. Healing potions are common, but fireball is not. And wish (or other 9th level spells) are legends.

As a note about dragons, the DMG mentions the following:

Tier 1: "if they face even a young dragon, they're better off avoiding the fight."
Tier 2: "They might have a chance of defeating a young dragon that has established a lair but not yet extended its reach far into the surrounding territory."
Tier 3: "They might encounter and even defeat a powerful adult dragon that has established a lair and a significant presence in the world."
Tier 4: "The dragons they encounter are wyrms of tremendous power, whose sleep troubles kingdoms and whose waking threatens existence itself."

You can question whether those statements are born out in play (in my experience adventurers punch above their weight class pretty considerably, but note that the DMG assumes no multi-classing and few magic items and little optimization, unlike these forums), but the default expectation is that dragons are rare. If T3 characters (who are "Masters of the Realm") might encounter and even defeat an established adult, you're not looking at a farm operation even being remotely possible.

The game expects even the weakest Adult dragons to be on the same scale as a Beholder, and the strongest on the scale of a Death Knight (the example of which is Lord Soth). The weakest Ancient dragons are on the scale of a Pit Fiend, the strongest are only out-CR'd by the Tarrasque. It does not expect these to be trivial foes.


In my setting, there is exactly one person in the main play area capable of 9th level spells, an ancient archmage who is more interested in his nubile "apprentices" (he's a dirty old elf) than in magic. The next appreciable levels are those casting 6ths--one or two of those per nation. One of the national leaders is a ~3rd-level-equivalent bard. He's in charge not because of his personal power, but because he's ageless (not immortal, just doesn't age) and has dirt on everyone. Oh, and his friend and co-ruler is one of maybe 50 adult dragons on the continent. There are maybe 3-5 ancients on the continent, total.

98% don't go above level 4-equivalent; 84% never go above level 2-equivalent, and 56% never get more than cantrip-level power. Levels 11+ make up 1/1000% of the population, of all "classes" combined. And those are heavily concentrated at level 11-equivalent. The highest (former) adventurers I know of got to level 11.

The Jack
2019-03-14, 07:36 AM
Thing is though you do get your regular veterans, knights, champions, mages, archmages plus whatever monsters you can get on your side (be it the highly specialized helmed horrors, the demon you summon or that crazy cr villain that just wants to kill dragons)


Sure, not everybody gets class levels, but regular knights are at least worth a 5th level fighter, and an npc wizard who can cast a 4th level slot can conjure a greater demon that'll do about half the battle on it's own (Not to mention they have pretty good resistances and immunities for many dragons)

I think NPCS can clearly have a good shot at killing dragons.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-14, 07:41 AM
Thing is though you do get your regular veterans, knights, champions, mages, archmages plus whatever monsters you can get on your side (be it the highly specialized helmed horrors, the demon you summon or that crazy cr villain that just wants to kill dragons)


Sure, not everybody gets class levels, but regular knights are at least worth a 5th level fighter, and an npc wizard who can cast a 4th level slot can conjure a greater demon that'll do about half the battle on it's own (Not to mention they have pretty good resistances and immunities for many dragons)

I think NPCS can clearly have a good shot at killing dragons.

But there just aren't that many dragons out there to kill. Not in standard worlds, anyway. So where are you finding the thousands you'd need to just outfit a single small army, let alone the entire world?

And there aren't that many casters who can do 4+th level spells, let alone those who are evil/stupid enough to conjure a demon. And knights will get toasted by a dragon (pun intended). You're looking at needing an army to kill a garden-variety adult if the adult is stupid.

Keltest
2019-03-14, 07:41 AM
Thing is though you do get your regular veterans, knights, champions, mages, archmages plus whatever monsters you can get on your side (be it the highly specialized helmed horrors, the demon you summon or that crazy cr villain that just wants to kill dragons)


Sure, not everybody gets class levels, but regular knights are at least worth a 5th level fighter, and an npc wizard who can cast a 4th level slot can conjure a greater demon that'll do about half the battle on it's own (Not to mention they have pretty good resistances and immunities for many dragons)

I think NPCS can clearly have a good shot at killing dragons.

I mean, they could zerg rush it. With 200 archers, enough arrows will eventually get through if the dragon sits there and takes it. Meanwhile, the knights are getting slaughtered in droves. Youre sacrificing the fighting elite and your core shock troops to this thing just to get a couple suits of armor that, by themselves really aren't that much better than plate.

The only reason to engage a dragon like that is if its threatening you and you have no alternative. Definitely not because you want to skin it and wear it.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-14, 08:11 AM
it is simple: they say that in any city or thorp you can find one individual of each class having a given level(and they write the recipice for getting the level of that individual)
And they define the kind of city by the number of people within it.

Sigh, do you not get that you are running the causality in both directions in your example?
"getting a city with enough humanoids spontaneously creates at least 3 full-casters with a level of 17 or more" -- the city of certain population creates the leveled individuals.
"and create more thorps to produce more people by spontaneous 'one of each class from the list genesis'" -- the leveled individuals create the populace.
Even when we accept the Tippy-like logic of the rule book stating the state of the world and backstrapolating physical laws (like spontaneous generation of persons) making the state of being proscriptive rather than descriptive, the idea that there is a two-way causality is a possible, but unrequired, additional absurdity.

The Jack
2019-03-14, 08:15 AM
But there just aren't that many dragons out there to kill. Not in standard worlds, anyway. So where are you finding the thousands you'd need to just outfit a single small army, let alone the entire world?

And there aren't that many casters who can do 4+th level spells, let alone those who are evil/stupid enough to conjure a demon. And knights will get toasted by a dragon (pun intended). You're looking at needing an army to kill a garden-variety adult if the adult is stupid.

There seems to be a lot of forgetting that dragons are big.

A knight is less likely to be toasted than a 5th level fighter. Slightly bigger health pool, advantage against frightened and leadership are solid advantages. And knights aren't too hard to get a hold of. You know the CR's supposed to be for four adventurers? Well I think knights are good enough for young dragons, and given their relative cheapness I think you could put them in parties big enough to kill dragons safely.
Plus ain't that what knights do? Slay dragons.

Summon Greater demon's a amazing spell for smart people with no problems if you use it cleverly. Any naysayers don't know how to wizard.


Helmed horrors are absolutely perfect for green dragons and shadow dragons and would do well against most others. Maybe they could win against young dragons on their own?
Also, a single high CR NPC could just kill dragons on their own and lead others to make it easier.




But I think a big thing that people like you are ignoring is that, in most settings, nobody goes to the PCS spouting 'WOW, You're the guys with the class levels of legend, please fix every problem we can't do ourselves. Of course not (I mean you can tounge'n cheek that, but that's when you're not taking the world seriously)

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-14, 08:59 AM
There seems to be a lot of forgetting that dragons are big.

A knight is less likely to be toasted than a 5th level fighter. Slightly bigger health pool, advantage against frightened and leadership are solid advantages. And knights aren't too hard to get a hold of. You know the CR's supposed to be for four adventurers? Well I think knights are good enough for young dragons, and given their relative cheapness I think you could put them in parties big enough to kill dragons safely.
Plus ain't that what knights do? Slay dragons.

Summon Greater demon's a amazing spell for smart people with no problems if you use it cleverly. Any naysayers don't know how to wizard.


Helmed horrors are absolutely perfect for green dragons and shadow dragons and would do well against most others. Maybe they could win against young dragons on their own?
Also, a single high CR NPC could just kill dragons on their own and lead others to make it easier.




But I think a big thing that people like you are ignoring is that, in most settings, nobody goes to the PCS spouting 'WOW, You're the guys with the class levels of legend, please fix every problem we can't do ourselves. Of course not (I mean you can tounge'n cheek that, but that's when you're not taking the world seriously)

No, a CR 3 Knight is not going to slay a dragon. Not even a young one. A young black is CR 7 and is likely to one-round kill a knight (average DPR 60, knight HP 52). And the knight doesn't have nearly the firepower to take it out when it flies away and waits for its breath to recharge. An adult will toast whole ranks of them at a time.

And knights are not common--a nation might have a few hundred or maybe a thousand...total. And most of those would have other jobs.

You seem to assume that the dragon will just sit there and slug it out. That's what I mean by assuming that the dragons are stupid. The knights will likely not even get close to the dragon.

Plus the fatal flaw that there just aren't that many dragons around. You seem to assume that they're growing on trees. They're not. Adults are legendary for goodness sake.

Pleh
2019-03-14, 12:50 PM
I mean, they could zerg rush it. With 200 archers, enough arrows will eventually get through if the dragon sits there and takes it.

Don't forget this is more or less precisely the purpose of lairs. 200 archers each occupy a 5ft space. Encircling the dragon (on a level surface) requires a minimum circumference of 1000ft. My math says the archers will have about 160ft between them and the dragon if they stand more or less shoulder to shoulder, which is just past the normal range for longbow in 5e, so the archers are likely taking a range penalty.

The archers likely don't want to be much closer, since the dragon flies at 80ft per move.

But in the Dragon's lair, all these knights and archers are bottle necked. The dragon's mobility may or may not be inhibited, depending on the lair, but not as much as the npcs. There's no reason for the dragon to fight fair.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-14, 04:45 PM
There seems to be a lot of forgetting that dragons are big.

A knight is less likely to be toasted than a 5th level fighter. Slightly bigger health pool, advantage against frightened and leadership are solid advantages. And knights aren't too hard to get a hold of. You know the CR's supposed to be for four adventurers? Well I think knights are good enough for young dragons, and given their relative cheapness I think you could put them in parties big enough to kill dragons safely.
Plus ain't that what knights do? Slay dragons.

Summon Greater demon's a amazing spell for smart people with no problems if you use it cleverly. Any naysayers don't know how to wizard.


Helmed horrors are absolutely perfect for green dragons and shadow dragons and would do well against most others. Maybe they could win against young dragons on their own?
Also, a single high CR NPC could just kill dragons on their own and lead others to make it easier.




But I think a big thing that people like you are ignoring is that, in most settings, nobody goes to the PCS spouting 'WOW, You're the guys with the class levels of legend, please fix every problem we can't do ourselves. Of course not (I mean you can tounge'n cheek that, but that's when you're not taking the world seriously)

They really aren't as other people have mathed out for you. And dragons have minions as well.

Why do you think kingdoms have access to any Helmed Horrors, let alone enough to use as dragon kill squads? If anything, the dragons are more likely to have Helmed Horrors as they can typically use magic, and certainly have the money to have them built.

You are right there. The PCs aren't the solution to literally everything. And I'd expect any successful kingdom to have defenses against a dragon. But hunting one? That's much much harder. Take Green Dragons for example. You've got helm horrors? Sure, whatever. The dragon can't be tracked, period. It also can see through the eyes of the animals of the forest. It has minions like Giant Spiders, Ettercaps, Yuan-ti, and of course kobolds. Prepare to be ambushed constantly. Prepare for tons of traps to whittle you down. If it can cast spells, it can have teleportation circles set up for guaranteed retreats. Be completely invisible during the fight, or spend days just reading your thoughts so it knows your every trick. It can even summon demons to back it up, or to help with the harassment.

And when it's wounded? It gets to rest and heal, while its minions prevent you from getting anything more then a short rest. Green Dragons are likely the absolute worst to go after, for all that it's the easiest to defend against its breath weapon

The Jack
2019-03-14, 06:07 PM
Don't forget this is more or less precisely the purpose of lairs. 200 archers each occupy a 5ft space. Encircling the dragon (on a level surface) requires a minimum circumference of 1000ft.


They're using ranged weapons. They don't need to encircle. It's favourable but uneccessary. Your maths are built on a false premise.

The Jack
2019-03-14, 06:14 PM
. And dragons have minions as well.
True
Though you can buy a lot of their minions.

hat's much much harder. Take Green Dragons for example. You've got helm horrors? Sure, whatever. The dragon can't be tracked, period. It also can see through the eyes of the animals of the forest. [/quote] which edition is this and isn't this an ancient thing?



Prepare to be ambushed constantly. Prepare for tons of traps to whittle you down. If it can cast spells, it can have teleportation circles set up for guaranteed retreats. Be completely invisible during the fight, or spend days just reading your thoughts so it knows your every trick.

The Vice versa is hardly less of a deal.



And when it's wounded? It gets to rest and heal, while its minions prevent you from getting anything more then a short rest. Green Dragons are likely the absolute worst to go after, for all that it's the easiest to defend against its breath weapon

You know, I was thinking whites might be the worst. If they weren't dumb, they'd be unbeatable. Sure, they're not as strong as the others, but they've got mad moves.



Other strategies
Poison the dragon's meat.



But, thing is, if a chromatic dragon sets up shop near you, you can attack or you can defend or perhaps set up some terrible diplomatic solution (or leave). Attacking is going to be better than waiting. Just kill and kill and then kill again.

Gnoman
2019-03-14, 06:26 PM
They're using ranged weapons. They don't need to encircle. It's favourable but uneccessary. Your maths are built on a false premise.

It is not easy to build a lair where it is impossible for 200 men to get into longbow range with enough room to fight.


It is trivial, to the extent that it will almost always happen by complete accident. Unless the dragon is incredibly stupid, you don't have "200 archers pincushion the dragon", you have "200 archers get broken up into smaller groups by terrain and easily slaughtered by the dragon."

Sure, you could eventually take the dragon down by sacrificing enough archers to this. However, you know what is much easier for large numbers of archers to kill? Lords that send their men to die in droves so his men can get a minor tactical advantage.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-14, 08:04 PM
True
Though you can buy a lot of their minions.

which edition is this and isn't this an ancient thing?


The Vice versa is hardly less of a deal.



You know, I was thinking whites might be the worst. If they weren't dumb, they'd be unbeatable. Sure, they're not as strong as the others, but they've got mad moves.



Other strategies
Poison the dragon's meat.



But, thing is, if a chromatic dragon sets up shop near you, you can attack or you can defend or perhaps set up some terrible diplomatic solution (or leave). Attacking is going to be better than waiting. Just kill and kill and then kill again.

Buy their minions? That's unlikely, considering most of them are savages or monsters. Lots of money isn't going to be really that impressive to them if they can't actually spend it or if you can't comprehend wealth. Not when it means betraying a terrifying dragon.

Going by your last few posts, I've been using 5E, and not really. It just says 'legendary', so I think it would kick in as soon as they can do legendary actions, IE Adult.

Pretty much.

My attitude towards dragons is that they should always been the absolute hardest thing in the game to fight. They are smarter than you, stronger than you, more experienced than you, and know every inch of their territory. Killing a dragon isn't a single encounter, it's a campaign in of itself.

They can either just cure the poison, or more likely just ignore it. 5E ingested poisons would almost certainly be saved by the dragon, so it would take negligible damage. Even more likely though? You couldn't poison their meat to begin with, because they are hunting down live things to eat fresh. What are you going to do, poison every quadruped in the region? Not that it would work, because the dragons are also smart enough to find a bunch of dead meat as really suspicious and not just scarf it down. Except maybe White Dragons.

Bacon Elemental
2019-03-14, 08:46 PM
If we have a dragon lair be, say 50 ft across, your 200 archers can stand 10 abreast but have to stand 20 deep in formation (100 foot long). That means the frontmost archers have to be within 50 foot of the dragon before the rearmost archers are outside of long range. If the archers have to come through a corridor that is, say, 20 foot (comfortably spacious for even an adult dragon) wide then the rear archers are an impressive 250 foot behind the front line, who are suddenly realising that dragons are big and scary

Bohandas
2019-03-15, 01:32 AM
Your view is skewed - because you've played PC's, and your GM has let you fight dragons and win, you think that is something that really happens.

In the real imaginary world, adventurers go to dragons lairs and die. Dragons win. Eat adventurers. Drive up the price of platemail, too. There are no 'dead adult dragons' to loot. But if you manage to kill one, you get a lot of antique suits of armor, as well as - possibly - a set of dragon armor.

And why only one? Well, you did cut up the best parts of the skin to kill the dragon, after all.


I can't imagine dragons would be too happy about you wearing their skin. And an angry dragon can be very difficult to deal with...

This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for most dragonhide merchandise to be made by a dragon who is basically the Ed Gein of dragons

Kaptin Keen
2019-03-15, 02:15 AM
This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for most dragonhide merchandise to be made by a dragon who is basically the Ed Gein of dragons

Yea, on that note ...... dragons moult, right? I frankly cannot imagine they give much of a damn about their skin.

Of course moulting or not isn't really part of the rules - but I assume they do, because it's cool. I guess they shed their skin each time they go up an age or size category ... and eat their old skin, because it's helps thicken and strengthen the new one. So it's not so much 'you're wearing the skin of my cousin - DIEE!!!' but more like 'you've made clothes from my dietary supplement .... DIEE!!!!'

hamishspence
2019-03-15, 02:33 AM
It may be a case of "shed individual scales" rather than "shed large amounts of skin at a time, like a lizard or a snake."

On that note - snakeskin isn't made from moulted snake skins, but from snake hide. The layer that is shed, is way too thin to make footwear or bags from.

Same may apply to dragons - moulted material is too thin to be useful.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-15, 02:35 AM
Yea, on that note ...... dragons moult, right? I frankly cannot imagine they give much of a damn about their skin.

Of course moulting or not isn't really part of the rules - but I assume they do, because it's cool. I guess they shed their skin each time they go up an age or size category ... and eat their old skin, because it's helps thicken and strengthen the new one. So it's not so much 'you're wearing the skin of my cousin - DIEE!!!' but more like 'you've made clothes from my dietary supplement .... DIEE!!!!'

They moult sure. But those leftovers would be pretty useless. It's the outermost, dead layer of scales after all. Like how dead skin has nothing in durability compared to your living skin.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-15, 07:27 AM
Yea, on that note ...... dragons moult, right?
...
Of course moulting or not isn't really part of the rules - but I assume they do, because it's cool.

Honestly, I think that's an open question. I mean, they are lizardddddsss...ish things, so one would assume so. OTOH, Dragons from Smaug on through to D&D are often described as having gems and coins permanently lodged in their scales from lying on their treasure mounds, something that makes less sense if they are continuously sloughing off scales. I'm guessing the 3e Draconomicon, and maybe even 2e (with the rather extensive descriptions of the Monster Manual/Monstrous Compendium entries) will have an actual answer on such questions, but maybe not.

hamishspence
2019-03-15, 07:33 AM
Maybe dragons are egg-laying mammals, like 4e Dragonborn?

In which case, the scales wouldn't be like lizard scales - they might be more like pangolin scales - modified hairs.

Hairy-looking dragons have a certain amount of precedent - Flame, from Dungeon Magazine, had a hairy crest:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Dungeon_Magazine_Cover.jpg

Morgaln
2019-03-15, 08:23 AM
If we have a dragon lair be, say 50 ft across, your 200 archers can stand 10 abreast but have to stand 20 deep in formation (100 foot long). That means the frontmost archers have to be within 50 foot of the dragon before the rearmost archers are outside of long range. If the archers have to come through a corridor that is, say, 20 foot (comfortably spacious for even an adult dragon) wide then the rear archers are an impressive 250 foot behind the front line, who are suddenly realising that dragons are big and scary

Not to mention that this puts the archers in a very comfortable position for the dragon's breath weapon. And it's unlikely those 200 archers will be stealthy enough to surprise the dragon in its lair.

awa
2019-03-15, 08:43 AM
d&d does not function well when you push out of its assumed range of design. Conventional armies on an open field also fall apart because of the hyper deadly nature of massed archers. Of course even with d&ds extremely generous rules on archery a dragons that felt threatened by archers could primarily fly around at night and make lairs with lots of turns in their corridors to inhibit mass fire.

halfeye
2019-03-15, 11:50 AM
Yea, on that note ...... dragons moult, right? I frankly cannot imagine they give much of a damn about their skin.

When snakes moult, they keep the scales they had, which are under their skin.

Rater202
2019-03-15, 01:34 PM
Dragonhide armor is explicitly dragon hide.

It's not just the scales, it's the whole skin.

Quertus
2019-03-15, 04:16 PM
Dragonhide armor is explicitly dragon hide.

It's not just the scales, it's the whole skin.

Cool, that's what I figured. Just... What system? What edition? And citation please.

Rater202
2019-03-16, 01:03 AM
Cool, that's what I figured. Just... What system? What edition? And citation please.

Well, for one the fact that it's called "dragonhide," not "dragonscale" is a tipoff:smalltongue:

In the 3e SRD, dragonhide is said to be made by working the hide of dragons, and a hide is much more than just the surface layer of skin that would be the scales.

It also goes on to say that dragonhide can only be made into hide armor, banded mail, breastplates, and full plate. (And shields,) that for some reason a breastplate takes as much material to make as a full plate(despite literally being just a breastplate, a helmet, and grieves and thus significantly less armor)

And that Dragonhide armor is, mechanically, identical to normal Masterwork armor of that variety(save that druids can wear the mail since it's not metal) but costs twice as much.

Which would, in 3rd edition at least, explain why it's not ridiculously common. If we assume that the additional cost is the cost of the labor needed to get dragon scale and/or additional work needed to work it into armor, then you're doing more work or paying more money for something that isn't any better than a much cheaper option--sometimes it's worse than the cheaper option, depending on what you're making.

Basically, practically speaking Dragonhide armor is only valuable if a Druid wants or needs armor heavier than regular hide armor.

Otherwise, it's purely a vanity item--you get it because it's cool, or as a trophy.

Pleh
2019-03-16, 05:55 AM
They're using ranged weapons. They don't need to encircle. It's favourable but uneccessary. Your maths are built on a false premise.

My "maths" were designed to show that the optimal strategy would be a dubious affair at best. And the Dragon has no motive to allow his attackers their optimal strategy. The further they get from optimal, the less likely they are to succeed. Once they're in the lair, encircling isn't unnecessary, it's probably impossible. It's unlikely they'll get to fire many shots at the dragon as he'll have total cover until they're in the kill zone.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-17, 01:40 AM
I mean, they could zerg rush it. With 200 archers, enough arrows will eventually get through if the dragon sits there and takes it.
Bounded accuracy and whatnot make hunting monsters with armies more viable than ever.



No, a CR 3 Knight is not going to slay a dragon. Not even a young one. A young black is CR 7 and is likely to one-round kill a knight (average DPR 60, knight HP 52).
I count 41 average damage, if it hits with all three attacks. Since its attacks are at +7 (see again bounded accuracy), and the knight probably has a AC in the 16-18 range (chain to platemail, higher if he had a shield), the actual DPR is going to be around 20. That's two and a half rounds, or ~20 seconds, to kill a knight. On average. Meanwhile, if the knight has a +5 attack bonus and averages around 7.5 damage per hit (as e.g. a 1st-level fighter with a Strength of 15 using a longsword would, so this is admittedly a low estimate since I don't have the book with me), the knight would have a 40% chance to hit, for an average DPR of 3 and an average time-to-kill of just over four minutes.
The conclusion doesn't significantly change (even if we add a few levels and a shield), but the math was flawed enough for me to correct regardless. Though I'd like to point out two important points.
1. Heavy casualties are typical of martial action. True, wars usually aren't fought over a single suit of fancy armor, but...
2. I imagine any king wanting to own a suit of dragonscale mail could probably finance his expedition off the dragon's hoard.
Fighting a dragon in a duel is foolish. Fighting a dragon in a war might be profitable, depending on the size of your army, the size of the dragon's hoard, and environmental factors. Speaking of which...



They're using ranged weapons. They don't need to encircle. It's favourable but uneccessary. Your maths are built on a false premise.
His logic sucks, but his conclusion is...arguably accurate. You can't fit 200 archers in a dragon's lair.
The real flaw with his premise is the idea that the army would need to march into the dragon's lair to fight it. Most D&D settings don't have Amazon or Netflix, so the dragon has to leave its lair sometimes. A wise dragon-hunter learns where its quarry likes to hunt, patrol, or heckle local athletes and finds a location for a good ambush somewhere in its typical stomping grounds. It's a bit tricky to ambush someone with a small army, but it's been done—and against people who knew the army was somewhere out there, because they were at war.
Conan will never slay a dragon, but Sun Tzu could.



d&d does not function well when you push out of its assumed range of design. Conventional armies on an open field also fall apart because of the hyper deadly nature of massed archers. Of course even with d&ds extremely generous rules on archery a dragons that felt threatened by archers could primarily fly around at night and make lairs with lots of turns in their corridors to inhibit mass fire.
Which would absolutely complicate things, but it wouldn't make things impossible. Night-time archery has been done IRL, no darkvision or magical light needed.
If a dragon knows hunters are likely to target it, they engage in defensive/elusive behavior to avoid said hunters. At that point, it's a game of cat-and-mouse, where the mouse is the size of a house and the cat is an entire army.




Thing is though you do get your regular veterans, knights, champions, mages, archmages plus whatever monsters you can get on your side. Sure, not everybody gets class levels, but regular knights are at least worth a 5th level fighter, and an npc wizard who can cast a 4th level slot can conjure a greater demon that'll do about half the battle on it's own (Not to mention they have pretty good resistances and immunities for many dragons).
...which is why I think "NPCs don't have PC classes" is one of 5e's mistakes. Leaving aside how it makes making custom NPCs more difficult, it doesn't make sense without some kind of in-world distinction between a 5th-level classed wizard and a non-class mage who prepares 3rd-level wizard spells.



It may be a case of "shed individual scales" rather than "shed large amounts of skin at a time, like a lizard or a snake."
On that note - snakeskin isn't made from moulted snake skins, but from snake hide. The layer that is shed, is way too thin to make footwear or bags from.
Same may apply to dragons - moulted material is too thin to be useful.
I'm not familiar with modern D&D lore (shameful, I know), but most descriptions of dragonhide I've seen attribute the strength of dragonhide to their impenetrable scales. You probably couldn't make conventional dragonhide armor out of it, but you could make something from that.

hamishspence
2019-03-17, 05:40 AM
4e metallic dragon scales contain actual metal, which contributes to their hardness. After the dragon dies though, the skin isn't significantly tougher than that of a chromatic dragon.

A point is also made (in 4e Draconomicon Part 1) that while it's possible to use dragon scales in scale mail armour, the scales don't last - only a few weeks before they become useless. Magic armour can be dragonscale (the magic preserving the scales?) but not mundane armour - not if you want it to last any length of time, that is.

TIPOT
2019-03-17, 05:53 AM
Trying to farm or murder dragons en-mass sounds basically exactly like the only thing that would get all the dragons to band up and work together. Like one or two unique suits would be annoying for them, thousands would be cause to get a whole flight together to torch that kingdom to the ground. It'd be something you'd hear about - like that desert used to be a fertile land, until the week of boiling breathe.

noob
2019-03-17, 04:24 PM
Trying to farm or murder dragons en-mass sounds basically exactly like the only thing that would get all the dragons to band up and work together. Like one or two unique suits would be annoying for them, thousands would be cause to get a whole flight together to torch that kingdom to the ground. It'd be something you'd hear about - like that desert used to be a fertile land, until the week of boiling breathe.

or it throws so many traumatized people into epic levels that the kingdom is then known as the kingdom full of insane epic casters that then destroys half of the planet.(depending on the way they manage the invasion)
Then afterwards the demilich reagents industry gets richer as it does each time a whole lot of people at once becomes insane and reach epic levels.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-17, 05:24 PM
or it throws so many traumatized people into epic levels that the kingdom is then known as the kingdom full of insane epic casters that then destroys half of the planet.(depending on the way they manage the invasion)
Then afterwards the demilich reagents industry gets richer as it does each time a whole lot of people at once becomes insane and reach epic levels.
...That's not how PTSD works. Or any psychological ailment, actually; it sounds more like what happened to The Joker than anything.

noob
2019-03-17, 05:48 PM
...That's not how PTSD works. Or any psychological ailment, actually; it sounds more like what happened to The Joker than anything.

It is more that only the murderhobos survived properly because they were the one that had enough power to survive the first few dragons and gain levels from that and thus get stronger and beat more dragons and so on.
Also in a fictional world with cartoon villains someone going insane the same way as a comic book character is not that much weird.

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-17, 10:05 PM
It is more that only the murderhobos survived properly because they were the one that had enough power to survive the first few dragons and gain levels from that and thus get stronger and beat more dragons and so on.
Power level is not correlated with psychopathy, not even in RPGs. It's entirely possible for non-murderhobos to find ways to gain XP...especially if there's a state-sponsored monster-slaying program. By your logic, kingdoms not finding ways to encourage law-abiding citizens to slay monsters would result in an imbalance of high-powered psychopaths, since murderhobos aren't likely to stop murderhoboing just because nobody's giving them legitimate targets.


Also in a fictional world with cartoon villains someone going insane the same way as a comic book character is not that much weird.
That doesn't mean you can use "Anyone using their military for that kind of thing is going to have a bunch of cartoon supervillains" as a reason why worlds don't generally use their military for that kind of thing, as though it were a simple fact of human nature. I'd probably accept it if a fantasy comic book said it worked like that in one specific instance in its world, but not if someone said it would be expected to work like that in fantasy worlds, generally.

noob
2019-03-18, 06:06 AM
when you are a murderhobo you consider more easily that fighting stuff is a good way to solve problems and so you get more encounters because if you solve one problem by talking you avoid having further problems while if you solve it with murder then you will get extra problems(and thus more encounters).
So the one going around solving its problems with murder is likely to progress faster because it will have more encounters than a person that talks.
Also I assumed that dragons rushing the kingdom from all the directions would hit the civilians a lot and risk to be not manageable by armies but better survivable by a few strong people that kills dragons with ambushes or whatever and flee when too much big groups for their strength comes.

Keltest
2019-03-18, 06:40 AM
when you are a murderhobo you consider more easily that fighting stuff is a good way to solve problems and so you get more encounters because if you solve one problem by talking you avoid having further problems while if you solve it with murder then you will get extra problems(and thus more encounters).
So the one going around solving its problems with murder is likely to progress faster because it will have more encounters than a person that talks.
Also I assumed that dragons rushing the kingdom from all the directions would hit the civilians a lot and risk to be not manageable by armies but better survivable by a few strong people that kills dragons with ambushes or whatever and flee when too much big groups for their strength comes.

That assumes that non-murderhobos just sit on their laurels waiting for adventure to come to them instead of actively seeking it out. Murderhobos also have a significantly lower life expectancy.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-18, 06:46 AM
In the 3e SRD, dragonhide is said to be made by working the hide of dragons, and a hide is much more than just the surface layer of skin that would be the scales.

It also goes on to say that dragonhide can only be made into hide armor, banded mail, breastplates, and full plate. (And shields,) that for some reason a breastplate takes as much material to make as a full plate(despite literally being just a breastplate, a helmet, and grieves and thus significantly less armor)

Yeah, that made me think that, despite saying it was the dragon hide, scales were an important component and that both breastplate armor and full plate armor needed a pair of cuirass-sized (for front and back) scales. Which, honestly, would look pretty hokey :smalltongue:.

Keltest
2019-03-18, 06:54 AM
Yeah, that made me think that, despite saying it was the dragon hide, scales were an important component and that both breastplate armor and full plate armor needed a pair of cuirass-sized (for front and back) scales. Which, honestly, would look pretty hokey :smalltongue:.

Yeah, I don't think youre going to get much better than Skyrim armor there. I kind of doubt youre going to get a full cuirass out of just two scales no matter how big the dragon is. Its going to be segmented in some way.

The Jack
2019-03-18, 06:59 AM
Let's do some fun with cubes and surface area.
Med: 6
Large:24
Huge:54
Garg:96+

Of course, dragons aren't cubes, but these multiplications should be useful to us when determining surface area. Large is x4, huge is x9, gargantuan is at least x16

(art basically only depicts ancients I've assumed)

If we assume 1 wyrmling, which is medium, offers enough for a full suit of dragon armour (Reasonable assuming no magical excuse, or that the size is all wingspan, which would make dragons very weak. I've kinda assumed wingspan isn't included) Then a young dragon offers 4 suits, an adult 9 and an ancient at least 16.

I'm not sure how you'd want to account for ages between those dragons. Is there a steady increase? Is a dragon big enough to offer 8 suits a young dragon or an adult in stats, or something between?

According to the monster manual, each category has dragon age at.
Wyrmling (5 years or less)
Young (6-100 years)
Adult (101-800 years)

For comparison, a cow takes two years. From what I've read elsewhere, dragons can mate when they're young (though chromatics don't typically care much about their young till they're older)




You could farm young dragons. The CR of young dragons (colour depending) is surmountable by NPCs (who will likely be equipped with the relevant dragon-hide which provides resistances, if the poison doesn't work) and you don't need such a big area for it (food may be a concern) and the NPCs will have all the advantages they want.

Now of course, just because it's doable doesn't make it easy, but making metal armour isn't easy either: Mining is hard, dangerous and often unrewarding. Your land may lack the resources to do it in the first place, and your refinement techniques may not be good. In addition, Dragon armour (in 5e) provides nice advantages that'd be useful on a battlefield where people cast spells.

hamishspence
2019-03-18, 07:26 AM
You could farm young dragons. The CR of young dragons (colour depending) is surmountable by NPCs (who will likely be equipped with the relevant dragon-hide which provides resistances, if the poison doesn't work)

As I recall, Dragonhide only provides resistance (according to 3.5 Draconomicon) for the purpose of how much damage the armour itself takes when exposed to energy. It doesn't actually provide resistance for the wearer unless it's magic rather than mundane.

It also can't normally reproduce until it reaches Young Adult (51, in 3.5).

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 07:42 AM
(Reasonable assuming no magical excuse, or that the size is all wingspan, which would make dragons very weak. I've kinda assumed wingspan isn't included) Then a young dragon offers 4 suits, an adult 9 and an ancient at least 16.



That's not how it works. Remember, the size is how much space it controls, not how much it occupies. And a wyrmling is explicitly only about the size of a small pony or large dog (talking about the body). It's Medium only because of the wings. And only the body would provide usable materials, and much of that would not. Which is only a small fraction of the volume.

You can't simply assume that there's a direct scaling between the size category and the actual physical size of the creature. For example, all the giants are Huge, but they range in height and size tremendously.

I'd say that you might be able to get 1 suit from a young, 2 from an adult (maybe). A wyrmling just doesn't provide enough to do anything meaningful with as far as armor.

As a note: a leather jacket takes something like 45 sq feet of leather. That's about 1 standard cow. A wyrmling is way smaller than a cow in actual body size, more like a sheep. A young dragon is about the size of a cow. But due to the body shape, you're unlikely to get as much hide from a dragon as from a cow. Especially since you have to cut/burn/destroy large patches of it to kill the thing in the first place. Plus, a suit of armor is going to need much more hide than a leather jacket, especially since it's going to have scales on it that make it difficult to work around.

So your assumptions are just totally wrong.

hamishspence
2019-03-18, 07:50 AM
If we assume 1 wyrmling, which is medium, offers enough for a full suit of dragon armour (Reasonable assuming no magical excuse, or that the size is all wingspan, which would make dragons very weak. I've kinda assumed wingspan isn't included) Then a young dragon offers 4 suits, an adult 9 and an ancient at least 16.

In 3.5, you need a Large dragon for 1 medium suit of Hide Armour, a Huge dragon for one medium suit of Banded Mail, a Gargantuan dragon for 1 medium suit of Half-plate, and a Colossal dragon for 1 medium breastplate, or suit of Full Plate:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialMaterials.htm#dragonhide

You also need a Large or larger dragon for a medium shield in addition to the armour.

awa
2019-03-18, 08:17 AM
Ignoring for a second all the many many problems in the various plans for farming dragons, it seems to me that if you somehow managed to pull this off you are probably going to find yourself dealing with some very nasty undead somewhere down the line.

I dont know about you, but when the spectral dragon comes a knocking I dont want to be wearing its skin.

The Jack
2019-03-18, 08:48 AM
In 3.5, you need a Large dragon for 1 medium suit of Hide Armour, a Huge dragon for one medium suit of Banded Mail, a Gargantuan dragon for 1 medium suit of Half-plate, and a Colossal dragon for 1 medium breastplate, or suit of Full Plate:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialMaterials.htm#dragonhide

You also need a Large or larger dragon for a medium shield in addition to the armour.

This is arbitrary, dumb and therefore irrelevant. It's in the same vein as building a suit in monster hunter. -you killed the dragon and now you get two scales and a hide, kill nine more and you can have a suit-. Yeah I think not. We're looking from a world building stance, not a gameplay stance.




RE: spectral dragon;
What're the odds? Like, none.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 08:50 AM
This is arbitrary, dumb and therefore irrelevant.

RE: spectral dragon;
What're the odds? Like, none.

No, as I pointed out, it closely maps the amount of usable leather you'd get from a cow (which is Large). And more complex pieces would need specific sizes/shapes/cuts, which may not be available on smaller creatures. You need large contiguous, undamaged pieces. Which you won't get from a slain smaller dragon.

Rater202
2019-03-18, 08:51 AM
This is arbitrary, dumb and therefore irrelevant. No.

It's not.

It makes perfect sense that only so much of a Dragon's hide can be worked into armor and that there's enough overlap in workable parts that making one suit means there won't be enough left for another suit.

If you're going to the effort to kill a dragon and make armor out of its hide, you're going to go to the effort of not using the crappy-bits fo hide to make the suit. You're only gonna use the best, and once you've made those cuts the rest is useless.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-18, 08:59 AM
it closely maps the amount of usable leather you'd get from a cow (which is Large).

Which, by the way, is one of the reason why leather armor was most likely not a thing widely used in the real world. (Gambeson was easier and cheaper to craft, as practical to wear if not more practical, and as efficient as a protection.)

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 09:00 AM
No.

It's not.

It makes perfect sense that only so much of a Dragon's hide can be worked into armor and that there's enough overlap in workable parts that making one suit means there won't be enough left for another suit.

If you're going to the effort to kill a dragon and make armor out of its hide, you're going to go to the effort of not using the crappy-bits fo hide to make the suit. You're only gonna use the best, and once you've made those cuts the rest is useless.

The sources I saw said that about 25% of a 45 sq ft cow hide is "wasted" (at least if you want large panels). So generally you need more than 1 cow for a leather jacket (which takes about 45 sq ft). Cows have more usable leather than young dragons do (since they're larger and not mostly wings). Plus, there's a lot less damaged hide on a cow. Armor requires more leather than a simple jacket. Thus, you're looking at multiple young dragons for a single suit, assuming similar waste patterns. One Huge dragon for a suit (plus some scraps) seems about right. You might get 1.5 suits out of a Gargantuan dragon--so much proportionally is just not suited for armor (ie the whole tail, which is too tightly curved to make good armor).

Keltest
2019-03-18, 09:06 AM
The sources I saw said that about 25% of a 45 sq ft cow hide is "wasted" (at least if you want large panels). So generally you need more than 1 cow for a leather jacket (which takes about 45 sq ft). Cows have more usable leather than young dragons do (since they're larger and not mostly wings). Plus, there's a lot less damaged hide on a cow. Armor requires more leather than a simple jacket. Thus, you're looking at multiple young dragons for a single suit, assuming similar waste patterns. One Huge dragon for a suit (plus some scraps) seems about right. You might get 1.5 suits out of a Gargantuan dragon--so much proportionally is just not suited for armor (ie the whole tail, which is too tightly curved to make good armor).

And this is, of course, assuming that a young dragon's hide will be all that useful as armor to begin with. Theyre still developing, their scales and hide are almost certainly not going to be as tough as an adult dragon's would be.

ThePlanarDM
2019-03-18, 10:51 AM
Right. Good and evil dragons would probably be a bit miffed at the thought of being turned into suits.

On this note: Id love to see a dragon wearing a studded gnomeskin armor, or a dwarf hair breastplate.

I had a nighthag in my game hold a purse made of dwarf faces. The leather of the faces was sewed together for the bag, while the long beards were woven together to make the shoulder strap. Needless to say, the party's dwarf was not happy.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 11:09 AM
That's not how it works. Remember, the size is how much space it controls, not how much it occupies. And a wyrmling is explicitly only about the size of a small pony or large dog (talking about the body). It's Medium only because of the wings. And only the body would provide usable materials, and much of that would not. Which is only a small fraction of the volume.

You can't simply assume that there's a direct scaling between the size category and the actual physical size of the creature. For example, all the giants are Huge, but they range in height and size tremendously.

I'd say that you might be able to get 1 suit from a young, 2 from an adult (maybe). A wyrmling just doesn't provide enough to do anything meaningful with as far as armor.

As a note: a leather jacket takes something like 45 sq feet of leather. That's about 1 standard cow. A wyrmling is way smaller than a cow in actual body size, more like a sheep. A young dragon is about the size of a cow. But due to the body shape, you're unlikely to get as much hide from a dragon as from a cow. Especially since you have to cut/burn/destroy large patches of it to kill the thing in the first place. Plus, a suit of armor is going to need much more hide than a leather jacket, especially since it's going to have scales on it that make it difficult to work around.

So your assumptions are just totally wrong.

From what I read, it takes two cows on average to get enough quality leather for a jacket, the rest has scars, defects, sores, etc usually.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 11:24 AM
From what I read, it takes two cows on average to get enough quality leather for a jacket, the rest has scars, defects, sores, etc usually.

Sounds about right from what I was reading. There's a reason leather products (real ones) involving large quantities of solid leather are expensive. You can't just stitch one together from scraps, after all. Not without dramatically lessening the value.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-18, 11:45 AM
Sounds about right from what I was reading. There's a reason leather products (real ones) involving large quantities of solid leather are expensive. You can't just stitch one together from scraps, after all. Not without dramatically lessening the value.

That certainly would explain how making a jacket or coat out of something that is the byproduct of beef production can still cost hundreds to a few thousands bucks.

I bet there aren't many dragons (particularly dead ones you have access to) that are free from scars, defects, sores, etc.

Recherché
2019-03-18, 12:06 PM
Even if you don't mind scars on your armor, dragon scales still have a directionality in most depictions. As in the overlap in one direction but not others. When I work with fabrics that have a directionality it regularly takes 1.5 times as much fabric as the equivalent garment made without directional fabrics. It's just because I can't fit pieces as efficiently if I have to worry about direction.

noob
2019-03-18, 12:06 PM
That certainly would explain how making a jacket or coat out of something that is the byproduct of beef production can still cost hundreds to a few thousands bucks.

I bet there aren't many dragons (particularly dead ones you have access to) that are free from scars, defects, sores, etc.

knowing the number of natural attacks and of damage the modern uberchargers gets it is of no surprise that there is barely any matter left from the dragon after it is killed.

JoeJ
2019-03-18, 12:50 PM
Invoking science here, I think we need to start by assuming that a dragon is a sphere with uniform density.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 12:53 PM
Invoking science here, I think we need to start by assuming that a dragon is a sphere with uniform density.

Is it in a vacuum? It needs to be in a vacuum for the approximation to hold.

Why blue? That is the starting point for all physicists, after all (speaking as one). :smallbiggrin:

As a physicist, I find it quite amusing that if you say "spherical cow approximation" to another physicist, they'll know exactly what you're talking about.

Rater202
2019-03-18, 01:48 PM
I mean, if you really wanted to you could probably, if you were very careful about how you cut, make more than one suit of armor out of a dragon--making hide armor out of a dragon bigger than the minimum size, is one way, but it'd probably be something low quality. At bare minimum I'd keep it at full price but drop the masterwork properties, if not decrease the AC bonus or increase the armor penalties from it being a piece of junk, depending on how exactly one goes about it.

Though, as I said, that Dragon Hide Armor isn't common is probably because dragon hide armor costs twice as much as masterwork armor of the same type made of hide or steel.

Adamantine and Mithril are more expensive, but they have actual benefits when you're wearing the armor. Dragonhide armor don't give crap you can't get from mundane armor.

Dragonhide armor is harder to get and more expensive to make without any benefit justifying that cost.

Why have the King send out his elite knights to slay the Red Dragons of Red Dragon Mountain to bring back their hides to make armor to outfit the royal army when it's easier and cheaper to just put the army in normal masterwork armor?

The only people who'd want Dragonhide armor are stupid people who think it's better than it is, dragon-slayers who want a practical trophy, and people who have the coin to spend on expensive novelties and status symbols.

IE: there's no demand for it, and thus no reason to build up a practical supply.

The Jack
2019-03-18, 02:05 PM
Surely when the dragon becomes Huge or Garg there's no need to double up on hide like you would do when making a leather jacket from cowhide?


Look, It has a natural AC even at low levels. What's good enough for it is good enough for you, even when it's a wyrmling. Now, it might be better to double up on wyrmling hide than not, but it's still got +5/6/7 AC from just one layer of hide and scales. This 'but it doesn't work like that for cows' stuff is nonsense.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-18, 02:11 PM
Look, It has a natural AC even at low levels. What's good enough for it is good enough for you, even when it's a wyrmling. Now, it might be better to double up on wyrmling hide than not, but it's still got +5/6/7 AC from just one layer of hide and scales. This 'but it doesn't work like that for cows' stuff is nonsense.

One, no it isn't. Two, what's going on, man?

Why are you getting upset that people are taking this topic seriously? I just went back through this thread and noticed how much you are disliking the fact that people are taking this subject seriously, going through the logical steps, sometimes coming to conclusions different than you are, and you respond in a manner which suggests that they are doing something wrong. Why?

Recherché
2019-03-18, 02:13 PM
This 'but it doesn't work like that for cows' stuff is nonsense.

Cows are one of the only big animals that we skin and make armor and clothing out of in the real world. Thus it's the main starting points to think about how skinning a big animal and making stuff out of it would work. Similar to how mithril doesn't exist in the real world but if there was a debate about mithril swords we'd talk about sword making techniques.

I'm not going to say that you'd get much less usable dragon hide out of a dragon than leather out of a cow. However it's a good starting point when it comes to talking about how much hide it takes to make a relatively small garment.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 02:40 PM
Cows are one of the only big animals that we skin and make armor and clothing out of in the real world. Thus it's the main starting points to think about how skinning a big animal and making stuff out of it would work. Similar to how mithril doesn't exist in the real world but if there was a debate about mithril swords we'd talk about sword making techniques.

I'm not going to say that you'd get much less usable dragon hide out of a dragon than leather out of a cow. However it's a good starting point when it comes to talking about how much hide it takes to make a relatively small garment.

Based on 2 cows for just a waist-length jacket, I'd guess 6 cow-sized dragons for a full suit of armor.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-18, 02:55 PM
Look, It has a natural AC even at low levels. What's good enough for it is good enough for you, even when it's a wyrmling.

No.
That's not how crafting armors from the skin of other animal works, so that's not how it works. At least if you want a realistic approach, which seems to be the initial goal of this thread.

But then, you can rule that in your universe, dragon hide and scale is "absolutely perfect" as to make armors and you can use every single bit of the dragon without any loss, and all part are exactly in the good proportion of what you need to make an armor out of it.

Resileaf
2019-03-18, 02:59 PM
You know what a dragon isn't in the shape of?
A human.

JoeJ
2019-03-18, 03:16 PM
You know what a dragon isn't in the shape of?
A human.

Unless it's used it's Change Shape ability to become a human. Then it is.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 03:18 PM
Unless it's used it's Change Shape ability to become a human. Then it is.

But then the person crafting the "armor" has to force the dragon to put lotion on its skin every day for a while before making the "armor".

:smalleek:

The Jack
2019-03-18, 03:26 PM
One, no it isn't. Two, what's going on, man?

Why are you getting upset that people are taking this topic seriously? I just went back through this thread and noticed how much you are disliking the fact that people are taking this subject seriously, going through the logical steps, sometimes coming to conclusions different than you are, and you respond in a manner which suggests that they are doing something wrong. Why?

I'm not, I'm either writing wrong or some of you are misleading me. I do find the 'in x edition' a little frustrating and the most painful 'well, in YOUR setting you can do that' when I'm just reading straight from the 5e corebooks (with no older stuff)

I've been swayed by many arguments in this thread. But some of them (cows) look faulty to me. Why would you need the layering when the scales are comparable to steel?

Rater202
2019-03-18, 03:28 PM
Similar to how mithril doesn't exist in the real world.


Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dimWhile no substance with all of those properties exists, the "metal" version--a corrosion resistant, silver colored metal that is both lighter and stronger than steel--accurately describes titanium and many alloys thereof.

Wanna discuss Mithril swords, titanium alloys would make for a good starting point.

awa
2019-03-18, 03:30 PM
Why would you assume a perfect transfer of ac from the dragon to you? No edition of d&d that im aware of has the scales be as good as the original ac.

you seem to be working off 5th edition so ill try and use that even though i'm less familiar with it.
So that means the wyrmlings whose full body coverings are less effective than full plate have inferior defense than metal.

At a glance the adult bronze dragon appears to be the lowest Cr dragon with a natural armor better the full plate. Thats CR 15, the purple worm at the same CR is a much dumber and larger monster, with harder natural armor.

Many of the things that make hunting dragons so difficult simply dont apply to a purple worm, so its easier to catch is not capable of cooperative defense, provides more material of superior durability. Though at CR 15 that still an exotic material only the very wealthiest could ever own.

looking back down the list the monster with the nat armor better than full plate and the lowest CR is a
ropers looks like they have much better ac and are only CR 5, honestly dont think we will get better than that.

Recherché
2019-03-18, 03:35 PM
Based on 2 cows for just a waist-length jacket, I'd guess 6 cow-sized dragons for a full suit of armor.

Hmmm so seamstress math time. A relatively fabric efficient jacket like this (https://mccallpattern.mccall.com/m7636) uses about 2 yards of 60" wide fabric. So let's make things simple and say there's 1 yard of fabric equivalent per cow. An average pair of jeans is about 1.5 -2 yards in my experience which is backed up by this (https://store.closetcasepatterns.com/products/ginger-skinny-jeans-pattern) pattern. My experience with making late medieval hose backs this number up with the past pair I made coming in at 1.5 yards. Gloves are half a yard or less. The last time I made medieval boots I ended up using around .75 of a yard of leather. While I have never made a leather helmet my guess is that it would be around .5-1 yards. This gives us a total yardage of 5.25-6.25 yards. With one yard of leather per cow we'd be looking at around 6 cows worth of leather for a simple suit of armor. However that does not translate to 6 cows worth of dragon. The directionally of the scales means that I can use the leather less efficiently and therefore I'd be looking at maybe 7.875-9.365 cows worth of dragon hide. Maybe less because I'd be more willing to accept scarred dragon hide not just the pretty parts and I'd be motivated to use every scrap I had. Maybe a lot more given that the dragon hide has holes it from where adventurers beat up a dragon. But there's my baseline.

This post has been brought to you by a historical seamstress giggling like a maniac about calculating fabric in cow's worths

The Jack
2019-03-18, 03:36 PM
Why would you assume a perfect transfer of ac from the dragon to you? No edition of d&d that im aware of has the scales be as good as the original ac.

you seem to be working off 5th edition so ill try and use that even though i'm less familiar with it.
So that means the wyrmlings whose full body coverings are less effective than full plate have inferior defense than metal.
.

Full plate is solid pieces, dragons have many smaller pieces so it would be better to compare them to... scale, perhaps heavy chain or splint.
Thus they perform favorably in comparison to steel.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 03:36 PM
Wanna discuss Mithril swords, titanium alloys would make for a good starting point.


We've been over that a few times on the iterations of the "real world weapons etc" thread, but the short answer is... no, unfortunately, titanium doesn't make better swords than steel.

For starters, it doesn't hold an edge.

awa
2019-03-18, 03:44 PM
Full plate is solid pieces, dragons have many smaller pieces so it would be better to compare them to... scale, perhaps heavy chain or splint.
Thus they perform favorably in comparison to steel.

those armors have gaps, dragons scales when worn by a dragon does not and its ac would account for that.

The Jack
2019-03-18, 03:45 PM
those armors have gaps, dragons scales when worn by a dragon does not.

Mail or splint do not have more gaps than a dragon would.
Scale is debatable.

awa
2019-03-18, 03:54 PM
read the description scale mail has gauntlets but no head or feet protection

while plate adds heavy boots (leather) and a helmet

so actually since dragons have scales on their feet there better than full plate as well

Resileaf
2019-03-18, 03:57 PM
read the description scale mail has gauntlets but no head or feet protection

while plate adds heavy boots (leather) and a helmet

so actually since dragons have scales on their feet there better than full plate as well

Of course they have scales on their feet. It's the only thing adventurers are able to hit with their swords.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 04:00 PM
Hmmm so seamstress math time. A relatively fabric efficient jacket like this (https://mccallpattern.mccall.com/m7636) uses about 2 yards of 60" wide fabric. So let's make things simple and say there's 1 yard of fabric equivalent per cow. An average pair of jeans is about 1.5 -2 yards in my experience which is backed up by this (https://store.closetcasepatterns.com/products/ginger-skinny-jeans-pattern) pattern. My experience with making late medieval hose backs this number up with the past pair I made coming in at 1.5 yards. Gloves are half a yard or less. The last time I made medieval boots I ended up using around .75 of a yard of leather. While I have never made a leather helmet my guess is that it would be around .5-1 yards. This gives us a total yardage of 5.25-6.25 yards. With one yard of leather per cow we'd be looking at around 6 cows worth of leather for a simple suit of armor. However that does not translate to 6 cows worth of dragon. The directionally of the scales means that I can use the leather less efficiently and therefore I'd be looking at maybe 7.875-9.365 cows worth of dragon hide. Maybe less because I'd be more willing to accept scarred dragon hide not just the pretty parts and I'd be motivated to use every scrap I had. Maybe a lot more given that the dragon hide has holes it from where adventurers beat up a dragon. But there's my baseline.

This post has been brought to you by a historical seamstress giggling like a maniac about calculating fabric in cow's worths

And that reinforces my point -- they'd have to slaughter dragons by the truckload to outfit a significant number of troops with dragon-hide or dragon-scale armor.

(BTW, thank you for the detailed elaboration. It's nice to know I was at least roughly on target.)

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 04:01 PM
And that reinforces my point -- they'd have to slaughter dragons by the truckload to outfit a significant number of troops with dragon-hide or dragon-scale armor.

One truckload of dragons isn't very much, unless you have a very large truck...:smalltongue:
But yeah. Commercialization of dragonscale armor is going to be...difficult.

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-18, 04:13 PM
One truckload of dragons isn't very much, unless you have a very large truck...:smalltongue:
But yeah. Commercialization of dragonscale armor is going to be...difficult.

I work in industrial-level inventory management, and part of that is 53' semi trailers, so I tend to think in very large trucks. :smalltongue:

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-18, 04:19 PM
I work in industrial-level inventory management, and part of that is 53' semi trailers, so I tend to think in very large trucks. :smalltongue:

When you put it that way...:smallamused:

I also guess you could save space by chopping off the wings first--it's not like they have usable hide on them anyway.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-18, 04:25 PM
Let's do some fun with cubes and surface area.
Med: 6
Large:24
Huge:54
Garg:96+

Of course, dragons aren't cubes, but these multiplications should be useful to us when determining surface area. Large is x4, huge is x9, gargantuan is at least x16

(art basically only depicts ancients I've assumed)

If we assume 1 wyrmling, which is medium, offers enough for a full suit of dragon armour (Reasonable assuming no magical excuse, or that the size is all wingspan, which would make dragons very weak. I've kinda assumed wingspan isn't included) Then a young dragon offers 4 suits, an adult 9 and an ancient at least 16.

I'm not sure how you'd want to account for ages between those dragons. Is there a steady increase? Is a dragon big enough to offer 8 suits a young dragon or an adult in stats, or something between?

According to the monster manual, each category has dragon age at.
Wyrmling (5 years or less)
Young (6-100 years)
Adult (101-800 years)

For comparison, a cow takes two years. From what I've read elsewhere, dragons can mate when they're young (though chromatics don't typically care much about their young till they're older)




You could farm young dragons. The CR of young dragons (colour depending) is surmountable by NPCs (who will likely be equipped with the relevant dragon-hide which provides resistances, if the poison doesn't work) and you don't need such a big area for it (food may be a concern) and the NPCs will have all the advantages they want.

Now of course, just because it's doable doesn't make it easy, but making metal armour isn't easy either: Mining is hard, dangerous and often unrewarding. Your land may lack the resources to do it in the first place, and your refinement techniques may not be good. In addition, Dragon armour (in 5e) provides nice advantages that'd be useful on a battlefield where people cast spells.

My goodness, where to begin with this line of thought?

For starters, you don't get a hundred percent recovery ratio. Besides the damage you do in killing the dragon, quite a bit of it is, well useless. Take say the skin around the joints. It'll be nigh impossible to cut it off and get a useful piece of hide that you can sow into a garment. The only part you can really typically use is the torso of an animal. So using me as an example, the amount of armor you could make from me (as a perfectly normal human male) wouldn't be enough to make a T-shirt's worth of armor.


And this is, of course, assuming that a young dragon's hide will be all that useful as armor to begin with. Theyre still developing, their scales and hide are almost certainly not going to be as tough as an adult dragon's would be.

Second is this. Their hide is significantly weaker, and thus simply isn't worth as much. Like, how hard do you really think it is to make plate armor, and why do you think it's easier to go hunting for dragons? Even working on the assumption that armor made from the hide will give you 100% of the same armor as the dragon, which is wrong for multiple reasons, that still means you need to be hunting Adults to just match Plate Armor.

2.5 is that if you aren't working with ideal materials, you likely need to either bring the entire corpse back to be worked on, or bring the expert with you. This is more an inconvenience, and can be worked around, but it plays into the above. Why bother?

Third is, again, these are intelligent beings. Even as a Wrymling they are smarter then the average human (besides Whites). They are perfectly capable of recognizing a hunting party and just flying away before the fight even begins. Killing a Wrymling might not be very dangerous for a well equipped party, but it's still a big pain to actually track one down and trap it.



Look, It has a natural AC even at low levels. What's good enough for it is good enough for you, even when it's a wyrmling. Now, it might be better to double up on wyrmling hide than not, but it's still got +5/6/7 AC from just one layer of hide and scales. This 'but it doesn't work like that for cows' stuff is nonsense.

What I know is that you are weirdly attached to this idea. There are both realistic and fantastic reasons on why mass hunting of dragons is a bad idea and doesn't make sense.

Rater202
2019-03-18, 06:04 PM
We've been over that a few times on the iterations of the "real world weapons etc" thread, but the short answer is... no, unfortunately, titanium doesn't make better swords than steel.

For starters, it doesn't hold an edge.

Maybe not, but Steel-Alloys with Titanium alloyed into it on the other hand... There's no strict given limit on how much lighter or stronger it has to be than regular steel. Maybe some titanium chips folded into the steel as it's being forged or a shell of one metal around a core of the other

(Honestly, though, I think a Light Bludgeon of some kind would be the ideal way or making a weapon out of Titanium based alloys, though.)

Honestly, the highest qualities of steel would be better than the highest qualities of titanium, but I seriously doubt that a medieval setting could make steel or titanium in the highest qualities on a reliable basis.

That aside, I don't think there's much more to say on the topic at hand: Making things out of hide, leather, or other forms of animal skin takes a lot of hide and you can't Frankenstein it together from too many animals, you need it to be at least a certain level of quality or it won't work out so well and not every bit of an animal is that quality and Dragonhide is a pain in the ass to get and not in any way better than much cheaper armors.

All of that together means that outside of people who are both Druids and fabulously wealthy, the only people who are gonna want Dragonhide armor are Dragonslayers making a trophy out of their kills and rich jerks wanting an expensive status symbol and not caring that there's a non-zero chance that someone died to get the materials needed to make their fancy new clothes.

DaOldeWolf
2019-03-18, 10:34 PM
I am kinda creeped out by this topic. Mass killing of sentient creatures for their skin sounds really disgusting especially when there are complains about how not enough it is gained in the process. :smalleek: I doubt that dragons would simply allow the extinction of their race. I doubt every other sentient creature in a world would simply allow such massacre. If the setting includes a dragon deity, I dont think they would just watch and see their creations be slaughtered. I dont see how this creepy idea would work by any metric of the word.

Putting my feelings aside, the plan wouldnt work. There is too many variables involved even if you expect the rest of the world to just watch.

For such a plan to work the following would be needed:
1. Healthy dragons with a body in perfect conditions that could be easily taken down without harming the body.

2. A group of powerful individuals that could track down such creatures with relatively small cost and capable enough to defeat any and all dragons that you need without circumstance or luck getting in the way.

3. Find a cost effective transportation method to transport the body of the dragon without damaging it on the process.

4. Find a group of people with talent and time with the right equipment to create the dragon armors. You also need a space and a system of work.

5. The money, luck and influence to manage the whole thing.

And I would be surprised if anyone though that it would be really easy to set all of this up and expect it to work smoothly.

Good thing, humanoid races are not used for the materials in the creation of armor. At least, I hope so.

Quertus
2019-03-19, 01:15 AM
So, for the much more efficient regeneration techniques...


Trying to farm or murder dragons en-mass sounds basically exactly like the only thing that would get all the dragons to band up and work together. Like one or two unique suits would be annoying for them, thousands would be cause to get a whole flight together to torch that kingdom to the ground. It'd be something you'd hear about - like that desert used to be a fertile land, until the week of boiling breathe.

Yes, one of the advantages of the plan is that, if I'm lucky, my XP comes to me, rather than me having to hunt it down.

Better yet if it's wealthy adventures bringing me loot and XP.


Ignoring for a second all the many many problems in the various plans for farming dragons, it seems to me that if you somehow managed to pull this off you are probably going to find yourself dealing with some very nasty undead somewhere down the line.

I dont know about you, but when the spectral dragon comes a knocking I dont want to be wearing its skin.

I mean, what's better than dominating the Dragon, body, mind, and spirit?

Please, send me undead to enthrall.


bet there aren't many dragons (particularly dead ones you have access to) that are free from scars, defects, sores, etc.

Just my regenerated ones. :smallwink:


knowing the number of natural attacks and of damage the modern uberchargers gets it is of no surprise that there is barely any matter left from the dragon after it is killed.

I'd think that "one attack for all your health" would be one of the best ways to have maximum Dragon hide intact.


Dragonhide armor is harder to get and more expensive to make without any benefit justifying that cost.

Why have the King send out his elite knights to slay the Red Dragons of Red Dragon Mountain to bring back their hides to make armor to outfit the royal army when it's easier and cheaper to just put the army in normal masterwork armor?

The only people who'd want Dragonhide armor are stupid people who think it's better than it is, dragon-slayers who want a practical trophy, and people who have the coin to spend on expensive novelties and status symbols.

You have forgotten my clever plan to return to the better days of 2e, where Dragon hide was better.


Why would you assume a perfect transfer of ac from the dragon to you? No edition of d&d that im aware of has the scales be as good as the original ac.

In 2e, it was 4 worse than the AC of the Dragon "donor". Which, if you enchanted it to +5, meant it was 1 better than the AC of the donor.


I am kinda creeped out by this topic. Mass killing of sentient creatures for their skin sounds really disgusting especially when there are complains about how not enough it is gained in the process. :smalleek: If the setting includes a dragon deity, I dont think they would just watch and see their creations be slaughtered.

Sure, it's creepy. But I'm looking forward to wearing Tiamat armor if she interferes. :smallwink:

Forum Explorer
2019-03-19, 01:26 AM
So, for the much more efficient regeneration techniques...


Somewhere along the line the edition changed to 5e, where you can't do it to a captive dragon. You can turn into a dragon and do it to yourself, but again, why would you do that? And you can't turn back and will lose your most powerful spells.

The Jack
2019-03-19, 04:11 AM
I am kinda creeped out by this topic. Mass killing of sentient creatures for their skin sounds really disgusting especially when there are complains about how not enough it is gained in the process.

Most of them are objectively evil tyrants who want to destroy your homes and horde your gold so that they can sleep on it.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-19, 04:32 AM
Most of them are objectively evil tyrants who want to destroy your homes and horde your gold so that they can sleep on it.

That is an assumption not supported by any edition of DnD whatsoever. DnD often says that its a world of adventure and conflict, but never says that evil outnumbers good. that is something people assume for conflict purposes then conveniently ignore the implications of it so that they can have more encounters to fight.

At least half the known species of dragons are outright good, therefore at least half the dragons in the world are good. there is no canonical assertion or explanation for why evil dragons would be more numerous.

therefore we can safely assume reality: selflessness is actually more beneficial in the long term to survival than selfishness. selfishness is only beneficial to survival in the short term. why? because a person who makes friends is soon surrounded by allies while a selfish person who consistently does acts to tick people off soon finds themselves outnumbered.

therefore it is actually more likely that good dragons are more numerous than evil ones.

Keltest
2019-03-19, 07:23 AM
That is an assumption not supported by any edition of DnD whatsoever. DnD often says that its a world of adventure and conflict, but never says that evil outnumbers good. that is something people assume for conflict purposes then conveniently ignore the implications of it so that they can have more encounters to fight.

At least half the known species of dragons are outright good, therefore at least half the dragons in the world are good. there is no canonical assertion or explanation for why evil dragons would be more numerous.

therefore we can safely assume reality: selflessness is actually more beneficial in the long term to survival than selfishness. selfishness is only beneficial to survival in the short term. why? because a person who makes friends is soon surrounded by allies while a selfish person who consistently does acts to tick people off soon finds themselves outnumbered.

therefore it is actually more likely that good dragons are more numerous than evil ones.

To say nothing of the fact that "theyre evil, therefore its ok to torture and exploit them" is still a morally indefensible position.

The Jack
2019-03-19, 07:30 AM
To say nothing of the fact that "theyre evil, therefore its ok to torture and exploit them" is still a morally indefensible position.

You say that, but most settings have civs with a lot of kill-on-sight rationales for a lot of creatures and they're still thought of as largely good. If you let that red dragon live, she's going to hurt a lot of people.


And no, it's not an indefensible position. People have often justified atrocity and convinced others it was morally justifiable. Cue a thousand real world examples that we can't talk about here. But the fact is that if people can justify the institutional harm of others, what chance do monstrous dragons have?

PhoenixPhyre
2019-03-19, 07:32 AM
To say nothing of the fact that "theyre evil, therefore its ok to torture and exploit them" is still a morally indefensible position.

Yeah. Killing them when they encroach (or even more proactive measures) may be appropriate, but farming them for their skins, especially using the frankly stomach-turning means suggested earlier (the name of the spell mindrape should give away the fact that it's not a good thing to do, not to mention the "regenerate so we can skin it over and over"), is morally wrong by any sane standard.

Edit: @The Jack--

Just because people have justified their atrocities does not make them right. It makes those atrocity-defenders evil as well. And we're going well beyond "kill on sight", you're suggesting active genocide, torture, and mutilation for personal gain.

Keltest
2019-03-19, 07:36 AM
Yeah. Killing them when they encroach (or even more proactive measures) may be appropriate, but farming them for their skins, especially using the frankly stomach-turning means suggested earlier (the name of the spell mindrape should give away the fact that it's not a good thing to do, not to mention the "regenerate so we can skin it over and over"), is morally wrong by any sane standard.

Edit: @The Jack--

Just because people have justified their atrocities does not make them right. It makes those atrocity-defenders evil as well. And we're going well beyond "kill on sight", you're suggesting active genocide, torture, and mutilation for personal gain.

Indeed. Its one thing to see a red dragon flying over the horizon and take steps to keep it from killing you and smashing your town, another thing entirely to capture it, tie it down, mentally rape it into submission, then flay it alive over and over again for a suit of armor that isn't notably better than steel.

awa
2019-03-19, 07:45 AM
Well lets look at it evil groups might try to justify it but they will be opposed by good groups because they are monsters and they will be opposed by dragons and any groups allied with dragons because duh.

So your premise that dragon armor would be incredibly common is deeply suspect if only a small subset of the most evil societies even attempt to harvest dragons on any large scale.

The funny thing is this idea assumes that dragon armor is so obvious that it would be more common than metal and yet every aspect of the argument has at the very least met with resistance.

The morality of the act, the availability of dragons, the ease of harvesting, the amount gained from any given kill, the quality of the acquired material, i dont think any of your assumptions at all have been simply accepted.

In some editions extremely high level magic can be used to partial mitigate the problem at the cost of greatly increased evil and just begging for undead and corruption, but you could use much lower level magic to acquire metal armor in far greater number with dramatically reduced risk.

The Jack
2019-03-19, 08:31 AM
Just because people have justified their atrocities does not make them right. It makes those atrocity-defenders evil as well. And we're going well beyond "kill on sight", you're suggesting active genocide, torture, and mutilation for personal gain.

What about 'greater good let's kill terrorists' kinda thing?


An adult red or black dragon is an atrocity maker capable of repeat 9/11 scale terrorism. It is inherently domineering, wicked, sadistic and it cannot be trusted, it's one of the most malevolent living things of the material plane. The dragon is the product of centuries of suffering for thousands of sentient victims directly or indirectly victimized by the dragon.

There's no moral 'we should let this live even if we have the capacity to stop it' it's a power-fueled monster aligned with chaos and evil. Even if you make a deal with it, it's inherently inclined to betray you.



Then there's the moral argument that it's right to punish the wicked. Red/Black dragons are unbelievably wicked, so a harsher treatment is justifiable if you agree with crime and punishment.

hamishspence
2019-03-19, 08:37 AM
Torture goes beyond "acceptable punishment of the guilty" for good-aligned characters, according to most D&D sources that discuss it.

As to how evil a chromatic dragon is - going by some D&D novels, they're not any more evil than the average evil mortal - they're just more powerful.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-19, 08:50 AM
What about 'greater good let's kill terrorists' kinda thing?

Doesn't work well in a world were good and evil are Objective things instead of Subjective or related to moral ones.
I mean, if that kind of stuff happen, it may mean "literally every citizen of this empire ends up in hell", which indirectly mean "literally any servant of good aligned deity (and a lot of neutral ones) will oppose this empire in order to prevent such catastrophe from happening".

But anyway, even if it worked, you clearly enter the domain of "non-standard setting". In the same way that if you add steam-power and railroads to the world (under the reasonable assumption that magic is far more complex to master than steam-power), you ends up in a "non-standard setting".

(Note that if you go further in the "dragon farm" idea for your world-building, an interesting follow up is "pandemic magical diseases", because most dangerous real world diseases come from cows/chicken/...)

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-19, 09:00 AM
Doesn't work well in a world were good and evil are Objective things instead of Subjective or related to moral ones.
I mean, if that kind of stuff happen, it may mean "literally every citizen of this empire ends up in hell", which indirectly mean "literally any servant of good aligned deity (and a lot of neutral ones) will oppose this empire in order to prevent such catastrophe from happening".

But anyway, even if it worked, you clearly enter the domain of "non-standard setting". In the same way that if you add steam-power and railroads to the world (under the reasonable assumption that magic is far more complex to master than steam-power), you ends up in a "non-standard setting".

(Note that if you go further in the "dragon farm" idea for your world-building, an interesting follow up is "pandemic magical diseases", because most dangerous real world diseases come from cows/chicken/...)

No one wants to catch dragon pox...

Keltest
2019-03-19, 09:31 AM
No one wants to catch dragon pox...

Mad Dragon Disease, the scourge of [insert world name here]

GreatWyrmGold
2019-03-19, 09:41 AM
when you are a murderhobo you consider more easily that fighting stuff is a good way to solve problems and so you get more encounters because if you solve one problem by talking you avoid having further problems while if you solve it with murder then you will get extra problems(and thus more encounters).
So the one going around solving its problems with murder is likely to progress faster because it will have more encounters than a person that talks.
And how does an official program for getting non-murderhobos to fight powerful monsters make this worse? You're not looking at a problem which consistent adventuring contracts cause, you're bringing up a problem that potentially exists in all D&D worlds in an attempt to avoid admitting that you said veterans would turn into psychopaths.


Also I assumed that dragons rushing the kingdom from all the directions would hit the civilians a lot and risk to be not manageable by armies but better survivable by a few strong people that kills dragons with ambushes or whatever and flee when too much big groups for their strength comes.
That's not a bad argument. (It relies on an unclear set of assumptions on where dragons are and how much, say, black and red dragons get alone, but it's not bad.) Why didn't you bring it up earlier?



Remember, the size is how much space it controls, not how much it occupies.
That's space, not size. Size is absolutely how big a creature is.


And a wyrmling is explicitly only about the size of a small pony or large dog (talking about the body). It's Medium only because of the wings.
...Ponies and large dogs are also Medium. And they don't have wings.


And only the body would provide usable materials, and much of that would not. Which is only a small fraction of the volume.
But it would be a reasonably consistent fraction. Dragon art doesn't show their proportions changing much as they age, beyond having slightly larger heads/eyes as wyrmlings.


You can't simply assume that there's a direct scaling between the size category and the actual physical size of the creature. For example, all the giants are Huge, but they range in height and size tremendously.
In 3.5, at least, there were plenty of Large giants. Can't say I've checked the heights of 5e giants, I'll admit.
And while there's a range of sizes within each size category, the ranges for each size category are consistently much larger than the next smaller one. On average, a Large creature is twice the height and eight times the volume of a Medium one.


As a note: a leather jacket takes something like 45 sq feet of leather. That's about 1 standard cow. A wyrmling is way smaller than a cow in actual body size, more like a sheep. A young dragon is about the size of a cow. But due to the body shape, you're unlikely to get as much hide from a dragon as from a cow. Especially since you have to cut/burn/destroy large patches of it to kill the thing in the first place. Plus, a suit of armor is going to need much more hide than a leather jacket, especially since it's going to have scales on it that make it difficult to work around.
See, this is the argument you shoulda lead with. Ideally leaving out that stuff confusing size category with space.



Look, It has a natural AC even at low levels. What's good enough for it is good enough for you, even when it's a wyrmling. Now, it might be better to double up on wyrmling hide than not, but it's still got +5/6/7 AC from just one layer of hide and scales. This 'but it doesn't work like that for cows' stuff is nonsense.
1. The "but it doesn't work like that for cows" isn't just "cow leather is weak and flimsy," it's "big animals like cows produce less leather than you'd think".
2. Just because dragonhide gives a dragon decent AC doesn't automatically mean anything made out of it would. By that logic, shouldn't all metal armor give you the same AC bonus? There's more to armor than material.



While no substance with all of those properties exists, the "metal" version--a corrosion resistant, silver colored metal that is both lighter and stronger than steel--accurately describes titanium and many alloys thereof.
I've always heard that mithril was basically fantasy aluminum.



I am kinda creeped out by this topic. Mass killing of sentient creatures for their skin sounds really disgusting especially when there are complains about how not enough it is gained in the process. :smalleek:
That's what happens when entire species are designated as Always Chaotic Evil. (Or Lawful Evil, or Neutral Evil, or whatever.) It's accepted as baseline that you can kill them and whatnot without regret; finding reasons to question that is the deviation. Which is also true of Usually/Often Evil creatures, come to think of it.
Combine that with the weird liminal state dragons exist in, where they're as intelligent as people (if not more so) but still look and often act like wild beasts, and throw in literary precedents for dragonhide armor...



That is an assumption not supported by any edition of DnD whatsoever. DnD often says that its a world of adventure and conflict, but never says that evil outnumbers good. that is something people assume for conflict purposes then conveniently ignore the implications of it so that they can have more encounters to fight.
Regardless of why evil dragons show up more often than good dragons, evil dragons show up more than good dragons. Maybe they're less common because they're in constant conflict, and the good dragons are always busy doing nothing in particular; maybe evil dragons' nature as r-strategists means that there are always a bunch of semi-feral chromatic dragons roaming about.
There's nothing said either way in the rules. Not that evil outnumbers good, not that good outnumbers evil, not even that good and evil are equal in number. Your assumptions are assuming as much as everyone else's.

Quertus
2019-03-19, 09:59 AM
Somewhere along the line the edition changed to 5e, where you can't do it to a captive dragon. You can turn into a dragon and do it to yourself, but again, why would you do that? And you can't turn back and will lose your most powerful spells.

Why would you? How about, so that you can outfit your Legion of Doom with Dragon hide armor in preparation for your return to a good edition of the game? That seems like a good reason to me.


To say nothing of the fact that "theyre evil, therefore its ok to torture and exploit them" is still a morally indefensible position.

It's... almost the basis of the game (and a lot of things IRL).


Yeah. Killing them when they encroach (or even more proactive measures) may be appropriate, but farming them for their skins, especially using the frankly stomach-turning means suggested earlier (the name of the spell mindrape should give away the fact that it's not a good thing to do, not to mention the "regenerate so we can skin it over and over"), is morally wrong by any sane standard.


Hopefully, it's sufficiently morally wrong that those wealthy loot stacks known as "adventurers" will bring their XP my way. :smallwink:

Besides, if I have the spell slots available, and they fail their saves, I may Mindrape them into being my lieutenants, and going out and getting me more loot, rather than inefficiently disposing of them like the previous evil overlord would have.


Indeed. Its one thing to see a red dragon flying over the horizon and take steps to keep it from killing you and smashing your town, another thing entirely to capture it, tie it down, mentally rape it into submission, then flay it alive over and over again for a suit of armor that isn't notably better than steel.

That second one is called "forethought". Especially when combined with time travel edition hopping conquest.

More importantly, the second one is a deterrent. Do you really want to mess with the guy who can and will do that to a Dragon?


So your premise that dragon armor would be incredibly common is deeply suspect if only a small subset of the most evil societies even attempt to harvest dragons on any large scale.

From what I've read, it sounds like "would be" is overstating things a bit (outside of, say, Dragonlance). But "could be" seems rather reasonable to me in most systems.

Keltest
2019-03-19, 10:38 AM
And now that somebody has started to defend the merits of slavery and torture, I think I shall bow out, at least until that particular train of thought dies down.

Bohandas
2019-03-19, 11:04 AM
You say that, but most settings have civs with a lot of kill-on-sight rationales for a lot of creatures and they're still thought of as largely good. If you let that red dragon live, she's going to hurt a lot of people.

Conversely, most settings also have the Blood War

Quertus
2019-03-19, 11:08 AM
And now that somebody has started to defend the merits of slavery and torture, I think I shall bow out, at least until that particular train of thought dies down.

It's a Role-playing game. How can you include an evil overlord, if you cannot role-play their point of view? :smallamused:

Max_Killjoy
2019-03-19, 11:08 AM
And now that somebody has started to defend the merits of slavery and torture, I think I shall bow out, at least until that particular train of thought dies down.


Yeah, it's not been an easy thread to read, especially when certain posters are blurring their own thoughts on the matter with in-character thoughts such that it's hard to tell where what they're seriously advocating ends and what a hypothetical character is willing to do begins.

And then other people are just seriously advocating hunting fully intelligent creatures and wearing their skin as clothing like it's no big deal.




It's a Role-playing game. How can you include an evil overlord, if you cannot role-play their point of view? :smallamused:


Save the RP for RP threads.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-19, 11:36 AM
Maybe not, but Steel-Alloys with Titanium alloyed into it on the other hand... There's no strict given limit on how much lighter or stronger it has to be than regular steel. Maybe some titanium chips folded into the steel as it's being forged or a shell of one metal around a core of the other
Titanium, although lighter per unit strength, also requires a larger cross-section than steel to achieve the same strength. So a titanium core sword is going to look significantly different, if nothing else. There's a reason the stuff is used as structural component for fighter craft and only really for corrosion-proof diving knives and the like. Still, imaginative gamers will rise to the challenge. :smallbiggrin:


Yeah, it's not been an easy thread to read, especially when certain posters are blurring their own thoughts on the matter with in-character thoughts such that it's hard to tell where what they're seriously advocating ends and what a hypothetical character is willing to do begins.

At least people are generally reacting such that it seems they realize that the other people in-thread are likely suggesting that such actions might possibly be justified by the residents of the D&D world, and are not IRL advocates of torture or species cleansing.

JoeJ
2019-03-19, 12:00 PM
Besides, if I have the spell slots available, and they fail their saves, I may Mindrape them into being my lieutenants, and going out and getting me more loot, rather than inefficiently disposing of them like the previous evil overlord would have.

Or they'll just add you to their undead army.

The Jack
2019-03-19, 12:01 PM
Torture goes beyond "acceptable punishment of the guilty" for good-aligned characters, according to most D&D sources that discuss it.

As to how evil a chromatic dragon is - going by some D&D novels, they're not any more evil than the average evil mortal - they're just more powerful.

You give a bad person power and they'll only get worse. Dat dragon be evily evil.

Willie the Duck
2019-03-19, 12:46 PM
You give a bad person power and they'll only get worse. Dat dragon be evily evil.

Is that in response to the idea that red dragons are 'not any more evil than the average evil mortal,' or a justification for torturing them?

DaOldeWolf
2019-03-19, 01:51 PM
Most of them are objectively evil tyrants who want to destroy your homes and horde your gold so that they can sleep on it.

I am fine with killling an evil dragon in self defense. Now, mass hunting of them for personal gain with the justification of them being predisposing for evil….. that is still pretty creepy.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-19, 02:29 PM
That is an assumption not supported by any edition of DnD whatsoever. DnD often says that its a world of adventure and conflict, but never says that evil outnumbers good. that is something people assume for conflict purposes then conveniently ignore the implications of it so that they can have more encounters to fight.

At least half the known species of dragons are outright good, therefore at least half the dragons in the world are good. there is no canonical assertion or explanation for why evil dragons would be more numerous.

therefore we can safely assume reality: selflessness is actually more beneficial in the long term to survival than selfishness. selfishness is only beneficial to survival in the short term. why? because a person who makes friends is soon surrounded by allies while a selfish person who consistently does acts to tick people off soon finds themselves outnumbered.

therefore it is actually more likely that good dragons are more numerous than evil ones.

See this is demonstrably false. One of the common traits between all of the dragons (or nearly all) is the presence of minions. And they are certainly evil, and yet they still have minions. Why? Well logically because there is some advantages to working for a dragon, even if it's evil. Let's try and figure some of these out:

1. The Dragon is on your side (or more accurately, you're on its side). This is likely a massive boost to your survival rate. Dragons typically lair in very dangerous locations. None of them have 'sunny plain' or 'happy valley' as lair locations. No, it's deserts, mountain tops, arctic plains, swamps, deep forests (which trust me, is a lot less hospitable then people think). Working for the local dragon means that not only do you not have to defend against the strongest monster in the region, but likely it will, inadvertently, protect you from the other scary monsters by allowing you to live near its lair.

2. It might even proactively protect you. The dragon enslaved you sure, but that also means you belong to it. Now it might not care at all if something happens to you. On the other hand, some dragons will lose it if even a single coin is stolen from their horde. So how angry will it be if someone attacked its favorite scale polisher or musician?

3. It may even provide for you. It might kill something big, eat its fill when its fresh, and give the remainder to its minions. Or even just giving you the scrap bones and gear that aren't valuable enough to enter its horde. Blue dragons are specifically called out as actively rewarding minions that do well.

4. Playing the odds. Yeah, you might get killed and/or tortured by the dragon in a fit of rage or boredom (or hunger), but odds are that won't happen to you. It'll happen to another minion (because statistically speaking if it's a random event, odds are it won't happen to you but someone else), and the better you serve the better your odds. While not serving the dragon means opposing the dragon, which means you are almost certainly going to die.

5. No where else to go. Things that serve dragons are stuff like Kobolds, Ogres, Orcs, and other intelligent monsters. Or particularly evil people. Point is these people aren't really welcome in your local town or community. They are on their own, and they can't beat the dragon on their own. Can't run, can't hide, and can't beat them. So join them. <= This one, I feel, is the biggest factor. Taking a kobold for example, you are smaller and significantly weaker than the average human. You also aren't welcome in any of the human's territory. They'll actively prosecute you, and you likely can't win in a fight against them. So you are driven out into the wilds which are full of dangerous monsters that are even worse then humans, and are likely inhospitable to boot. But there is a local dragon. So you enter its service because really, what choice do you have?


Why would you? How about, so that you can outfit your Legion of Doom with Dragon hide armor in preparation for your return to a good edition of the game? That seems like a good reason to me.


Because, and stay with me now, you can't trust your minions. You getting skinned leaves you vulnerable. I don't think it's possible to do without taking massive damage, and until you heal you are really weak. You've also got multiple minions with blades literally at your throat during the whole operation.

So pain aside, it seems like a really good way to get yourself killed. And before you suggest mentally dominating them so they can't, dragons don't have enough spells to pull that off. Turning into a dragon removes a lot of your spells.

And you can't do it yourself, pain aside, you lack the fine finger control needed.

Not to mention as an evil Overlord you can't really afford to be taking so much damage before (or between) having to fight off the inevitable adventuring groups trying to kill you.

awa
2019-03-19, 02:59 PM
not to mention all your minions watching your transformed dragon self weeping in agony as they carve bits off their edge lord master is not going to do wonders for your image.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-19, 03:12 PM
Forum Explorer, your still thinking short term.

Being allies with an evil dragon doesn't protect you from the evil dragon. thats why they're evil. competence has nothing to do with this. your dead no matter how stupid or smart the evil dragon is about their evil, its just that you die for different reasons, because they don't value your life either way- anything you can do for them can probably be replaced. the protection of an evil tyrant is a short term, inherently frail thing for it always requires another threat to be protected from (real or imagined and often the latter), and once that threat is gone, the new big threat is the thing that rules you, and suddenly simply being protected from an outside threat isn't enough to satisfy living your life under the internal one. thus does tyranny fail, sure in the case of an all-powerful dragon it more often fails in a way that leads to them living and all their minions dying to their flame breath, but still it fails. and the minions are often the stupidest beings on the face of the planet with the kind of cultures that say betrayal is great as long as you get power out of it when it often just leads to their death.

really, minion races like goblins, orcs and ogres and so on should've darwined themselves out of existence long ago. through falling into tactically bad situations that any decent human commander could bait them into, if nothing else. "raaawwr, we're orcs lets all charge the enemy!" human commander: "alright, form the phalanx." orcs dead.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-19, 03:44 PM
Forum Explorer, your still thinking short term.

Being allies with an evil dragon doesn't protect you from the evil dragon. thats why they're evil. competence has nothing to do with this. your dead no matter how stupid or smart the evil dragon is about their evil, its just that you die for different reasons, because they don't value your life either way- anything you can do for them can probably be replaced. the protection of an evil tyrant is a short term, inherently frail thing for it always requires another threat to be protected from (real or imagined and often the latter), and once that threat is gone, the new big threat is the thing that rules you, and suddenly simply being protected from an outside threat isn't enough to satisfy living your life under the internal one. thus does tyranny fail, sure in the case of an all-powerful dragon it more often fails in a way that leads to them living and all their minions dying to their flame breath, but still it fails. and the minions are often the stupidest beings on the face of the planet with the kind of cultures that say betrayal is great as long as you get power out of it when it often just leads to their death.

really, minion races like goblins, orcs and ogres and so on should've darwined themselves out of existence long ago. through falling into tactically bad situations that any decent human commander could bait them into, if nothing else. "raaawwr, we're orcs lets all charge the enemy!" human commander: "alright, form the phalanx." orcs dead.

That's only if the outside threat actually goes away. Besides the monsters, bad climate, and just being weak, there's the so called 'forces of good', which are more then a match for the minions, and may have driven them out to the dragon's lands within their lifetime. That's why I called out #5 as being the most important. And it's not like the dragon can destroy those threats either, because of the PCs and failing them, other dragons, both good and evil.

Yeah, the dragon is bad. But life in its service is still life, which is more then you get without the dragon. And you know it because everything tells you so. Parents, history, mythology, religion, your own experiences. And the very existence of the dragon is proof that the world is an unfair place, and you are at the bottom of the heap.


It's R-strategists vs K-Strategists really. The R-strategists actually do better in harsher terrain with more monsters, while those same monster (including dragons) make it risky to actually counter attack and wipe them out. Particularly since the good races aren't actually all that good, so weakening your own military in permanently exterminating the gobinoids is a good way to get invaded by your neighbor, or overthrown by the local necromancer and what not.

noob
2019-03-19, 03:48 PM
Goblins are not a naturally minion race it is just that by being small they get enslaved easily.
If goblins were provided with the means to start a nation not based on being enslaved by the strong people then they might become scarily efficient thanks to fast population growth and the ability to live with low amounts of food and them not having an intelligence penalty means that they can actually start researching interesting stuff.
It is just that goblin nations does not happens because everybody likes to kill goblins or enslave them.

Lord Raziere
2019-03-19, 04:08 PM
okay whatever, keep defending the merits of being desperate stupid raiders who need a giant magical lizard to live, I'm going to do something else that I find more worthwhile.

Keltest
2019-03-19, 04:16 PM
okay whatever, keep defending the merits of being desperate stupid raiders who need a giant magical lizard to live, I'm going to do something else that I find more worthwhile.

I mean, certainly being subjugated by the superpredator is going to give you a better life expectancy overall than being in competition with it. Yeah, it will suck for a few random individuals every year, but on the whole your tribe or clan or whatever is going to be much better off than if you motivated the dragon to just kill all of you to get you out of the space.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-19, 04:42 PM
okay whatever, keep defending the merits of being desperate stupid raiders who need a giant magical lizard to live, I'm going to do something else that I find more worthwhile.

Hmm? I'm not saying it's a good thing that they are desperate stupid raiders who need a giant magical lizard. I'm saying the opposite. That their situation is so bad they need a giant magical lizard to live, no matter what the giant magical lizard demands in return.

Like without monsters to protect them and make it difficult for the humans to counter invade? I'd expect all the minion races to be exterminated altogether.

MoiMagnus
2019-03-19, 04:43 PM
Forum Explorer, your still thinking short term.

Being allies with an evil dragon doesn't protect you from the evil dragon. thats why they're evil. competence has nothing to do with this. your dead no matter how stupid or smart the evil dragon is about their evil, its just that you die for different reasons, because they don't value your life either way- anything you can do for them can probably be replaced. the protection of an evil tyrant is a short term, inherently frail thing for it always requires another threat to be protected from (real or imagined and often the latter), and once that threat is gone, the new big threat is the thing that rules you, and suddenly simply being protected from an outside threat isn't enough to satisfy living your life under the internal one. thus does tyranny fail, sure in the case of an all-powerful dragon it more often fails in a way that leads to them living and all their minions dying to their flame breath, but still it fails. and the minions are often the stupidest beings on the face of the planet with the kind of cultures that say betrayal is great as long as you get power out of it when it often just leads to their death.

Well, no, at least not always. (The frequence is up to world building choices)

First, dragon are evil in the same way as humans, not as the same way as extraplanar entities, which mean:
1) They can be on the "good" side of evil.
2) They can behave in a good aligned way on some subject, and will remain evil as long as their general behavior is evil.
3) They are clever (good Int and average Wis), meaning that if that literate enough, they can consider that the best way of managing their troups is actually to behave in a LN or LG way toward them in order to build a sincere loyalty of its troups. (And if he use those troups to pillage nearby kingdom, that's not enough to make him neutral)

You could totally have an evil dragon that consider that its most competent minion are part of its "treasure", and want to have as much competent minion has possible, and make them live in a pretty confortable way (if he consider it improves his prestige), giving them a life as good as the life of most court advisors in human kindgoms. (Which is a good life compared to most life in medieval time).

Sure, it isn't the best situation to live in on the long term, and you would prefer living under the rule of a powerful AND good creature, but that's possibly the best you could expect to find without dying in the process.

Rockphed
2019-03-19, 06:08 PM
I mean, certainly being subjugated by the superpredator is going to give you a better life expectancy overall than being in competition with it. Yeah, it will suck for a few random individuals every year, but on the whole your tribe or clan or whatever is going to be much better off than if you motivated the dragon to just kill all of you to get you out of the space.

The key to not getting eaten by the superpredator is to acquire a large enough herd of cattle that the superpredator can eat itself into a torpor whenever it gets the munchies.

JoeJ
2019-03-19, 06:28 PM
The key to not getting eaten by the superpredator is to acquire a large enough herd of cattle that the superpredator can eat itself into a torpor whenever it gets the munchies.

And enough barrels of whatever spices the superpredator likes to sprinkle on them. It's not just about quantity, you also have to make sure that it likes the taste of the cattle better than it would like the taste of you.

Quertus
2019-03-19, 07:08 PM
Or they'll just add you to their undead army.

Exactly. Darwinism at work. May the best evil overlord win!



Because, and stay with me now, you can't trust your minions. You getting skinned leaves you vulnerable. I don't think it's possible to do without taking massive damage, and until you heal you are really weak. You've also got multiple minions with blades literally at your throat during the whole operation.

So pain aside, it seems like a really good way to get yourself killed. And before you suggest mentally dominating them so they can't, dragons don't have enough spells to pull that off. Turning into a dragon removes a lot of your spells.

And you can't do it yourself, pain aside, you lack the fine finger control needed.

Not to mention as an evil Overlord you can't really afford to be taking so much damage before (or between) having to fight off the inevitable adventuring groups trying to kill you.

Well put. All the more reason to prefer skinning the offending Dragon over yourself. Although choosing which minions do the skinning is important, in any event.


not to mention all your minions watching your transformed dragon self weeping in agony as they carve bits off their edge lord master is not going to do wonders for your image.

Well, there is always masochism, construct/undead minions, etc.

Again, I prefer my evil overlord skinning his enemy to himself, but there are ways (in some editions) to optimize even that experience.

The Jack
2019-03-19, 07:20 PM
I think I could work with green or blue. Black, Red or white? My every move is to get outa there. Serving one of those things is for tragicomic stockholm syndrome nutters. The comic relief you really just feel sorry for. Now with Red, extremely short term, you could work with it if you can take advantage of the dragon's best interest... but long term you wont align such a thing.

Premptibely attacking the dragon is just good sense. Don't let it grow old. Greater-good type evil is nueteral, and i'd take that.

Keltest
2019-03-19, 07:23 PM
I think I could work with green or blue. Black, Red or white? My every move is to get outa there. Serving one of those things is for tragicomic stockholm syndrome nutters. The comic relief you really just feel sorry for. Now with Red, extremely short term, you could work with it if you can take advantage of the dragon's best interest... but long term you wont align such a thing.

Premptibely attacking the dragon is just good sense. Don't let it grow old. Greater-good type evil is nueteral, and i'd take that.

Greater good type evil is not only evil, its probably the most common type of evil. Very few people are like Xykon, doing evil for the lulz. Most villains legitimately believe that their goals are good in the long run, and believe that other people are either too weak or too squeamish to seize this benefit.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-19, 10:00 PM
Well put. All the more reason to prefer skinning the offending Dragon over yourself. Although choosing which minions do the skinning is important, in any event.
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The problem is that in 5E there aren't any good options to permanently disable a dragon. Permanent draining spells are pretty much out of the game. Killing a dragon and harvesting it's skin sure. But capturing it? Might be impossible in the long term.



I think I could work with green or blue. Black, Red or white? My every move is to get outa there. Serving one of those things is for tragicomic stockholm syndrome nutters. The comic relief you really just feel sorry for. Now with Red, extremely short term, you could work with it if you can take advantage of the dragon's best interest... but long term you wont align such a thing.

Premptibely attacking the dragon is just good sense. Don't let it grow old. Greater-good type evil is nueteral, and i'd take that.

I imagine working for a red would be a lot like this (https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/interlude-lest-dawn-fail/). Working for a black would be well evil, even more so than other evil dragons. Your best chance of survival would be in delivering helpless people for it to torture and eat.

Under no circumstances be the minion of a white dragon.

You aren't wrong, but Wrymlings are typically raised by a parent. Or not. That bit of worldbuilding is up to the DM. I don't think there is a standard established for early dragon life.

The Glyphstone
2019-03-19, 11:58 PM
The problem is that in 5E there aren't any good options to permanently disable a dragon. Permanent draining spells are pretty much out of the game. Killing a dragon and harvesting it's skin sure. But capturing it? Might be impossible in the long term.




I imagine working for a red would be a lot like this (https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/interlude-lest-dawn-fail/). Working for a black would be well evil, even more so than other evil dragons. Your best chance of survival would be in delivering helpless people for it to torture and eat.

Under no circumstances be the minion of a white dragon.

You aren't wrong, but Wrymlings are typically raised by a parent. Or not. That bit of worldbuilding is up to the DM. I don't think there is a standard established for early dragon life.

Nah, Black Knight is probably closer in mindset to a Blue Dragon than a Red one. Reds are primarily known for their pride and vanity, in addition to being the most powerful of all chromatics. Serving one and surviving is primarily dependent on your ability to remain useful while being enough of a sycophantic tail-kisser.

Forum Explorer
2019-03-20, 02:43 AM
Nah, Black Knight is probably closer in mindset to a Blue Dragon than a Red one. Reds are primarily known for their pride and vanity, in addition to being the most powerful of all chromatics. Serving one and surviving is primarily dependent on your ability to remain useful while being enough of a sycophantic tail-kisser.

The dragon part of that interlude. I thought that was obvious, but I'm usually wrong about that.