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I was thinking of making some radical concept changes regarding dragons, but first I wanted to specify the motivations and see how people react to them.

I don’t know if the subject ever came up (I know I’ve never seen it) but I believe it should’ve.


Okay, What do we know about dragons ?
- They’re physically powerful
- They’re mentally superior
- They have crapload of spell power - features, spells & treasure
- They have crapload of skills
- They are a valued prize among high-level adventurers
- They breed slowly
- They have a very long life span (thousands of years)

The above lead to several compelling conclusions regarding encounters:
- A dragon with Int 18 or more should never ever ever be encountered by chance. Decades of survival have thought them to avoid unnecessary conflicts.
- A dragon with Int 16 or more never ever ever underestimate an intelligent opponent.
- An encounter with a dragon should almost always start with optimum settings for the dragon (deadly traps, dispels/A-M, self-empowerment via spells ahead of time, followers/slaves – all after the characters have been significantly beaten down and warn out... and when all the above fail – contingency means to revitalize and quick escape routes... and if you happened to have taken one down, getting to its real treasure should be as easy as pin-pointing a specific snowflake in a blizzard).

This goes even farther on a game-settings scale.
Given that:
1. Dragons were around at the dawn of mankind and the other humanoid races
2. They had a lot of time to assess these young races, and anticipate the direction in which their evolution takes them and what effects this will have on the denizens of their homeworld and on them in particular.
The compelling conclusion is that in a world where dragons exist in even a reasonable amount of abundance, humanoid races should’ve been hunted down and dwindled to near extinction.
Even if the above is nearly impossible ecology-wise, dragons with polymorph and Alternate form should’ve easily made it to almost every key political position and set global-scale wars among the humanoids – just to keep them too busy to ever become a threat in any way.


Does anybody follow my trail of thought ?
Am I making any sense ?
Am I missing something other than “snap out of it man, it’s just a game” ?
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