How to stop PCs from exploiting dragon corpses.

[Sir Daniel]

So, in a adventure I'm running, at the end, is a young dragon boss fight. The people I play with are all smart, and given enough time, I'm sure that they could harvest these super durable dragon scales and turn them into armor. How do I stop this?

[ComradeBear]

You either don't have a dragon, express that the total weight of a full dragon hide is insanely heavy, that dragon scales are not much bigger than Lizard scales and so they're gonna take several days to harvest them all, etc.
You could also mention that providing the materials does reduce the cost for dragonscale armor, but it's still crazy expensive.


But in the end, know that players are agents of chaos. They will do crazy things and destroy everything you worked for. It's their job.
So if you don't want them to figure out a way to benefit from Dragon Parts, don't use a dragon. Otherwise they can probably figure something out.

[LibraryOgre]

"If dragons don't want to be killed, why are they made out of loot?"

Beyond that, though, why prevent them from doing so? Make it a time/money sink. Or, if you're determined, have another dragon, a larger dragon, come and claim the body. Dragons have a ritual about death, you see, and while the older dragon isn't necessarily going to fight the characters, nor is she going to let them desecrate the body of a young dragon to wear.

[kyoryu]

I see three basic strategies, with tons of variations:

1) Transportation: How do you get the dragon bits from point A to point B without damaging or destroying them?

2) Knowledge: Who knows how to take dragon bits and turn them into treasure?

3) Notoriety: Dragon bits are useful, and many people will want them and attempt to acquire them.

[icefractal]

First off, why do you want to prevent this? Dragon-scale armor is pretty classic. And it varies from game to game, but dragon-scale armor is not usually overwhelmingly powerful - it's just masterwork armor with a small amount of energy resistance in 3E, for example.

However, if you do want to prevent it, you can just change how dragons work in your campaign - who says they have to leave a useful corpse? Depending on how you feel about the natural-ness of dragons, they could:
A) Melt into horrible toxic arcane sludge, which poisons the land where it falls for a generation.
B) Turn into a natural feature - a green dragon might sprout into impossibly fast-growing forest, a red one might cause a hot spring or a small lava fissure where it falls, etc.
C) Something else that doesn't leave a body around.

[Peelee]

In addition to what other people said....

Cows are covered in leather. That doesn't mean I could skin a dead cow, travel a few days to a town, and get some leather armor made. Stuff needs to be cured, tanned, processed in some ways. Soon as the cow dies, its materials start to deteriorate. People have processes to slow or stop that.

Why would dragon scales be different? Does someone in the party know how to preserve them? Anyone with skill ranks in any sort of armor or smithing profession? Anyone with skill ranks in survival? They may be able to get scales, but will the scales last long enough to get the armor made?

[JeenLeen]

With respect to some earlier questions, in the game you are playing, how is dragonhide armor compared to others?

Regardless of the answer, I think some of the above are good answers. The most 'in-game' to me feels like saying it takes special prep soon after death for the scales to be salvagable. But also, if this would be an issue for balance and such, I recommend telling the players out-of-game that you are concerned about how it would make it hard to balance encounters with this armor boost, so please don't try to work around it. Maybe all they can do is sell the dragonhide for some extra gold or favors.

You might need to be direct (kind, but direct) out-of-game for some players to realize what the in-game things hint at. Also, if they understand why you don't want it to happen, I would think most would understand and relate.

[Kantaki]

Simple. Dragons -„real” dragons, not overgrown lizards -don’t leave much of a body under normal circumstances.

The reason for that is that the species primarily feeds on magic- that is the main reason they collect gold by the way. As a conduit for magical energies. Because of this a good part of their body consists actually of the magic they feed on.
And when they die and their soul/will/however you call it that held the whole mess together vanishes the magic energy flows back into the surrounding area.

Most „dragon remains” on display or used in equipment would be either replicas or come from other sources.
If you really want to use the body parts of a proper dragon you would need to undertake highly specific- and expensive -preparations.

[The Glyphstone]

Alternatively...is it a problem? You've left the edition unspecified, but in 3.5, there were strict limits on how much dragonhide armor one corpse could make. If it's a Large dragon, they can make one single suit of hide armor from its remains. Unless 4E or 5E has more generous allowances, just use that guideline, and I can't imagine one suit of hide armor will break your game.

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

[Strigon]

My recommendation is to let them do it.
Letting your players do what they want (within reason) is one way to make them enjoy playing at your table; it's just a matter of balancing. If you want, you can make the dragon very hard to kill, then make its corpse valuable and easy to exploit - they beat a boss, give them something nice. Alternatively, you can make the dragon a fair fight, and simply make its corpse difficult to exploit; most dragons are associated with fire or another element. Maybe their blood is actually lava, or something. If it's one of the acid-breathing dragons, make it a xenomorph. They're magical creatures; get creative.
Finally, you can make their loot not that great. Personally, I'd avoid this, but maybe dragonscale armour is just like regular armour but lighter; stuff like that.

However, since you asked how to stop them? Make the dragon tough; by the time they bring it down, the scales/bones/teeth/whatever are all ruined; it takes a skilled dragon slayer to kill such a beast and leave its valuables intact.

[Knitifine]

Gonna echo everyone else; why is this a problem?

[oudeis]

So, in a adventure I'm running, at the end, is a young dragon boss fight. The people I play with are all smart, and given enough time, I'm sure that they could harvest these super durable dragon scales and turn them into armor. How do I stop this?

I'm with the others on this: it isn't at all clear why this is such a problem. However, it's your game and you can make whatever rules you wish. I try to use in-game lore and mechanics for solutions rather than arbitary or capricious restrictions or gross fiat, so here are some things you could try in that spirit:

• Dragons are intelligent creatures, and making clothing from the corpse a la 'Buffalo Bill' from Silence of the Lambs would lead to widespread revulsion, condemnation, and ostracism from civilized society. This is of course aside from the immediate and unrelenting vendetta that will be pursued by every dragon of any color against any who dared do such a thing.
• When a dragon dies, the body consumes itself spectacularly as the magic that kept the embodied elemental forces at bay vanishes: fire-breathers erupt in explosive conflagration, gas-breathers are dissolved by their own corrosive vapor, lightning-breathers are obliterated by massive thunderous discharges of electricity that arc repeatedly from head to tail and back again, etc.
• In a similar vein, perhaps the skin is charged with the residual magic of the dragon, subjecting the wearer to constant low-grade thermal/electrical/chemical attacks. Is the extra protection worth the chronic skin blistering?
• Dragon skin is heavy. Wearing the equivalent of a modern bomb-disposal suit might make you effectively invulnerable from battlefield threats but you won't be able to do much more than walk slowly.
• Dragon scales are hard but extremely brittle, like ceramic plates. Dragons are constantly shedding and regrowing them but the players will need to replace broken scales after every fight or lose any armor benefit.

[cobaltstarfire]

It's a young dragon, maybe the hide/scales simply aren't thick/big enough to be usable, or there are only so many scales of the right size/shape/quality and probably not nearly enough to make armor from.

[veti]

I would go with "crafting armour from dragonhide is a complex and skilled job. The nearest blacksmith capable of such a feat is about 800 miles thataway, and for some reason his time is in very high demand, so good luck getting anything out of him this side of next winter. Of course you could learn the craft yourself, but you'll have to get the same guy to teach you, and that will take even longer. Or you could try to learn by trial and error, but the operative word there is 'error' and without so much as a pattern to go on, I would expect you to ruin several dozen dragon hides before you get it right."

[PrincessCupcake]

Well, it takes a Large dragon minimum to create a set of armor from the hide. and a Young dragon is only medium sized. Unless the party includes a gnome/halfling/goblin/ratfolk/other small sized character, they won't be able to create a useable set of armor out of it.
and if you're going with Pathfinder, harvesting useful materials from a dragon and creating something with them requires a feat and quite a few skill ranks. "don't have the feat? okay you cut up the dragon corpse but standard methods of preserving the parts are ineffective."

I'm not sure why this is an issue in a standard campaign, but there you have some ways.

(although the previous suggestion of a dragon corpse melting/exploding/transforming into some natural wonder is actually pretty cool.)

[AnBe]

You could always make it a scale-less dragon, you know, have it be like a naked albino dragon or something? Then there are no scales to worry about, but the young dragon might lose his/her natural armor (if any).

[Koo Rehtorb]

Why is this a bad thing? D&D is about fighting monsters and getting loot. Dragon scale armour out of a slain dragon sounds perfectly fine to me.

It's within your rights to make an adventure out of harvesting the stuff, getting it back to town, and turning it into armour, though.

[RazorChain]

Let the dragon kill the PC's.


Then the dragon can make an armor out of them.

Problem solved.

[Lord Torath]

In 2E AD&D, armor made from dragon hide weighed about 30 lbs (for human-sized suits), was flexible, had no innate magical properties from the dragon it came from, cost about 5 grand to make, and provided an AC four points worse than the dragon it came from. A young dragon would have a base AC roughly equivalent to platemail, or maybe full plate, which means the armor made from its scales would be somewhere between Leather and Chainmail. Not really worth the 5 grand it costs to make it. Full Plate cost 4,000 - 10,000 gold, so until your dragon had armor 4 points better than that, you were generally better off with mundane armor (unless you were a thief, bard, or ranger).

How disruptive will it be if your PCs get access to 1 suit of expensive dragonscale that's about as effective as Platemail?

In Xanth, dragon steaks are considered a delicacy (although more dragons ate people than people ate dragons). How bad is it for the body of the dragon to be considered part of the treasure?

[Inevitability]

If you're set on stopping your PC's but don't want it to seem forced, I suggest the 3.5 Final Strike feat. Almost all dragons have an elemental subtype, so they qualify, and one of its side benefits is explosion upon death.

If your game is 4e or 5e, there's no rules for creating dragonhide armor anyway, so you can rule as you want.

[Pauly]

You can always use the solution from The Hobbit.
Dragon falls into deep water, and warring armies turn up to dispute the spoils of the dragon hoard.

[Corsair14]

In addition to everything above, your average PC even with a smithing or leatherworking skill would have very little clue on how to deal with dragon scale and more likely than not would destroy it in the attempt. Even if miraculously they succeeded, the most they would get out of a young dragon is a cool looking suit of leather armor.

Actually if your PCs were thinking dragon scale they are thinking really small. In old editions dragon blood by itself was worth far more to alchemists than the scales were along with the bones. I remember years back we killed a dragon, red I think, and sat there dumping potion bottles to collect as much as we could and made a pretty mint at multiple alchemy shops.

I have never heard of this need treasure for magic conduit thing before in 30+ years of gaming. Is this some kind of retcon of established fluff from the newest monstrous manual or 4ed's? Used to be it was all about dragon greed and even good dragons had it. Some dragons, greyhawk dragons if I remember right, lived in cities and didn't have a horde of treasure but instead had palatial homes and stuff. I know they screwed up my favorite dragon in the newest book, the Shadow Dragon which is supposed to be a race of underdark dragons closely connected to the plane of shadow, not some silly changed surface dragon. So I will be ignoring that entry when I inevitably add one to my campaign.

[Jay R]

If they don't have Craft(Tanning) or Profession (Tanner) or some such, then they won't know how to preserve the scales. The scales will be stinking within a day or two, and worthless not much later.

My recommendation is that by the time they get back to town, most but not all of the hide and/or scales are ruined, so that they get enough to make their own armor or other cool thing, but none left over to sell. Give them the cool part (wearing dragon scales) without the absurdly exploitative part (making lots of money).

[Cernor]

When my party finally killed a dragon and decided to make its hide into armour, we ended up having to go to a major city (Waterdeep in FR, which was a multiple-hundred-mile journey), give up most of our wealth we'd gathered to date (including its hoard), and wait about a month for the crafting process to be complete.

What I've found is that if you're giving out enough loot to keep players happy, they'll generally only take trophies, rather than taking everything they can sell. What adventurer doesn't want some dragon horns to hang on the wall of their tavern after they retire?

[Telonius]

I encourage it. (And I'll use the opportunity to link to one of my favorite villains).

[Grac]

Gonna have to go with everyone else, asking why it's a problem. If you don't want the PCs to have an item, don't put it in the game. Don't want them to get access to a magical instrument that casts charm Monster at will? Don't give it to *anyone* in the game, in case they somehow get it. Especially don't give it to some fey demigod that challenges the party bard to a performance. Don't want them to get Dragon scale armour? Don't put Dragon scales in the game.

[Professor Chimp]

If they don't have Craft(Tanning) or Profession (Tanner) or some such, then they won't know how to preserve the scales. The scales will be stinking within a day or two, and worthless not much later.

Unless they have a lv3+ Cleric with them. They'd be able to preserve the remains with Gentle Repose. Near as I can tell, there's nothing in RAW to prevent them from casting it again when the first is about to run out, effectively delaying the decay indefinitely.

Anyway, I agree with many here to just allow the PCs to harvest the scales, but having it require some forethough on how to preserve them and specialized skills to properly turn them into armor. Skills the PCs more than likely don't have, so they'd need to find someone who does while keeping the remains from spoiling. You could use that as a hook for a small quest.

[Vinyadan]

In addition to what other people said....

Cows are covered in leather. That doesn't mean I could skin a dead cow, travel a few days to a town, and get some leather armor made. Stuff needs to be cured, tanned, processed in some ways. Soon as the cow dies, its materials start to deteriorate. People have processes to slow or stop that.

Why would dragon scales be different? Does someone in the party know how to preserve them? Anyone with skill ranks in any sort of armor or smithing profession? Anyone with skill ranks in survival? They may be able to get scales, but will the scales last long enough to get the armor made?

In theory, you can just take away the inner fat layer with a pincer or a small knife and put the pelt into salt, leaving the rest of the elaboration to when you have the needed material or have more skins to work on. In practice, unless the PCs walk around with, I don't know, 50 kg of salt, there is no way they could carry around that stuff for various days and keep it workable, it's, like, 20-50% of the pelt weight in salt. Gentle repose or similar could do the trick, however, if they think about it. Option 2 is keeping it frozen. Option 3 is somehow simply taking the water out of the pelt (a drying spell?).

The best thing is just to make the stats of the dragonloot acceptable for the power level of your campaign. After all, it is a young dragon.

[Sir Daniel]

Thank you for the feedback. The reason that I was worried about this is that I overestimated the properties of dragonscale armor. Maybe I'll say that the scales aren't hard enough to make armor, and there isn't that much, but you can make a masterwork shield that's immune to acid (its a young black dragon) out of the hide and some of the scales. Or boots.

[Strigon]

Thank you for the feedback. The reason that I was worried about this is that I overestimated the properties of dragonscale armor. Maybe I'll say that the scales aren't hard enough to make armor, and there isn't that much, but you can make a masterwork shield that's immune to acid (its a young black dragon) out of the hide and some of the scales. Or boots.

Sure; heck, you can even leave the door open for more powerful armour if you want, and just say its scales aren't fully developed as it's too young. Say they're still somewhat soft, and you prevent them from getting it now, but you also avoid closing the door on dragonscale armour in the future!