Should'nt dragon stuff be absurdly common?

[The Jack]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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:



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]

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]

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.

[Xuc Xac]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.