Quote from: DavetheLost;1033309I remember at least one article from an old Dragon magazine about giving dragons improved combat options to make them scarier. Wing buffet, rear foot kick and stomp, tail lash, and of course grab, fly and drop from altitude. I'm pretty sure it is a subject that has had many articles.

Dragons by the book and dragons as imagined don't really match well if you are imagining Godzilla and the rules are giving you Gadzuki.

Labyrinth Lord dragons have 6-11 hit dice as mature adults depending on type, adjustable by +/- 3 HD depending on age. They save as Fighters of level equal to their ht dice. Their scale are at least the equivalent of plate mail. Considering that a zero level "normal" man has 1/2 to 1 HD, dragons by the book are pretty impressive until the PC heroes come along.  I think we sometimes forget the "normal" man as a standard of comparison.

2nd edition AD&D were basically OD&D/1e AD&D dragons with those optional abilities, and the spellcasting earlier ones only had a chance at. They made sufficiently good Godzilla-alikes (only the really young ones were appropriate for pre-name-level parties.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033309I remember at least one article from an old Dragon magazine about giving dragons improved combat options to make them scarier. Wing buffet, rear foot kick and stomp, tail lash, and of course grab, fly and drop from altitude. I'm pretty sure it is a subject that has had many articles.

5e dragons get to do this sort of thing as an off-round action. It makes them much tougher.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033273Speaking, magic using dragons should be the rare exception, not the norm.  I can accept the very occasioanl shapechanged gold dragon, but have always considered gold dragons to be the rarest of the dragons too.

My biggest pet peeve with dragons in D&D is that are often cheapened. Instead of being Smaug the Golden or Fafnir or Vermithrax Pejorative, they are just a big pile of EXP sitting on a mound of treasure. I want an encounter with a dragon to be memorable. When they are just another entry in teh monster manual and there is a black dragon in every swamp, a tree in every forest, a white on every snowy mountain, etc they lose something.

Oh totally! I actually disliked the dragon ecology introduced in later editions because they turned dragons from forces of nature into talking animal wizards who lived everywhere.

In actual mythology, fairy tales, legends, etc, dragons are a big deal whenever they appear. In many cases they are personified natural disasters. For example, the chimera (which is considered a dragon in real world bestiaries, along with the hydra and sea serpents) was believed to be a volcano personified.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032214Frankly, I agree.  You know how hard I worked to construct a medieval world with some degree of authenticity for my RPGs, and you know that nobody gave a crap.  It's the same in any endeavor, by the way; the vast majority of model railroaders, for instance, do not CARE that the Athearn 40' boxcar is 1 HO scale foot too wide.

Was the Medievalism just lore and background? Or was it something you made into part of the POINT of playing?

Because that's what I did with Lion & Dragon; the Medieval environment is total and has very significant effect on how you play. Stuff like religion and social class, economics and politics. And when players get into that it becomes a feature, because it makes the gameplay itself completely different from standard D&D in exciting ways.

Quote from: Kiero;1032457In the medieval era, maybe not. In earlier ones, it was called leaving out the body armour, and just relying on your helmet and shield.

Well, there was Padded Jack and Jack Splint armor.

Oh yeah, and in most settings, "magic shops" are utterly ridiculous.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1033800Oh yeah, and in most settings, "magic shops" are utterly ridiculous.

Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

I regularly order wands of CLW in bulk from my local occult shop.

The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

Ding!  Winner.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

So how many +1 swords or Staves of Wizardry have you bought at your local Occult Shop?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1033852So how many +1 swords or Staves of Wizardry have you bought at your local Occult Shop?

They are referring to real life equivalents. How many actual Staves of Wizardry have you seen in real life? I am guessing none. How many objects have you seen that some people believe actually have religious or magical functions? Quite a lot, I would guess.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

And regardless, real magic items, if they worked, are either the bazookas/tanks of their world, or the bulldozers/life-saving medicine. What are they doing on some store shelf gathering dust? Particularly if they are non-expendable. At the very least they should be in use, and you should be negotiating with their owner or operator that they should sell you this tool of their profession because you're giving them enough gold to retire on or the like.

There are real world occult stores. Then again, what they sell doesn't actually do anything, or what they do is subtle enough that it can't be objectively confirmed. I bought a magical item in a real world magical store. My wife and I were on vacation in Europe and we went to the Vatican. There was a Vatican store where we bought a Saint Christopher medal blessed by the Pope. What did this magic item do? Well, if anything we didn't notice, and we likely wouldn't notice a +1 bonus to d20 rolls involving the rest of our trip.

Similar sorts of stores or merchants have existed through history. Places that sell blessed items, religious relics, charms, potions, medicine, snake oil, and so on. The effects of these things is usually subtle if not non-existent and they tend to be affordable for common people.

A magic item store in a D&D setting is closer to a store that sells advanced military hardware rather than an occult store, both in terms of how effective (or dangerous) the merchandise is and how expensive it is. You can go to a corner store in any real world city to sell a tank that you captured in battle so that you can buy that jet fighter you want. You can buy and sell extremely expensive or dangerous items in the real world, but not in a corner store.

Might there be certain mystical, economic, social, and political conditions where a D&D style magic store is possible? Yes.

I would still hate them though and think that they are silly and ruin the atmosphere of a setting or campaign because it reduces something that should be special, rare, and wonderous to a commodity with a price tag. You exchange an epic quest to find a legendary artifact with role playing a trip to Walmart.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

There wasn't in the middle ages.