Discussion Characters / DungeonsAndDragonsDragons

Okay, migrated the Lesser Dragons to the main list, and brought the undead dragons over from the Undead page, bringing the page down to 227,840 characters compared to 284,377 when the split warning came up. We should be good for a while, even if some D&D nerd with a bunch of old sourcebooks and too much time on their hands (yo) adds a few more dragons to the page.

Page too big. Again. Man, who'd have thought that a game called Dungeons & Dragons would have so many dragons in it?

My usual instinctive response of "migrate them into the main creature index" obviously doesn't work here, because these are all subraces and undead derivatives of the same base "(true) dragon" creature entry with a bunch of common tropes at the top of the page. The craziest idea I had was to add a "Breath Weapon: line/cone of fire/ice/etc." to each dragon entry under their alignment and stuff, to cut down on the number of Playing with Fire, An Ice Person links appearing on the page, but I don't think that's going to make much of a difference, because there are still dragon types not on the page yet.

So splitting the page into "Dragons" and "More Dragons" pages looks to be the way forward, the question then is where's the best place to split the page? The halfway point is in the middle of the Lung Dragons, so do we just arbitrarily decide that everything above that point goes on one page and everything below goes on another? Do we say this page is for "core" dragons — the universal dragon tropes, and the chromatics, metallics and gem dragons, perhaps — and everything else goes on the other page? We could try splitting based on whether a dragon type has rules for the current game edition, but the problems with that approach would be that it would require shuffling whenever 6E happens, and it breaks the moonstone and time dragons out of their family groups.

Thoughts, ideas?

I'm not particularly connived that a "lesser dragons" page would necessarily look bad? Assuming that it'd include all the material currently in the lesser dragons section, that'd be about 60,400 bytes of written content split across three sections.

It's the "organize by creature type" issue again. That approach gates creature entries behind knowledge of the game's taxonomy, one that is subject to change when editions drop or rename monster types, or reclassify creatures. And the end result would again be a bunch of critters whose shared traits are darkvision and a vulnerability to a specific magic weapon, while a less academic browser might wonder why a drakkensteed is on the main creature list yet the quite similar dragonnel is elsewhere.

We can't even say these lesser dragons are likely to be encountered together, unlike the various undead, whose page is basically a necromancer's catalogue.

Personally I'm against folding stuff back into the main list because, as it stands, people are not going to stop digging up the most obscure/ barebones D&D creatures they can find and adding them to these pages. We've already created general creature pages for almost every letter of the alphabet; what are we going to do once they get too big? Split Creatures A into Creatures A1 and Creatures A2, for instance?

Would that be any worse than splitting an "Everything with the Dragon type" page into a "proper dragons" and "everything else with the Dragon type (until an edition reclassifies them)" pages? At least it'd be easier to find the Jabberwock on a hypothetical "J1" page than guessing that the game considers it a Dragon more than a Monstrosity, Fey or Aberration.

Also, right now the only alphabet page approaching split length looks to be "S" at 88 of 111 Word pages, due to the letter's sheer ubiquity. The "D" page, for example, remains stable at 46 of 111 Word pages, and shuffling the appropriate lesser dragons into it only expands it to 58 or so of 111.

True dragons are anything that grow stronger through age categories, so creatures like the sea serpent (both versions) and 5E dragon turtle (but not the 3E version) do qualify. There's no real reason that they must be tied to a bigger family or something.

On another note, I'm not sure why arcane and epic dragons are now simply lumped in with the 'misc' true dragons instead of, y'know, being listed together as an actual family.

Yeah, that's the understanding I have come to by now as well.

I would support moving the sea serpents back to the true dragon section and re-grouping the arcane and epic dragons. What about the dragon turtles? Should we prioritize their most common classification (i.e., lesser dragons) or their most recent (i.e., true dragons)?

I don't really see a reason to not acknowledge the recent change.

Well, in the meantime, should we at least reassemble the other dragon families?

Oh, there's a discussion about this I missed.

A "true" dragon can be defined as possessing four key traits: a common body plan (four legs and wings), a breath weapon (and usually other magical abilities), growing through age categories, and a frightful presence. Everything in a Monster Manual's "dragon" entry will have all of these traits, and while there are a handful of exceptions to this rule — some of the 2E and planar dragons lack wings or have evolved sea serpent-like bodies, fang dragons have spell-like abilities but no breath weapon, and the lung dragon family has a radically different morphology and aging process — the overwhelming majority of true "X dragon"s meet these criteria.

Other creatures of the dragon type do not. Most drakes lack wings, don't have age categories or a frightful presence, and only a few have breath weapons. Dragonets better resemble true dragons, and nearly all of them have breath weapons, but only the fairy dragons have something resembling age categories, and none have a frightful presence. Linnorms have breath weapons and age categories (in 2E), but no frightful presence, and their bodies are characterized by lacking wings and hind legs. Landwyrms have a frightful presence, but no wings, breath weapons or age categories.

In the case of dragon turtles, we have a wingless creature that looks more like a turtle than a dragon. It possesses a breath weapon, and as of Fizban's sourebook we have age category stats for it, but it lacks a frightful presence. Its 5E Monster Manual entry uses phrases like "land-based dragon kin" and "like true dragons" to describe it without grouping dragon turtles with such creatures, while the entry for dragons proper specifically mentions a dragon turtle as a creature that, like a wyvern, has dragon blood, but is not a true dragon.

In the case of sea serpents, their 5E incarnation is even less dragon-looking than previous artwork of serpentine creatures with atrophied limbs. While they have breath weapons and grow through age categories (truncated ones in 5E's case), they lack a true dragon's frightful presence. The 3E Dragon article that gives the most background to sea serpents mentions that they are "Of some relation to true dragons," variously "like true dragons" and "unlike true dragons," and "have a common heritage with dragons," but are distinctly separate from them.

It may also be worth pointing out that we're talking about "dragon turtles" and "sea serpents" rather than "turtle dragons" and "sea dragons."

Anyway, that's my short essay on why those salty suckers belong in the "misc lesser dragons" section rather than the "true dragon" half of the page.