D&D 1E Should Gold Dragons always be LG and Black Dragons always be CE?

[Mark Hope]

Just inquiring: Do you ever mix up dragon alignments in your games of 1e?

In my game, alignment is applied after the fact - it's a description of how you behave. So dragons can change their behaviour and thereby change colour. A gold dragon that turned to evil would change its appearance accordingly, becoming a chromatic dragon of some type. Dragons with mixed hues are a thing in my games as well, with mixed breath weapons to suit.

 

[el-remmen]

In every edition of D&D I have run (1E, 2E, 3E, B/X, BECMI, 5E) I have handled dragons as unique beings whose colors indicate lineage from a progenitor of their line that might suggest their alignment/attitude but not necessarily. Ultimately, their history (to the degree it can be known/researched in-game) determines what people think about a specific dragon's alignment.

Edit to add: The determination of type by color is something human sages have retroactively applied to categorize dragons "scientifically" - but that while widely accepted is dangerously inaccurate.

 

[Voadam]

I did not use that many dragons in 1e and their appearances were fairly brief.

Mostly ones in modules (I remember the black dragon Aulicus in I2 Tomb of the Lizard King and another black dragon in C4 To Find a King) and random encounters (In particular a green dragon flying over the woods outside of Hommlette that the two elven assassins wisely hid from).

I went by the book on such things when they came up.

 

[Mark Hope]

Aulicus is fantastic - two great set-piece encounters if you're lucky (as DM, at any rate). A player new to D&D in my game lost his first character ever to Aulicus, Very memorable beast.

 

[Simon Miles]

There is this weird trope going on right now where people try to signal how comfortable they are with The Other, by making everything exactly like themselves, thereby actually revealing just how uncomfortable they are with the idea of things whose feelings, beliefs, ideas, and culture isn't exactly like their own. It's mildly concerning to me when I see that behavior with respect to non-human ideas, and it's downright scary when I see people misapply the idea of "we're all fundamentally similar" to real people. Real empathy requires us not to just recognize the similarities, but understand and recognize the differences. If you can't do that with something as different from you as a dragon, and instead find yourself pretending a dragon thinks exactly like a (for example) 20 year old upper middle class American - well there is a problem.

Very much with you on that one. I stick with the BTB dragons; acting out their respective alignments and consigned to them, born to them as defined by their genetic heritage. They are so rarely encountered in my campaigns as to be a fairly moot point anyway. I do, however, more widely classify Alignment as a short-hand for describing the values of the society of the creature; hence I am comfortable with the "all orcs are evil" trope. It['s the way they behave and they have reasonable motives for this, it's just their thinking is alien to the predominantly human thiking of the players so it is branded as "wrong" when it is really just "different". But, putting that WHOLE can of worms to one side, Dragons in my world are very magical creatures who feed more and more from the magical fields of the planet while they sleep as they grow older. Their motives and philosophy might be natural, genetic instincts, a moral code indoctrinated into them by their parents, or a subtle game that they play, or even a side-effect of the massive amounts of magical energy they absorb. Whatever the cause, they behave the way they do and try to eat adventurers who come to steal their loot.
And, building on that, someone suggested on a Facebook post that Dragons actually excrete treasure, which is ahy they are lying in a great big pile of it. I like this idea. It fits with my world design quite nicely...

 

[Voadam]

While I used them straight I would have no problems with a 1e game where dragons were not the default book alignments.

In Eberron all dragons are any alignment.

In B/X white and blue dragons are Neutral while black, green, and red are Chaotic.

I've heard of campaigns where each dragon was unique, so you might encounter the one Brass Dragon, or the one Purple Dragon or the one Pan Lung and they might or might not correspond to the book alignment.

 

[Genghis Don]

Just inquiring: Do you ever mix up dragon alignments in your games of 1e?

sometimes, yes. A couple I change the baseline for/permanently, one being the black dragon you mention. 1e MM "
They tend towards the mid point between law and chaos in their evil." I make them out as being Neutral Evil

 

[darjr]

Amnemis said that just isn’t true!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don’t play 1e, but my guidepost with alignment is that beings of the material plane that are intelligent do not have inherent personality traits like breeds of dogs or species of cat. At most, they have drives that push or pull them in some circumstances, so a red dragon’s Lawful Good is a lot more imperious and wrathfully violent than that of a silver dragon.

It’s the outsiders that are their alignment. That is, if a devil becomes chaotic, they become a demon. If they become good, they become a celestial. (This is only for D&D, though. In my own game demons are just as complex as humans, just much older, more alien, and essentially beings of spirit tied to actions and emotions rather than places and things)

Zariel was an Angel, became a devil, and if the PCs take the hard road and succeed, she becomes an Angel again.

But dragons are very strongly of the world, not beings of spirit or the outside planes.

The mirror planes (Feywild and Shadowfel) are odd, in that they exist partly in one state and partly in the other, being neither quite Outsiders nor Material. Aberrations are also odd in that they aren’t necessarily Outsiders as such, but follow the rules of Outsiders, except that they cannot change their state. (Well, don’t tell my Eberron players but they can, they just are destroyed and reform later in a semi-random location, only hazily aware of what they were, mostly in the form of nightmares).

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Just inquiring: Do you ever mix up dragon alignments in your games of 1e?

Nope. Never felt any need to. I can't even specifically recall doing that with ANY monster in D&D, though I'm sure I must have at some point. It severely undermines one of the purposes of alignment if players otherwise have every reason to expect alignment A but you instead substitute alignment B. With incredibly few exceptions, DM's who I have heard of doing so have only done it to unpreventably trick PC's into doing really bad things because of otherwise reasonable expectations, and then seriously punished them for not having detected the DM's scheme to do it.

I would ask, if a monster is going to be labeled as a given alignment, WHY would that monster be given that alignment? What is alignment for if not for everyone to use to understand and predict behavior? Alignment exists at all so that the DM has guidelines for how that monster behaves and for the PC's (if they are given reason to do so when immediate actions or attitudes don't add up) to detect good/evil or actually use Know Alignment and THEN similarly have a guideline for how that monster can be expected to behave. If you then secretly/spontaneously change that for a monster (including by saying that their alignment itself cannot be predicted), especially KNOWN monsters which the PC's have met before and have certain understandings of how their alignments are assigned, you're just digging a pit for the PC's to fall into without a clue that the pit even might be there. For example, it is a known thing in D&D, the "chromatic" dragons are all evil and the "metallic" colored dragons are all good. You turn that understanding against the PC's at your peril if you're the DM because they can no longer USE alignment as the RELIABLE gauge of what ANY species of monsters are going to do.

There are only a couple reasons to do it. One is the RARE exception. You perhaps make one beholder in your entire campaign setting into a LG bartender, or a SINGLE, INDIVIDUAL silver dragon to be one that has become evil. But you have to be careful not to just toss all the other alignments out the window for beholders or dragons in general without providing proper and adequate information TO THE PLAYERS, about what changes you might make and how they might be expected to deal with the new uncertainty. If the PC's meet a dragon are they supposed to just flee both LG and CE dragons? How can they possibly know which they might be dealing with until they're all ROASTED where they stand. Before they would have at least been able to say, "well it's metallic in color - unless it's a one-off creature the world has never heard of, it's going to be good-aligned". But now they get to deal with every dragon as a complete enigma.

So then there's the second reason. It's fine to do it if you WANT that and the players are willing to accept it, simply to have a significantly altered campaign setting, but alignments of monsters are noted for good reasons. They're SUPPOSED to behave in a certain way, predictably (at least after the first-time-ever encounter with them) so that Detect good/evil and Know Alignment are required in every encounter before PC's know what to do. If you want all silver dragons to be evil and all black dragons to be good, go for it. But give players appropriate heads up about such things. Don't just spring it on them without warning. And certainly don't just make alignment a random determination without REALLY good reasons for it. Give PLAYERS the chance to understand why it might be, and the opportunity to protect their PC's from potential disaster due to simple ignorance that you put upon them.