Some of the most powerful fantasy imagery revolves around dragons. Aside from the actual dragon itself, dragonhide armor is one of the most iconic fantasy items there is.

Unfortunately, most references to them in core rule books leaves a lot to be desired.

Today I want to look at how dragonhide armor fits into an economy and the world in general. Tomorrow I’m going to get my hands dirty and get into the details.

Economics 101

What’s the first rule of economics?

Supply vs. Demand

The reality of the situation is that there’s not a lot of dragons in most worlds – and thankfully so.

Our general safety aside, it also stands to reason that if there’s not a lot of dragons, then there’s not a lot of dragonhide. Beyond the issue of availability, I’ve yet to encounter a dragon in any literature that didn’t have a problem giving up it’s hide for some humanoid to make some armor.

Getting The Hide

There’s two of ways of getting hide to make armor from – buying it or killing your own dragon. Killing your own dragon is the usual course most adventurers take because it’s pretty much the quintessential D&D adventure and a great high-level goal.

Buying it tends to really cheapen the experience for most adventurers and is rarely considered. Beyond that, most economies won’t have spare sets of dragonhide armor floating around to be purchased. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime type of item. There’s simply not enough dragons nor adventurers skilled enough to kill them to see any sort of regular influx of dragonhide into a campaign.

Even if we take a setting like Dragonlance, where dragons are prolific, they’re not dying every day. And then when they do die, their skin would be something coveted by the wealthy and powerful everywhere. Very few adventurers can stand up to the wealth and influence of a kingdom’s ruler. An item like this will become desired not just for it’s combat benefits, but also for the political gains it affords. Think of big CEOs and their yachts, cars and other “toys” that cost countless millions of dollars that ultimately serve as little more than a status symbol.

Possession is a reflection of power in many cultures – ours is no different.

Negative Effects Of Dragonhide

You may be thinking to yourself, “Huh? What negative effects?” and you likely wouldn’t be alone. Here’s some things to ponder.

Imagine yourself a dragon. You’re an ancient race of highly intelligent and infinitely powerful creatures that trace their time on whatever planet you’re on to before there were even any other races present. Your understanding of the universe is unparalleled and you know no equal except from amongst your own race. In other words, you have one hell of an ego – and it’s totally warranted.

Beyond that, dragons on the whole are horribly ethnocentric. Even the weakest, most useless dragon (by dragon standards, of course) is immeasurably better than the best of any other race. It’s a dragon after all.

Given that, if you saw some puny humanoid wearing the skin of a fallen dragon – even if they were an enemy of yours – you’d likely feel initial resentment. I don’t see how all but the most successful and powerful adventurers wearing dragonhide can have a positive encounter with all but a few exceptional dragons.

Most of these points will fall to the discretion and responsibility of the DM. They are, after all, responsible for creating and properly playing the dragon’s personality. However, it’s something that the average adventurer should consider as well – dragons rarely enjoy dragon slayers.

The Color Makes The Dragon

As we all know, dragons are color-coded for our convenience. The chromatic dragons are what we consider the “bad guys” and the metallic dragons are what we consider the “good guys”.

For the most part, armor is only made from the chromatic dragons. This makes sense because the majority of adventurers are “good guys” and you don’t go around wearing the skin of other incredibly powerful and iconic good guys if that’s the camp you want to be in. Despite a dragon’s ethnocentricity, this is the safest path to go if you’re going to be encountering other dragons.

There’s no reason that you couldn’t wear the skin of a metallic dragon if you’re a neutral or evil character (or have been somehow gifted an item from a good dragon – though the fact that they’d make an armor out of a fellow good dragon for a humanoid would be something the DM would need to sort out). However, in all but the rarest cases, this would likely result in very negative reactions from pretty much all other good dragons that were encountered. Since evil dragons are evil dragons, it certainly wouldn’t improve your chances with them either.

The whole point of this is that chances are you’re only going to be interested in dragonhide from one of the types of dragons – chromatic or metallic. And in that group, you’re likely going to have a preference as to what type of dragon in particular (red, gold, black, green, silver, etc.).

You’ve effectively taken an already rare creature (dragons in general) and made it statistically impossible to locate a specific one suitable for your desires. Luckily, adventurers have a way of tweaking the randomness of the universe. As you’ll see tomorrow, there are also concerns about the size (age category) of the dragon in terms of what size armor it can produce.

On The Morrow

Tomorrow I’m going to go into pricing, enhancements and other crafting details.

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 9:16 am.
Viewed 496 Times