Your High-Level NPCs Should Ride Dragons

This is not a Dragonlance post!

I imagine that the most common reaction when encountering a dragon in D&D is to kill it. After all, we're playing as heroes! (Evil) Dragons are greedy tyrants who lord over the weaker beings of their domain. They are a monstrous force of nature which is best expunged from the earth! We might also be motivated to lay claim to their substantial hoard of treasure, sure, but either way that dragon is definitely going to be dead. It's not like we're going to enslave it and sell it to the highest bidder, right?

...Right?

From the AD&D Monster Manual:

What's that? No, it's fine. I just wasn't expecting it to be assumed that larger towns and cities "usually" have a market for dragons, like people there are commonly anticipating adventurers rolling into town with a battered dragon on a leash for sale.

The rules for subduing a dragon are as follows:

(Interestingly, silver and gold dragons can't be subdued. Neither can Bahamut or Tiamat, obviously. That means the most valuable dragon you can subdue is an ancient red dragon, which will earn you 8,800 to 70,400 gold pieces! It's worth noting that OD&D also has rules for subduing dragons, but only in AD&D is the implication that this is common practice.)

At the end of each round, the DM rolls percentile dice against the percentage of its total hit points a dragon has taken in damage in the combat to that point. On a success, the dragon is subdued. Note that there are no penalties to attack or damage rolls for attempting to subdue the dragon versus attacking to kill it. Since killing the dragon necessitates reducing it to zero hit points, whereas subduing it has the potential to defeat it much sooner, it's actually easier to subdue the dragon than to kill it. And you get to keep it or sell it! Subduing dragons is the optimal strategy!

Well sort of. Read on:

Subdued dragons must be well treated and given ample treasure and freedom. What is "ample freedom" to a subdued dragon that is simultaneously "strongly held"? I'm not sure. Can you give a subdued dragon treasure from its own plundered hoard? Or is that insulting? Older and more powerful dragons are "less likely" to remain subdued, and intelligent, spellcasting dragons are "not likely" to remain subdued (each dragon type has a percentage chance of "speaking" - which I interpret as being "intelligent" - and using magic). Evil dragons dislike Good masters and Good dragons dislike non-Good masters.

Aside from Good dragons being 50% more likely to kill/escape from a non-Good captor, not much concrete guidance is given. What's the baseline chance for a subdued dragon to attempt to escape? Nonetheless, the implication is clear - if you want to capture and sell a dragon into slavery, its better to get a young dumb one. If you're Evil or want to sell a dragon to an Evil patron, make sure you bag an Evil dragon. If you're "Good" or want to sell the dragon to a "Good" patron, get a Good dragon. Good people batter and enslave intelligent beings, right?

Fools! A dragon that size would have made a perfect slave!

The point being, if you're going to fight a dragon anyway, subduing it is relatively easier than killing it. Actually keeping it subdued long enough to bring it to town (where there is apparently a ready and waiting market eager to bid on it) is likely an adventure of its own. Suddenly the ancient red dragon seems like more trouble than it's worth. You might wish you killed it.

Fortunately for you, dragons are apparently known for their cowardice:

I'll be honest, when I think "dragon", "cowardice" is not the first word that comes to mind! Are dragons the most cowardly of all monsters? If the ability to be subdued is the definition of cowardice, that may very well be the case! The only other monster in the Monster Manual which is explicitly capable of being "subdued" is the giant beaver kit (a baby giant beaver) - when subdued, they are, of course, also sold into slavery. Are dragons as cowardly as baby giant beavers? Perhaps! The word "cowardice" appears just once in the AD&D Monster Manual, in the entry on dragons.

This is a bit disingenuous, as other monsters can be captured and sold, such as blink dog pups and griffon and hippogriff fledglings - but those are all babies! Dragons are, as far as I can tell, the only monsters which, as adults, are explicitly capable of being subdued and sold in this manner.

The DMG does have a general rue for striking to subdue:

This suggests that other monsters can be subdued as well, but even this section says, "Go see Dragons. They're so well known for their cowardice that there are special rules for beating them up and selling them, and every big town and city basically expects you to show up with one at some point!"

All this is to say, give your high-level NPCs dragons! The text clearly indicates that not only is the subdual of dragons possible, but it's common enough that larger towns and cities usually have a market for them. The implication is that people in big towns and cities own dragons!

I know some games operate under the assumption that the player characters are the most important people in the world and there are no NPC character-types more powerful than them, meaning dragons are only subdued and brought to town when the PCs do so, but this is boring! And also not what's implied by AD&D's setting wherein high-level character-type NPCs can be found delving dungeons and ruling castles scattered throughout the wilderness!

Maybe once in a campaign, the players might encounter a dragon and think to subdue it. They might keep it for themselves or sell it. That's all well and good, but there are other character-type NPCs out there in the world doing the same thing. The player characters have not cornered the market on dragon slavery!

In a previous post, I did some rough calculations and estimated that there is probably one dragon per 600 hexes, which is one per every six cities (of which there is generally 1 per every 100 hexes). Therefore, you might reason that one high-level NPC per six cities is likely to have a pet dragon (the dragon is likely to match the NPC's alignment and is unlikely to be intelligent or cast spells). However, that only reflects the likely distribution of dragon lairs in the wilderness when play begins. And it seems a bit sparse for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, no?

Well, what if the wilderness population of dragons is low at the start of play because throughout the history of the region, the wild dragons of the world have been captured by adventurers and made to serve high-level masters? Suddenly, the possible number of dragons in your world can be much greater! How many should there be, then? I don't know. There are no roads here.

Next time you roll a random encounter with a dragon when the party is exploring the wilderness, maybe put a high-level NPC rider on its back. In fact, if you've already stocked your region with monster lairs and no dragon lair is present, I would venture to guess that every random encounter with a dragon is in actuality an encounter with a dragon and its high-level master and rider. Or maybe there's a 50% chance that it's a dragon which has just made its way into the region and is looking to establish a lair. That's cool too.

Maybe every once in a while a dragon rider takes flight over the city, causing the player characters, their hirelings and henchmen, and the common folk to go running for cover:

These dragon riders are for certain a menace to society! Won't somebody stop them?

Just remember that the older these dragons get, the better they need to be treated, or else they're likely to escape back into the wild and, presumably, take vengeance upon their captor. Maybe that's why the castle is totally deserted.

Maybe it is a Dragonlance post!