I’ve been playing roleplaying games, including various editions of Dungeons & Dragons, since 1977. And in all that time, a question has been nagging at me, which nobody has been able to answer. Why are there Good dragons in the D&D Monster Manual?

The first edition Monster Manual came out in 1978, and — as you’d expect from a game with “Dragons” right in the name — devoted five pages to various types of dragons. There were acid-spewing black dragons, poisonous green dragons, frost-breathing white dragons, lightning-shooting blue dragons, and of course the classic fire-breathing red dragons. They were evil, greedy, proud, and often very clever — perfect top-tier monsters.

A Brass Dragon from the original Monster Manual. This picture is almost certainly copyrighted and trademarked up the wazoo so you’ll probably just burst into flames from looking at it.

But then there were the “metallic” dragons. The copper, brass, bronze, silver, and gold dragons — not to mention the singular and immensely powerful platinum dragon Bahamut. They had their own breath weapons, their own life stages, and were generally very powerful opponents, except for one feature: they were all different flavors of Good in alignment.

That by itself was kind of odd. In the European mythology and folklore, and fantasy fiction published before 1978, dragons were generally wicked. The archetype in modern literature is Smaug, the chiefest and greatest of calamities, from The Hobbit. The only non-evil dragons I know of in that era’s fiction were the dragons in Anne McCaffrey‘s science fiction series about the dragon-riders of the planet Pern. They were clever, but served more as the trusty flying mounts of the dragon-riders than as important characters in their own right.

Asian folklore has benevolent dragons — though even there some of them can be dangerous. But the dragons of eastern Asia are very different physically from the metallic dragons of the Monster Manual, except for the rather Asian-looking picture of the gold dragon. Asian dragons later got their own write-ups in the Oriental Adventures book of 1985. Other than the gold dragons, I don’t think the good metallic dragons were supposed to represent the “eastern” versions. Certainly the brass, copper, silver, and bronze dragons look entirely “western” in anatomy.

There’s a sense that the Good dragons are there to “balance” the Evil ones. But that’s kind of odd, too. Other powerful Evil creatures in D&D don’t have balancing counterparts. Liches, the might Evil undead sorcerers, don’t have Good undead to oppose them. Nor do vampires, or beholders, or manticores. After all, the whole point of the Monster Manual is to list potential adversaries for your players’ D&D characters. The characters are the “balance” for all these monsters.

And that’s my big problem with the Good dragons: at best they are useless. They have to be, both in the game setting and in play. In the world of Greyhawk, or Eberron, or wherever, if there are benevolent creatures as powerful as the metallic dragons around, then the question arises, why don’t they deal with the Evil dragons, liches, vampires, beholders, manticores, et cetera? Superman is a powerful Good being in comic books, and he doesn’t just sit around in his Fortress of Solitude — he goes out and helps people. That’s what being Good means, right? (See my own thoughts on alignment here.)

So the Good dragons have to be “nerfed” in various ways to give the player characters genuine threats to face. They’re busy. They can’t be bothered. They’re preoccupied with personal rivalries. You’re the only ship in the quadrant, so to speak. So why have them in the setting at all?

It gets worse if you’re actually confronting them for some reason. Imagine you’re meeting with the boss of an illegal drug cartel. He’s got gunmen at his side and has all the local police paid off or intimidated. Meeting with El Jefe is going to be a scary experience. He could have you killed, or tortured. Maybe even threaten your family, too. Just surviving that meeting feels like an accomplishment. Meeting a red dragon would have the same scary vibe.

Now imagine you’re meeting with Mr. Mark Smucker. He’s easily as rich as the cartel boss. He’s got hundreds of donut shops under his control, factories making jam and pastries, fleets of trucks delivering snack products. He may not threaten local governors, but he can probably get them to return his calls promptly. Meeting with Mr. Smucker might be interesting, possibly fattening, but you won’t be scared. The worst he can do to you is not offer you some delicious snacks, or decline to donate to whatever cause you’re trying to raise funds for. You’re not going to wind up in a shallow unmarked grave.

That’s the problem. If a Good dragon really is Good, then the worst it can do — just like Mr. Smucker — is nothing. And since that’s mostly what Good dragons are shown doing all the time (so that there are still dangerous monsters in the world for your character to fight), that means encountering one is kind of boring. They may offer you gold or magic to do some task for them, but that’s not very different from a human king or wizard making the same request. And in those cases the question of “why don’t you do it yourself?” is easier to answer.

So: what are Good dragons for? Well, I think I know. In the original Monster Manual there are two and a half pages devoted to stats and writeups for the metallic dragons. As a sometime roleplaying game designer myself, I can attest that when you’ve got 112 pages to fill and you’re on deadline, that’s nothing to sneeze at.