Every Dragon Should Have a Hobby

I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way dragons became a bit predictable. Every one of them seems to be sitting on top of a mountain of gold waiting for adventurers to wander in. They'll tell you how insignificant mortals are, breathe fire a couple of times and then, assuming the party survives, everyone helps themselves to the treasure and heads home. There's nothing wrong with that, but if every dragon does it, they all start to blur together. 

The thing that I keep wondering about is what dragons actually do to fill up their days. These are creatures that have been around for centuries. Some of them have watched entire kingdoms rise and fall. Surely they don't wake up every morning, look at the same pile of gold they've been looking at for the last five hundred years and think, "Yep, still happy with my life choices."

I'm a big believer that memorable NPCs have hobbies, and I don't see why dragons should miss out. As I keep mentioning, competitive duck herding is a real thing. I've developed a slightly unhealthy obsession with watching it, and I'm still not entirely sure how it became a sport in the first place. If people can become that passionate about herding ducks, imagine what an ancient dragon might get obsessed with after many hundreds of years.

Maybe your dragon has spent the last century trying to brew the perfect cup of tea because every human version is, frankly, disappointing. Perhaps it collects stories instead of treasure because it worked out long ago that anyone can dig gold out of the ground, but a genuinely good story is hard to come by. I quite like the idea of a dragon that's convinced it's writing the greatest cookbook the world has ever seen, despite the small problem that breathing fire isn't especially helpful in a kitchen.

That's the sort of thing players remember. Years later nobody is talking about how much damage the breath weapon did or whether the dragon had three legendary resistances instead of two. They remember the dragon that insisted they stay for afternoon tea before discussing business, or the one that became genuinely offended when someone criticised its scones.

I think we sometimes spend too much time trying to make dragons mechanically interesting when they've already got everything they need. The Monster Manual tells you how a dragon fights. That's the easy part. The interesting part is deciding who it is, what it's passionate about and what it was doing before a group of adventurers interrupted its afternoon.

Because once your players meet a dragon that has an actual life beyond waiting to be slain, they'll stop seeing it as another monster and start treating it like a character. In my experience, that's when dragons become truly unforgettable.