Thursday, August 14, 2008

Dragonborn Bewbs

This is an old topic that started some serious flamewars a few months ago, so it's probably best that I'm posting it automagically while I'm out of town. I have no desire to revisit the madness, but I want to offer up a single thought about it.

I suspect that the reason dragonborn females in the 4e core books have breasts is simply because:
  1. The art director told the artist(s) that we had to be able to tell the genders apart.
  2. The artists followed that directive in the simplest way possible - by differentiating the genders of dragonborn the same way they do every other race.
And that's too bad. I think someone seriously dropped the ball on this one. I don't think the dragonborn breasts, the way they're depicted, do their job of differentiation all that well. A couple of images in the PHB I dunno what gender the subject is. I also think that with ten seconds of thought they could
have come up with something that would have done the job better and caused a lot less geek controversy. That's about how long it took Jen and I to come up with the suggestion below when the subject came up between us.

I think female dragonborn should look just like the males we have in the books (maybe with smoother heads - that seems to be another subtle differentiating feature) and the males should have frills.

How cool would that be? How badass would the iconic male dragonborn paladin look, charging out of the page at you, with his freaking frills flared out past his shoulders? While we're at it we can give them to the male dragons to flare when they use their breath weapons (and court female dragons).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep, I love that. Ruffs would be great - much better than having breasts on a Dragon. That's just/wrong/! I like the idea of a Dragonborn Rogue dandy dressed in Renaissance clothes and immaculately preened ruff :)

Similarly, I thing it's silly that Dragonborn don't have tails, but Tieflings do. I guess that was to differentiate Dragonborn from Lizardmen, and make the Tieflings more like Nightcrawler. Whatever.

In our campaign, Dragonborn look like upright dragonmen (Draconian, even) and Tieflings have horns but no tail. So there, Wizards of the Coast.

Gregor LeBlaque said...

Welcome, greywulf! Yet another blogger I read on a regular basis stops by! Kewl!

For some reason the tail thing never bothered me either way. Of course, the dragonboobs thing didn't bother me as much as it seemed to rile up so many others. I never even thought about it until I read a post on it somewhere, and then my reaction was kind of a puzzled "Huh? Well, that's a little dumb, don't you think?"

Joseph said...

Heaven forbid WotC/Hasbro actually do anything that would not only make sense, but be really cool and ground-breaking all at the same time...

Donny_the_DM said...

Better yet, male reptiles are often larger and more colorful. The females of a large number of species are usually small and plain.

Male = metallic?
Female = Chromatic?

Seems true in real life if you catch my drift :)

Somehow I don't think the "aesthetic" of breasts works well with this race. I mean C'mon...their not even mammals!

Gregor LeBlaque said...

@joseph: Pretty much my thought exactly.

@donny: If you click the "revisit the madness" link* in the original post and browse some of the discussions linked there, you will find apologists actually arguing that they are mammals (or at least some other magical genotype that is neither mammal nor reptile)...

* The Art of the Near TPK is not responsible for any mental anguish or injury that may result from clicking that link. You have been warned.