Originally Posted by
Pokonic
All Dragons are Special.
By that, I mean that there are so many traits a individual dragon may have, scale color means diddly squat.
You see, when a dragon is in a egg, it grows by syphoning ambient magic from around it. This, along with local envrioment fectures, genetics, and random chance, tends to mean most dragons are easily spotted from crowds of other dragons.
Also, dragons, rather than by scale color, see there "kind" as most of there extended family. For instance, the dragons of, say, the Emerald Forest are known for greenish, almost rootlike scale ridges on there belly and a tendancy to have poison-breath, while the family known as the Stonescales have distinct large, flat scales and tend to be more compact than most. Hence, a gathering of a extanded family might literaly consist of every creature with the Dragon subtype in the monster manual, exept there all vaugly friendly with each other and have roughly the same body traits.Scale color is usualy only useful in determining a individual dragons origin, roughly the same as telling which contanent someone's ancesters came from.Breath and powers gained from age catagories is even less useful for identification, because those are always influenced by where there egg was layed. A red dragon from the frozen north would still have a frosty cone of breath and has ice-related powers.
As such, a pesudodragon from the local swamp have more in common with his half-fey (which would have been gained from being layed in a fey-controled area) three-headed white-scaled uncle who breaths poison who lives a few miles away than another pesudodragon who lives in the same swamp who, by contrast, has a fire-breathing Linnorm for a mother(who rightly sees the pesudodragon as a runt compared to a fellow sibling who looks almost exactly like her). It gets even more fun if said uncle and mother get together and have there own brood.
Ahh, the fun I have had with my players with this.:smallbiggrin: