Quote Originally Posted by Remuko View Post
Sorry if this ends up sounding nitpicky, but Chromatic and Metallic Dragons, at least in 3.5 are not "alignment locked by their type". Always X alignment just means exceptions are rare, but any creature with free will (and mental ability score to enable such) can change to any alignment.
Exceptions don't make rules though. Metallic and Chromatic are specifically denoted to be X alignment per their type. On the other hand, Lung dragons are specifically noted to not be that way in the description of them. Which means, exeptions or not, the general truth of things stands. It's not any different than saying "Humans have two legs and two arms". It remains true, even if rare individuals are born without. Specific examples do not, and never will, make general truths not true. It only means that we have to be intelligent enough to understand the simple fact that exceptions exist. Which, we have understood for a very long time, hence the very old saying "there's an exception to every rule".

People speak generally. If we had to list every single exception of every single thing every time we talked, we'd never actually get a conversation done. Also, alignment was a lot stricter in the older versions than it is in the newer ones. To the point that for those rare exceptions? 3/3.5 lore has rituals that dragons would undergo to change their color to match whatever alignment they were so that they very much still did fit into a simple "type". Rarely undergone, but also rarely needed so... how many of the exceptions did it, VS didn't do it? I couldn't say.

Could you meet a dragon that hadn't yet undergone such a ritual? Sure. Was it likely? Not really. So, in every effective manner that matters for general conversation... they're "locked" to their type. If you want to talk about specific rare instances that are probably less than 1% of the population, that's a whole different topic. But yes, I'm aware that "always" really means, "one can assume it to be some high number, to the point where it may as well be well over 90% of the time, or close enough to where it doesn't make any difference". Mostly because that's also what it tends to mean in real life too. I simply pointed it out because, as previously mentioned, it was specifically noted on their general description.

Bascially, general trumps specific, unless what is being discussed is a specific instance of a thing. That said, don't worry, it's fine - I do appreciate the attempt to pass along the information, I'm just already aware. If it wasn't obvious from my overly long response, I am also "nitpicky" when it comes to making sure the facts are correct, lol. So no worries at all! Not sure if you were aware of the ritual for color change that they had available too, so maybe that buit might be new to you, maybe not. Regardless, don't worry about me getting offended at someone trying to just give information, I'm all for it!