zanpyr:

I do not think Wyrmrest is against dragon RP, but they are against poorly executed dragon roleplay. Many good dragon RPers will keep their characters’ nature a secret and you won’t know their character is a dragon unless they tell you. 

A fellow on the WRA Forums wrote a guide on playing dragons some time back that I used for making my own dragon and I strongly recommend it to anyone seriously wanting to play a dragon and be accepted by fellow RPers while doing so. I also suggest a guild where the other players are supportive of crack concepts, not a guild of obvious dragons because folks may blow you off on the virtue of being in a guild with a bunch of other almighty lizard type dragons.

The difference between my dragon and the average obvious almighty lizard is my character is a whelp with a pathetic breath weapon who floats in a direction and is actually safer in his mortal form than his dragon form. He’s a trash mob tier character and his magics are about as powerful as the average mage adept. 

What the character does is far more interesting than the fact he is secretly a whelpling. He’s separated from his flight because he’s sickly and if he goes home his flight will cull him so mortals are his flight now (so yes, he does hang around Silvermoon). Before he found someone he could trust he was surviving by working as a fortune teller for money to survive. He still does fortune telling. 

So he walks around and offers to do rune readings for people. I do it at parties and social events too. He does not even use his abilities on the runes, they are just random draws from a bag and him suggesting how each rune applies to someone. And people have a lot of fun with it and the runes are often creepily accurate which makes it all that much neater.

Before i put that the character is a dragon in my tooltip (I put “Bronze Whelpling”) I had hints in his profile that something’s a little off. He’s young and does not know how to do a believable shapeshift so his shapeshift is in the Uncanny Valley. It is a fairly subtle hint. Even after I put the tooltip thing in I have gotten nothing but positive responses. 

So yes. It’s quite possible to play a dragon. There are dragons secretly walking among the mortals right now and most players will never know who they are because they keep their nature a secret

Too many people make dragons to be powerful or special somehow rather than to explore the nature of a person living with a huge secret, or what the world is like through the eyes of one of the flights. Too often the only thing interesting about dragon characters is that they are dragon characters. 

So you want to RP a dragon? Read the guide I linked.

Do not be too powerful. A dragon with powers no greater than a competent mage is not going to turn heads like an all powerful ten thousand year old lizard who looks down his nose at filthy mortals.

Do not be too special, a trash tier whelpling or to a lesser extent a small, mount size drake, is not that special. In fact their vulnerability can be something that makes them interesting.

Do not make being a dragon the only interesting thing about the character. A good test is if you could go through and take the dragon out of your character, are they still interesting?

It’s so much about presentation and execution.

While I’m sorry that people are giving you crap about being a dragon, OP, I can not help but feel like getting crap is probably because you are making a massive mistake somewhere in your execution. It might be a good idea to step back and examine the situation with new eyes. Hit up Krenk’s guide linked above, it helped me a ton and it can help you too.

Some mistakes I see people make are things like being an obvious dragon in Silvermoon with “dragon” in your tooltip and language in your description or character behavior that screams almighty lizard. (If I see an obvious dragon in Silvermoon walking around treating the mortals like crap or having a description that talks about them being a ten thousand year old being bordering on godly power I do not RP with that player. I nope, tun around and walk away.) The people who do this really sour people to the idea of dragon RP. They’re ruining it for the rest of us and I wish they would stop. 

As an aside I put Bronze Whelpling in the playstyle field of my dragon’s tooltip because we only see the obvious godly powered dragons and rarely the ones that are cool solid characters due to the whole keeping it a secret thing and I do think it helps foster that negative viewpoint people have. In a way I’m trying to break stigma by being outright about the dragon thing but the language in my description and how I play the character does not seem to trigger the same nopes as the group of ten thousand year old almighty lizard god dragons who publicly talk about dragon affairs in Farstrider Square.

Play a dragon for the right reasons. Make sure the character is not giving you some unfair advantage. Make the character interesting for reasons other than just being a dragon. Execute the character well. Even consider keeping it a secret. Only a few particularly anal people will care provided you’re playing fair and execute well.