As Phoenix406 stated, if you have enough food and you hatch the common dragon, you can do the Tales without spending gold. The gold I used was between skipping the tasks requiring Weasel dragon (which I still don't have) and speeding up breeding in the beginning to try to get the Weasel dragon - so it was 50 to skip hatching, 50 to skip raising to level 6 and 12 to skip breeding. The additional 17 or so was through speeding up breeding.
If I can hatch the common dragon, I don't spend any gold.