Does anyone know a console command to make dragons start randomly spawning WITHOUT having to do the main quest? I like making a lot of different characters, and only one of them is Dragonborn, but I'd still like to encounter dragons occasionally, since realistically it's a problem that plagues all of Skyrim, and no one is safe.

you could try forcing the quest to be completed, but I think that the quest is the activator for these dragons to spawn randomly. There is the option of spawning your desired number of dragons on the spot but not to continually spawn automatically.

Well you need to complete the first dragon fight quest through the console. That will start dragons spawning

You can stop the MQ right after having slain the first dragon outside Whiterun. At that point, each Dragon altar (10 in total) will have a resident dragon not to mention that dragons will start spawning everywhere. You can then control the random spawning by setting to 1 or 0 a global variable (I don't recall its name) but always after the mentioned event, not before.

This will make random dragons appear even if you haven't done any main quests

"set dragonsreturned to 1"

"getglobalvalue dragonsreturned" to see if its 1

It doesn't seem to spawn any dragons on world walls though, only those that appear after fast travelling and such