Talk:Dragonborn Variants (3.5e Race)

Ratings

Eiji-kun dislikes this article and rated it 1 of 4.

The mechanics seem... ok. A bit confusing in some places (2d6+Con mod... is that damage?), and I'm not sure why neither the damage more the DC scale well (DC 10 + Con... did you mean DC 10 + 1/2 HD + Con like most breath weapons?) Normally that's just a neutral at best, but the fluff is barren and uninspiring. Clearly these are not the pre-existing 3.5e Dragonborn, they just have the same name. I'm not familiar with 4e dragonborn and the fluff text gives me nothing except some are tall, some are short, and they're some dragony thingery. That drops it down. If you could clean things up and inject 500cc of liquid fluff into it, it'll do better. (EDIT 6-23-14: Just bumping as my opinions still haven't changed over the years. Is this author still about?)

Comments

Looking this over, there are some problems that need to be addressed. Not much here, so this should be short: Under the Personality header... those two sentences just rub me the wrong way. It's basically a kick to the face saying "your character can only have a personality that matches that of it's dragon." That's horribly limiting. Put something else there instead and broaden it. Since we're talking about parent dragons, you make no mention of how we even get dragonborns and what dragons match up to what races of dragonborns. Put that in. Each Fill-in-the-blank-born under Physical Description should mention the parent dragon. If you really want characters to be based off their dragon parentage, provide reference to that parentage. I'm gonna skip talking about the rest of the flavor because it's so sparse and uninteresting. On to mechanics then. Ability modifiers are fine. With an overall penalty, you've got some room to fit in a few extra little bonuses with their flavorful abilities, so let's see what they get. Okay, speeds are... all over the place, and don't balance out to each other or properly for an LA 0/ECL 1 race. A fly speed is not suitable for a starter race. Crank that to a glide with a progression or something, or heck, give them all a glide progression if you have to (which isn't a great option, and not really one I'm for, but it's been done before, so whatever). Why the weird Darkvision range? Darkvision is usually 60 feet (or 120 with Superior Darkvision, which a few creatures have). The breath weapons are a mess and a lot of information is missing from them to make them usable (like what action it takes to use them, if it provokes Attacks of Opportunity in melee, if it's supernatural...). 3/day is also stupid (yeah, I said stupid) for an ability that's likely to be their iconic power. Give it a limitation per minute or a cooldown, like once every 1d4+1 rounds. As Eiji mentioned in his rating, the damage types aren't mentioned either. The fact they don't scale damage-wise is also strange, given that at level 1 it might be pretty nice to deal 2d6+3 electric damage at range on multiple targets, but at level 2, not as awesome, and by level 5 you've got a dragon that keeps his mouth shut. They're also not balanced against each other, including the other "in-the-place-of breath weapon" abilities, which also have vital information missing. I don't even want to talk about Vulnerabilities and Resistances at this point. Also, just put in all the darn elemental and outsider languages, there's like 7 of 'em, it's not hard. That's about it, just that reading and comparing the varieties is difficult with them all mashed into the same block together. Subheaders with what each individual variant gets based of the core dragonborn basics might help. Finally, yeah, this was the short version of commenting. Now, get to work. ---02:59, 25 September 2012 (UTC)