 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and fun fact about me, I think that dragons are dope. My favorite toddler show is Dragon Tales, my favorite childhood game is Spyro, and my favorite toy store is Bad Dragon. Moreover, I am just tickled pink to finally be able to talk about the closest thing to a scale that the core rulebook will let you become the Dragonborn. I'm gonna talk all about our little dragon hoarders from their stats to their facts, and I'm gonna give some homebrew rules that'll help you be a dragon in your own games. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I've never even read a single chapter of Aragon, then feel free to play your Dragonborn however you want. But real quickly, I want to give a shout out to my new patrons this month. Hingra, Soyant, Joshua, Wellman, Brandon, King, Travis, Flat, Rose, Blyman, Sean, Hans, Richard, Alator, Temple, Wynno. Thank you for your continued patronage. With any luck and your continued support, I'll never have to do anything resembling rapping ever again. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, Dragonborn are medium-sized humanoid creatures with scales all over their bodies and the top part of a dragon for a suit on their head at all times. On that much we can agree on, but that is pretty much where the similarities end. See, Dragonborn have this criminally small amount of information about them, which means that it's largely up to the players to fill in the gaps of knowledge that the writers just decided to leave out. For instance, where do they come from? Well, in Dragonlands they came from nowhere, in the Forgotten Realms they come from the planet's weird alternate-dimension sister planet, and in Greyhawk they happen when a cultist gets drunk one night and decides to throw magic at an egg until its dragon mother shows up and wonders why its child is now covered in seasoning and mustard. Since Dragonborn didn't show up as a core race until 4th edition and didn't even exist before 3rd edition, the more inclusive settings have been trying to explain why now one-tenth of the population are strangely obsessed with DeviantArt, while the other settings just try to get by on whistling and looking the other way and hoping that you stop staring soon. And it doesn't get any less confusing the more you try to read into them, either due to the book going back on its own statements, or because the people who play Dragonborn are a cool kids who don't need to read the single page and a half that they are provided with to understand their characters better. Did Dragonborn have tails? The book says no, but everybody gives them one anyway, even though tails are supposed to be the property of the legally distinct half-dragon, so who knows? The book also says that their scale shade only comes in your favorite shades of brown, except for those times that it doesn't and actually matches up with your draconic color, but people only ever use the colors and metals anyway, so that little fact is completely ignored in favor of having Sparkles the rainbow dragon ride through the countryside on her majestic unicorn. The only cultural thing about the Dragonborn that the book mentions at all is that they are a clan-slash-tribe-based society that cares about the clan TM, and anything that isn't the clan TM can go to hell. Other people? Not part of the clan! Gods? Not part of the clan! Other Dragonborn? Hey guys, I'm starting this new clan community and it would be really cool if you showed up. Here's a link to my clan discord where a super small but super chill community thinks in advance for checking it out. And the rest of the world doesn't know what to make of the Super Robot Lizard Team Hyper Force either. A normal person will see a Dragonborn walking around and think that that must be just what a dragon actually looks like, or they'll think that it's a monster with a serious fetish for Skyrim. The reactions will honestly mostly be decided by what a town or person thinks of dragons as a whole. It's like asking what they think of Elementals after seeing Genasi, or Snacious D after seeing Tieflings. Sure, people get the idea of what a Dragonborn is supposed to be, but you can't just walk into a group of people with nothing but your helmet and gloves on, and expect your black t-shirt and pants to disguise the fact that your whole concept just isn't thought through enough. Even worse, mechanically, Dragonborn are honestly super shafted as well, being by far the worst static outclass in the entire history of 5e, even more so than the orc. Hear me out for a second. Dragonborn get a plus 2 to strength and a plus 1 to charisma. They can speak draconic, and then depending on which color or metal of dragon that they gain their ancestry from, they will have both resistance to an element, as well as the ability to breathe that element once per short rest. Now, the problem with the Dragonborn is that that is all they get. The extra language, who cares? Everybody gets that, but the real meat is supposed to come from the elemental powers bestowed upon them by Dragon Dad. You may look at the breath attack and think, hey, that's cool, I can breathe fire, except that you can only do it once per short rest, and the damage is equivalent to a low power first level spell. In practice, it feels like you're setting up for an amazing powerful ability that's going to turn the tide of battle, only for you to use it, take a roll on those dice, and deal about 7 damage to everyone you hit. The enemies will have just enough foresight to look at you and be all like, hey, hey man, are you okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah guy, I'm fine, I'm just getting warmed up, don't worry about it. The resistance to an element is okay, I mean, tieflings get resistance to fire, and that's cool, but honestly it's so really gonna show up that it may as well not even be there most of the time. Think back to all the games that you've played and really tell me, all the times that you've been hit with lightning damage, or acid damage, or cold damage. Is it really good enough to be one of the only two unique things that a Dragonborn gets? But have no fear, because I didn't just spend the last two and a half minutes complaining about something if I don't intend to fix it, so here are a few options to help balance everything out. The first easiest option is to just change the breath weapons so that you can do it a number of times equal to your constitution modifier, because doing it more often means that you're getting more instances of area damage out over time. My other option, and the one that I personally use, is to crack open your copy of Xanathar's Guide, find the dragon hide feat in the list of racial feats, and slap that bad boy with it at the very start. Some people might freak out over, oh, why are you advocating for giving someone a free feat at the first level, but honestly, the feat doesn't actually really do much. It increases your strength, Conor Charisma, by one. It sets your unarmored AC to 13 plus dex, and it gives you an unarmed claw attack that does 1d4 plus strength. These are less than impressive, because who cares about innate AC or claws when they are completely circumvented by the armor and weapons they almost everybody gets anyway. But the point is that it FEELS like you're getting more, and the AC increase can save Wizards and Sorcerers a spell slot when they don't have to cast Mage Armor anymore. The damage resistance doesn't ever really need to be changed, because it's still nice to have, it's just not enough to carry the race on its own, and with any luck, using either of those minor tweaks or even coming up with a fix on your own will lead to a new generation of kids who think that this is the apex of cool. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out my discord, please don't sell your eggs to a white-haired barbarian lady who will only lead to heartache 8 years later, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford enough gems to get past that stupid bear that won't let me save the dragon realms. But yeah, Davi out.