EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
That's the general consensus, or pretty close to it, yeah. The PHB Dragonborn is somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of a "proper" race, and is noticeably behind other PHB options, such as the Dwarf and especially the Mountain Dwarf (two feats for stats, a third feat for extra weapon proficiencies, a fourth feat for medium armor proficiency, and darkvision). Whereas here you have the Dragonborn sitting with two, maybe two and a half feats if you're feeling especially generous.
And yet people keep saying that players only choose Dragonborn to be powerful....even though Dragonborn are more popular than Dwarves (collectively!) on D&D Beyond....
For my part at least--and I understand this is a risk of opening up the vast can of wyrms (not just worms...) that SEVERAL previous threads have touched on--I think a lot of people just have a strangely low tolerance for what "human-like but not human" means. That is, anything which can use the same logical processes as humans, learn to speak human languages (perhaps with a physiological quirk like long s's sounds for reptilians), and struggle through similar existential/philosophical dilemmas as humans....is automatically exactly equivalent to a human in every possible way, and thus could be perfectly substituted by actual humans with no noticeable difference. And that's just...really strange to me, because there's plenty of both brute physiology and more subtle stuff you can do to make things more interesting that wouldn't work if you just swapped in normal humans.
E.g. Dragonborn are hatched, though they still suckle after hatching, and mature much more quickly than humans (walking within days, for example). This radically changes things like gender roles, since women can go off to war as long as they're not carrying eggs. It can even have subtle effects on things like literature and metaphor: instead of cradles, shells; metaphors about the fast-fading flower of youth are likely. Prisons can't be designed in such a way that their bars could be breached by repeated application of breath weapons.
Eladrin can all teleport. This pretty seriously changes the way society is going to design buildings, in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, you can have much more outlandish architecture when people can just teleport to any spot they can see. On the negative side, high fences are useless deterrents and prisons cannot rely on mere iron bars to hold individuals in.
You can do similar things with other races (e.g., what does having prehensile tails alter about tiefling culture?), and can also go for more subtle things that aren't directly relevant to adventuring. Maybe dragonborn, because their ENT passages are toughened in order to withstand the force of their breath weapons, tend to have a more muted sense of taste--and thus their food is more powerfully-flavored (particularly spicy) compared to other cultures', while Elves, who have especially sensitive and refined palates, tend to be seen as making very "bland" food because its flavors are very subtle and layered. Maybe Dwarves, because of their resistance to poisons, make a habit of creating dishes that are slightly poisonous--to dwarves, it's no big deal, but dwarven rations are not just unpleasant-smelling, they're actually dangerous for non-dwarves to eat. Etc.
Yes, you can create a world where there's absolutely no difference whatsoever culturally or behaviorally between distinct D&D races. But...why would you, when you can pretty easily create some very neat things by NOT doing so?
