Yes, it's how I view dragons and dragon blood. And I'm fully capable of imagining anything. It's not about being able to imagine a justification for weak dragonborn. It's that such justifications fall short of how I view dragons. The game is Dungeons and Dragons. I've always felt that dragons were weaker than they should be in most of the editions. 3e came very close, though.
Last time I changed over campaigns the previous one finished with 10 players (in two groups run on different nights). The new one, considerably and intentionally pared down, started with 4 players, 2 of whom were brand new to our crew. As the game went on we took in more players, while some left (and then returned); there's been 14 in total over the years with a high point of 8 at once (again in two groups on different nights). Right now it's back down to 4, only one of whom was in the original 4; and he was out for something like 8 years before returning in 2024.
I kinda take it as a given that most DMs (if not running completely stock e.g. AL play) are in large part developing and running a game or style that, if someone else ran it, they'd like to play in. This to me isn't controversial in the slightest.
Easily solved by having people bring their own snacks if they so desire.
Where I'll design the setting I want to run and if others are interested enough to play in it, good. If not, clearly I've done it wrong and need to start over.
Remind me not to come to your parties, they're byof!
If the following two things were true.....Or at the absolute least, you'd want to design it so that the top, say, six or eight most-played races are clearly given space for if players would want to pick them. Right? Like why would you intentionally design a setting knowing that you're excluding stuff folks are very likely to ask for?
As of the last time we got any data (collected in 2023, so the last hurrah of 5.0), that would look like this: Human, Elf, Dragonborn, Tiefling, Half-Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Half-Orc. And this ain't no random showing either. Per the numbers (or rather best guesstimate because they used a crappy, inconsistent scale for a bar graph!!!), humans were somewhere north of 700k, elves somewhere north of 500k, and dragonborn about midway between 500k and 200k--call it 350k. My very rough estimate is that the bar chart contains around 2.8-2.9 million characters, so this indicates dragonborn are shockingly close to 1/8th of all characters, or at least they were in 2023.
Is it really all that wise, if one is drafting a brand-new setting for strangers you've never met, to make no room for an option used by an eighth of all players? Seems like a pretty unwise choice to me.
As for Dragonborn specifically and PC-playable Draconics in general, I was forever put off the entire concept by my experiences with a Half-Dragon in the 3e game I played. That character, played almost entirely for power reasons, turned out to be wildly overpowered for its level* and wasn't exactly a shining advertisement for introducing Draconic PCs into our 1e-like system.
It's funny how things turn out.
