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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9849278" data-attributes="member: 29398">If the following two things were true.....--- I'm designing a 5e or 5e-adjacent setting and-or game--- I'm designing for complete strangers...then what you say here would be quite valid.However, in my personal case neither of those is true.  I'm designing a 1e-adjacent setting and-or game for an as-yet unknown subset of the people I either already know or will have got to know by the time I'm finished.  It's the "as-yet-unknown subset" piece that makes me say, while still designing, that I've no idea who the actual players will be when I'm done: I might or might not know who I'll be inviting in and have no way of knowing whether they'll accept.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.* - the only thing that reined it in a bit was the blessings of random chance: it consistently rolled poorly for its hit points on level-up.It's funny how things turn out.  For story reasons, when designing my current setting/game I was thiiiiis close to banning Elves as PC-playable, as my long-term idea was to set Elves up as (in general) the bad guys.  Kept 'em as PC-playable in the end, but tried to soft-discourage players from taking them.Fast-forward 18 years and of the 8 most-played characters in my game, 5 of them are Elves and a 6th started out as an Elf before a reincarnation accident turned her into a Hobbit (the other two are a Hobbit and a Human).  Even with that, though, the Elves-as-bad-guys story still more or less worked out.</blockquote>

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