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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 3914486" data-attributes="member: 7533">Consider the following...I'm certain exactly how long dragonborn are supposed to live, but, for instance, compare a typical human's life span to that of a typical dragon.  A dragonborn (using a human's lifespan) who has to earn his wings and breath through "the experience of trial by fire" -- adventuring, that is to say -- will likely gain those benefits sometime in his late 20's to early 30's.  Even those who take a safer appraoch to gaining the requisite experience will have to gain to traits by the time they're 70+ or risk dying of old age as an immature dragonborn, rather than living for centuries as a true dragon.That does two things...First, it completely bypasses the youngest three or four age categories of dragons, ensuring that true dragons you do run into are exceptionally powerful.  Not only would true dragons start straight off as a juvenile or young adult, but they would also by default (unless you included some sort of fundamental mental change as a part of the molt) have all the class levels accumulated as an "adolescent" dragonborn.Second, it allows you to keep dragonborn as a modestly common race, with all the ancient empires that may entail, while still keeping dragons relatively few and far between.  The limiting factors being: A) As with any race, few will ever take up adventuring the only pratical way to quickly gain the required experience. B) Even amongst those who adventure, fewer will survive until the higher levels needed to gain those feats. C) Not all those dragonborn who gain enough experience may choose those feats and become a dragon.In other words...  Dragonborn are to dragons what tadpoles are to frogs. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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