Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6793583" data-attributes="member: 2067">As someone who is a bit ambivalent on DB in general, my hypothesis is that the issue is principally one of aesthetics. DB didn't necessarily "fit" with what people saw D&D as. There's a lot of D&D out there that is heavily reliant on Tolkeinesque imagery or with the "Mundane + Magic" assumptions that see even dwarves, elves, and halflings as strange beings rarely seen by others. 4e's presentation of a more cosmopolitan racial makeup was probably unwelcome for those players. Combine that with the Edition Wars entrenching ideologies, and you have a race that has become something of an icon, regardless of if that's fair or not. In FR especially, the resentment over the 4e treatment of the setting made the DB the vanguard of punching around a beloved setting - they just dropped in from Outer Space. This would be part of why dragonborn and tieflings are in the "uncommon races" section in the 5e PHB. It's subtle permission from the game to ignore them if they don't fit your idea of what a setting entails. And sometimes all you need is a little bit of official validation to feel welcomed.For me personally, "dragonborn" has always seemed like a linguistically awkward word, and the "Proud Warrior Race Guys" of 4e never grabbed me (the 3e "ascended mortals" even less so), but the 5e dragonborn (as a continuation of the 4e dragonborn, but now without a homeland) are growing on me, thanks to their narrative of diaspora and refugee status, which isn't a common narrative trope trucked in for D&D races (it's been done, but it's not over-done). Unlike the Proud Warrior Race or the Former Slave Race or other similarly over-done narratives, there's interesting space there to explore some unique kinds of heroes particular to their time and place and not simply generic anybodies. That's an interesting proposition to me.</blockquote>

Verification