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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6795522" data-attributes="member: 22779">To be fair to EGG though, he was writing this at a time when there wasn't a huge body of work in the game to draw on.  Compared to now where you have decades of material and thousands, and thousands of pages spread across dozens of writers, all detailing the myth and background of the Forgotten Realms milieu.  The advice that "you are virtually on your own with regard to monsters as player characters" isn't true any more.  There's a ton of advice for doing this.  Note, his issue is more with the idea of playing dragons or demons and he freely accepts the idea of demi- and semi- humans in the campaign.  I'd say Dragonborn are far, far closer to semi-humans than actual dragons or demons.  His issues stem mostly from balance and practical reasons which I completely agree with.  But, he's also not really talking about humanoid characters.In any case, the advice is very outdated.  Even the idea of the "mostly human group" didn't last that long.  Look at Dragonlance.  Of the 6 original Heroes of the Lance, half of them aren't human.  Half-elf, kender, dwarf, and 3 humans (Caramon, Raistlin and Sturm).  And that was being created pretty much at the same time as the AD&D DMG.  Moving forward, you have numerous generic books - Complete Humanoids, Savage Species, etc - detailing mechanics for playing non-humans and most published settings came out with more and more non-human races to be played.  3e took a serious stab at making solid mechanics for playing truly non-humanoid characters with some degree of success - the Level Adjustment system did work, most of the time.  4e took a different tack and tried to tie racial abilities to feats and levels - again, with some degree of success.  From a purely mechanical standpoint, there's no particular issue with Dragonborn.  It's not like they're over or under powered.  They're mechanically perfectly fine.For my own FR games, I'd go the direction of Dragonborn simply being yet another race and no one really has any issue with it.  Treat them like Chewbacca from the original SW Trilogy (Han Solo's best friend is a seven or eight foot gorilla and not one person reacts in the slightest to seeing him, despite the fact that not one other Wookie appears in any of the original trilogy movies).  Sure, he's weird looking, but, then again, this is a fantasy setting with a bajillion sentient species floating around.  He's not that much weirder looking than a half orc or a Saurial (which live in the Dalelands, not that far from the Sword Coast and have been there for quite some time).  So, yeah, I'd have no real issue with a DB character wandering around the setting.</blockquote>

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