Dragon Samurai - How do they work?

[weckar]

Specifically their dragon breath ability. The text is... hazy. To me, at least. Could you help me figure out what I fail to understand?

Dragon Breath (Su): A dragon samurai can use a breath weapon
once per day as a standard action. The type of breath weapon
depends on the color of the dragon samurai’s clan, as noted below.
The breath weapon deals 1d8 points of damage per class level.
The Reflex save DC for the breath weapon is 10 + the dragon
samurai’s class level + the dragon samurai’s Con modifier.So far it seems clear enough. Although a note of what the Reflex actually applies to (half-damage, it seems) would have been nice.

If a dragon samurai already has a breath weapon of the same type,What exactly is considered the same 'type'? Element? Shape? Both?

the damage stacks. For example, if a half-dragon character has a
breath weapon dealing 6d8 points of damage once per day, and
gains a breath weapon of the same type that deals 2d8 points of
damage for being a 2nd-level dragon samurai, her damage increases
to 8d8. She still gets to use her breath weapon only once per day.Yes, except the example uses two breath weapons that both can be used once per day anyway. How does this interact/stack with breath weapons that can be used more often? Does it never stack, always stack, or stack only once per day? Or does it in fact actively reduce the usefulness of your existing breath weapon?:smallconfused:

[Zaq]

How do they work? Very poorly. I'm dreading the inevitable day that Dragon Samurai becomes the Iron Chef Secret Ingredient. You know it's going to happen.

As you've shown, RAW is fuzzy on how it stacks, so pretty much any answer you're going to get here is going to be an interpretation, rather than ironclad rules text. You could make an argument that a breath weapon is only "the same type" if it can only be used once per day, for example, since otherwise (as you pointed out) there's no usage interaction that actually makes sense. It's very rare for a class ability to actually make a character weaker than they were before taking it, and while it's not unheard of (Wilder's Enervation, Incantatrix's requirement of banning an additional school of magic, etc.), it's usually spelled out that the feature is supposed to be an explicit drawback. (There are exceptions—Green Star Adept's capstone, for example.) And there's no explicit rule that a class ability should never make you weaker, or should never make you weaker without spelling out that it's intentional. But if we interpret the rules with the understood guideline that class abilities are not generally supposed to be drawbacks, there's no consistent way of having Dragon Samurai's 1/day breath weapon interact with breath weapons that aren't 1/day, given the "you can still only use the weapon 1/day" text. So the only thing that makes sense to me is that the Dragon Samurai's breath weapon is treated as being entirely separate from non-1/day breath weapons, or maybe that it can be used to stack with one instance per day of your other breath weapon.

In fact, the stated example kind of indicates that it could stack 1/day. It doesn't give extra uses per day, but in the listed example, that means that it doesn't change the use limit at all. So you could read the example as meaning "You can't use your breath weapon any more often than you could before entering Dragon Samurai, but 1/day, you can stack the damage from Dragon Samurai's breath weapon with your existing breath weapon." (The "you can still only use your BW 1/day" text is, in this interpretation, a limit from half-dragon, not a limit from Dragon Samurai.) If you were going for a higher-power game, you could even argue that the stacking isn't necessarily limited to 1/day (because it doesn't change the use limit on your existing BW, but it does state that it stacks for damage), though whether a GM would let that fly is likely dependent on the rest of the party and the intended power level of the game. I don't think that this is necessarily intended, but I also think that the as-written class ability is really horrifyingly underpowered, so I'm sympathetic to rulings that would make it better.

As you stated right away, the rules are fuzzy at best. My guess is that the author(s) of Dragon Samurai never expected that there would be breath weapons usable more than 1/day, since (to my knowledge, and I might be wrong on this point), the only PC-available breath weapon that existed when the Miniatures Handbook was written was half-dragon, which is hard-capped at 1/day. Dragon Shamans, Dragonfire Adepts, and Dragonborn of Bahamut all came after the Miniatures Handbook.

In short, the rules don't really make a lot of sense as written, which may or may not be an artifact of the state of the game at the time that they were written. I don't think it's a logical reading for Dragon Samurai to place additional limitations on preexisting breath weapons, and I can see an argument both in favor of it stacking whenever you use them and in favor of it not stacking more than 1/day (though I'd never play it if it only stacked 1/day, because really, that's horribly underpowered).

[weckar]

Heh. Fair enough. So it's an "Ask your DM" in neon-lit capitals.

Too bad. It seems like a nice flavorful PrC...