Almarck
2015-12-27, 11:38 AM
Alright, so, you want to be a dragon? And not as a buff or as a capstone ability that requires 20 levels? You want to be an actual dragon!
Well, I have something you might be interested in.
Enter Rite Publishing’s In the Company of Dragons , a book detailing a race/class combo designed specifically to let players play a dragon from level 1 all the way up to level 20, growing in size and power all the way.
You get to be a dragon! And it’ll be my job here to show you how to make the best dragon you can.
The majority of the data can be found on d20pfsrd, if you are interested. However, this is only a free sample published on an SRD side; there much more detailed rules to be found in the official book release, which is available in PDF format in a variety of sites, including d20pfsrd’s store and Drivethrurpg.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/3rd-party-races/rite-publishing/dragon-taninim (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/3rd-party-races/rite-publishing/dragon-taninim)
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/rite-publishing/draconic-exemplar (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/rite-publishing/draconic-exemplar)
For the purposes of this guide, I will be covering:
-the Taninim race with the important racial traits.
-the Dragon Racial Paragon Class in full detail
-If a piece of information is not listed in the pfsrd, I generally will not be listing full details and instead only provide a general idea of what it does when providing my rating.
I will be skipping entirely over the Draconic Hero Archetype, which is only referenced to in the pfsrd but not given any details.
Reading this guide:
I will be color coding options
Red is bad. The worst of the worst is in this color.
Orange is not as bad. Passable, but better options.
Green options are good.
Blue represents the must haves, selections that are good and are recommended after others.
Purple stands for options that are rather situational or really hard to quantify without considering the needs of your campaign.
I. Considerations and Roles
Playing a Taninim is a unique experience. Regardless of what class you choose, you’re very disincentivized from taking anything to do with armor or weapons as a result of racial abilities that you can’t get rid of. So, even if you decide to roll with a Taninim and decide to roll a fighter, you’re going to have issues using a shield and sword.
Brawler: This is what the class is made for and it shows. You have very high health, a wide variety of defense selections, and loads of natural weapons, on top of big strength bonuses. There’s also the fact that several of your offensive ability selections favor CMB combat. Just be careful at early levels before your natural armor kicks up and makes up for your lack of gear, you’ll be rather squishy up until you hit level 4, but you got 3 natural weapons to make up for it. Most things die to you at these levels.
Blaster: You can do blasting with your breath weapon, but it shouldn’t a primary role. The main drawback to using the Breath Weapon is that it is always the same element and it has a random cool down, making consistency hard to use. You can use blasting as a side project to open up for an initial attack, but it’s not necessary.
Psuedomage: You aren’t a true spellcaster and though you can get SLAs or caster levels from this class, they aren’t the primary focus. But you can get alot of different magical abilities, you have UMD on your class skill list with a heavy incentive to build up Charisma, and past level 10, you get every single wizard spell on your spell list nice.
Skill Monkey: You have an impressive skill list and a half decent number of points in this. So you can pull your weight around on skill checks, especially if you don’t have a wizard or know it all. You’re not going to beat a rogue though.
Strength. You’ve got loads of natural weapons and you can grow so large that over time you can carry an entire armory on you. Feykin can safely ignore this
Dexterity. You’re never going to get much dexterity. Just make sure you have a score over 10. Because any dex damage or poison can just render you helpless in an instant past a certain point, you’re going to want to make sure it’s decent. Feykin can make this a blue though.
Constitution. You’re going to want this up, regardless of your build. It provides both bonus HP and determines uses for Draconic Weaponry, as well as affects Weaponry and Gift DCs.
Intelligence. Good to have, but not essential. Very little other than bonus skill ranks apply for an Exemplar. Safe to dump if you really don’t want it.
Wisdom. You can safely drop on wisdom. Nothing save skill bonuses and your will save run on it and your Willsave is high enough that it’s not a worry. Just don’t go too far.
Charisma. Used primarily to determine Draconic gift or weaponry DCs. Useful, but not as beneficial as strength unless there’s gifts you want to take full advantage of.
II. Race - Taninim
Unlike other classes, Draconic Exemplars, are only limited to a single race, which to be fair is kinda the point. If you could select another race, you wouldn’t be playing a dragon, would you?
Thankfully, the Taninim come with a variety of racial traits to atleast make it feel like you have choice over what kind of dragon you are, even if you don’t plan on sticking to a Draconic Exemplar.
I will cover several important racial traits in detail, under the assumption you’ll be rolling with Draconic Exemplar.
Base Racials:
+2 Constitution, +2 Charisma, and -2 Dexterity: All around good stats. The hit to dexterity is a pain, but you’re stronger and better able to use your class abilities regardless of what they are.
Small: Your starting size puts you around gnome size. Nothing magic and you eventually molt out of it. There’s advantages for being small if you decide to not take DE levels, but that’s not the purpose of this guide isn’t it?
Normal Speed: Nothing fancy here. Passable speed with no maluses. You generally won’t be taking armor so you don’t need to worry about having slower speed as a result of wearing it.
Type: Taninim are dragons. Mixed bag here. Taninim are treated as dragons may not seem like much, but has a profound effect on certain game play things. First off, you’re not vulnerable to spells that target humanoids, such as say charm person… at the same time, you can’t target yourself with a buff keyed to work on humanoids, such as Enlarge person. Second, you’re vulnerable to the same things dragons are, such as Dragon-Bane weapons.
Also, depending on what kind of setting you are in, you may end up with a variety of unusual RP situations.
You can probably manage to ask your DM for creating an “Enlarge Dragon” spell just for your mage if you really want buffing.
Dexterous Claws: This is the reason why you can’t use swords, bows, and shields. You get penalties to a few things and you get your speed cut in half. But that’s kinda thematic. While you don’t get weapon proficiency as a DE, it gets red because it means using staves or wands would get in the way of you using your melee or speed.
Dragon Senses: Darkvision 60’ and low- light vision have their uses. Passable.
Dragon Immunities: Immunity to magical sleep and paralysis may or may not
Glide: Worthwhile for the early levels, but not going to be helpful later on as the check becomes harder to make without investing heavily into flying. Granted, by then you do just have a fly speed, so this ability becomes useless.
Kinslayer: A minor buff against dragons. Not really all that great, but in dragon heavy campaigns, it can be handy. Otherwise, it’s too situational
Natural Weapon - Bite: Okay, this is nice. A bite attack that because you’re a dragon. deals 50% more damage from strength and benefits from power attack’s secondary rule since it’s a primary natural weapon that uses 1 and ½ of your strength. As a DE, natural weapons will be one of the few ways you’ll be dishing out damage. Not as useful for a Feykin, but still useful.
Scaled Hide: Bonus AC is nice. But it’s nothing major.
Superior Awareness: Perception and Sense Motive are things you’re always going to use. This is blue because of that.
Unfettered Predator: And this is how the game discourages you from wearing any armor. Now, granted, you don’t get armor proficiency at all as a DE, but it does mean that you do not under any circumstances have an incentive to take armor proficiency feats or roll a fighter for one level.
The penalties are worse for medium or heavy. With light, the penalties are at least manageable and aren’t too great if you’re running a casting class. Mithril can be used to circumvent this if you really want to use armor.
Languages: Decent selection of languages I say. Covers most of the bases and you get two free, Draconic and Common. Only really matters if language becomes important in your table.
Draconic Physiology: At least with the discouragement of wearing armor or using weapons, you get the quadruped rules, which basically means you can act as the party pack mule as long as you’re not a Feykin. May or may not matter, depending on how much your group spends on Bags of Holding and how much you compulsively loot entire bandit camps.
Alternate Racial Traits
Brutish: A fair trade I say. This racial trait drops your race stats and sensory awareness for stuff more important to a frontline brawler. However, the price I feel may be discouraging to some people.
Feykin: This racial trait massively changes things for you. You start small, no tiny, and you never size out of it. Which is good and bad, but at least you get a free 60 fly speed. For the purposes of the guide, I’ll definately be listing out in some cases how Feykin should approach certain things because of how utterly different some things are.
Sagely: This trait is better for a caster oriented dragon. Not ideal for the Draconic Exemplar. Skip.
Lung: Worth consideration. It unlocks certain options as a DE that you may be interested in. Makes using items better and gives you a primary gore attack in the future instead of two wing attacks. You can also use this with Brutish and Sagely.
Favored Class Bonus: You don’t get anything special for taking Draconic Exemplar, sadly.
Well, I have something you might be interested in.
Enter Rite Publishing’s In the Company of Dragons , a book detailing a race/class combo designed specifically to let players play a dragon from level 1 all the way up to level 20, growing in size and power all the way.
You get to be a dragon! And it’ll be my job here to show you how to make the best dragon you can.
The majority of the data can be found on d20pfsrd, if you are interested. However, this is only a free sample published on an SRD side; there much more detailed rules to be found in the official book release, which is available in PDF format in a variety of sites, including d20pfsrd’s store and Drivethrurpg.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/3rd-party-races/rite-publishing/dragon-taninim (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/3rd-party-races/rite-publishing/dragon-taninim)
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/rite-publishing/draconic-exemplar (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/rite-publishing/draconic-exemplar)
For the purposes of this guide, I will be covering:
-the Taninim race with the important racial traits.
-the Dragon Racial Paragon Class in full detail
-If a piece of information is not listed in the pfsrd, I generally will not be listing full details and instead only provide a general idea of what it does when providing my rating.
I will be skipping entirely over the Draconic Hero Archetype, which is only referenced to in the pfsrd but not given any details.
Reading this guide:
I will be color coding options
Red is bad. The worst of the worst is in this color.
Orange is not as bad. Passable, but better options.
Green options are good.
Blue represents the must haves, selections that are good and are recommended after others.
Purple stands for options that are rather situational or really hard to quantify without considering the needs of your campaign.
I. Considerations and Roles
Playing a Taninim is a unique experience. Regardless of what class you choose, you’re very disincentivized from taking anything to do with armor or weapons as a result of racial abilities that you can’t get rid of. So, even if you decide to roll with a Taninim and decide to roll a fighter, you’re going to have issues using a shield and sword.
Brawler: This is what the class is made for and it shows. You have very high health, a wide variety of defense selections, and loads of natural weapons, on top of big strength bonuses. There’s also the fact that several of your offensive ability selections favor CMB combat. Just be careful at early levels before your natural armor kicks up and makes up for your lack of gear, you’ll be rather squishy up until you hit level 4, but you got 3 natural weapons to make up for it. Most things die to you at these levels.
Blaster: You can do blasting with your breath weapon, but it shouldn’t a primary role. The main drawback to using the Breath Weapon is that it is always the same element and it has a random cool down, making consistency hard to use. You can use blasting as a side project to open up for an initial attack, but it’s not necessary.
Psuedomage: You aren’t a true spellcaster and though you can get SLAs or caster levels from this class, they aren’t the primary focus. But you can get alot of different magical abilities, you have UMD on your class skill list with a heavy incentive to build up Charisma, and past level 10, you get every single wizard spell on your spell list nice.
Skill Monkey: You have an impressive skill list and a half decent number of points in this. So you can pull your weight around on skill checks, especially if you don’t have a wizard or know it all. You’re not going to beat a rogue though.
Strength. You’ve got loads of natural weapons and you can grow so large that over time you can carry an entire armory on you. Feykin can safely ignore this
Dexterity. You’re never going to get much dexterity. Just make sure you have a score over 10. Because any dex damage or poison can just render you helpless in an instant past a certain point, you’re going to want to make sure it’s decent. Feykin can make this a blue though.
Constitution. You’re going to want this up, regardless of your build. It provides both bonus HP and determines uses for Draconic Weaponry, as well as affects Weaponry and Gift DCs.
Intelligence. Good to have, but not essential. Very little other than bonus skill ranks apply for an Exemplar. Safe to dump if you really don’t want it.
Wisdom. You can safely drop on wisdom. Nothing save skill bonuses and your will save run on it and your Willsave is high enough that it’s not a worry. Just don’t go too far.
Charisma. Used primarily to determine Draconic gift or weaponry DCs. Useful, but not as beneficial as strength unless there’s gifts you want to take full advantage of.
II. Race - Taninim
Unlike other classes, Draconic Exemplars, are only limited to a single race, which to be fair is kinda the point. If you could select another race, you wouldn’t be playing a dragon, would you?
Thankfully, the Taninim come with a variety of racial traits to atleast make it feel like you have choice over what kind of dragon you are, even if you don’t plan on sticking to a Draconic Exemplar.
I will cover several important racial traits in detail, under the assumption you’ll be rolling with Draconic Exemplar.
Base Racials:
+2 Constitution, +2 Charisma, and -2 Dexterity: All around good stats. The hit to dexterity is a pain, but you’re stronger and better able to use your class abilities regardless of what they are.
Small: Your starting size puts you around gnome size. Nothing magic and you eventually molt out of it. There’s advantages for being small if you decide to not take DE levels, but that’s not the purpose of this guide isn’t it?
Normal Speed: Nothing fancy here. Passable speed with no maluses. You generally won’t be taking armor so you don’t need to worry about having slower speed as a result of wearing it.
Type: Taninim are dragons. Mixed bag here. Taninim are treated as dragons may not seem like much, but has a profound effect on certain game play things. First off, you’re not vulnerable to spells that target humanoids, such as say charm person… at the same time, you can’t target yourself with a buff keyed to work on humanoids, such as Enlarge person. Second, you’re vulnerable to the same things dragons are, such as Dragon-Bane weapons.
Also, depending on what kind of setting you are in, you may end up with a variety of unusual RP situations.
You can probably manage to ask your DM for creating an “Enlarge Dragon” spell just for your mage if you really want buffing.
Dexterous Claws: This is the reason why you can’t use swords, bows, and shields. You get penalties to a few things and you get your speed cut in half. But that’s kinda thematic. While you don’t get weapon proficiency as a DE, it gets red because it means using staves or wands would get in the way of you using your melee or speed.
Dragon Senses: Darkvision 60’ and low- light vision have their uses. Passable.
Dragon Immunities: Immunity to magical sleep and paralysis may or may not
Glide: Worthwhile for the early levels, but not going to be helpful later on as the check becomes harder to make without investing heavily into flying. Granted, by then you do just have a fly speed, so this ability becomes useless.
Kinslayer: A minor buff against dragons. Not really all that great, but in dragon heavy campaigns, it can be handy. Otherwise, it’s too situational
Natural Weapon - Bite: Okay, this is nice. A bite attack that because you’re a dragon. deals 50% more damage from strength and benefits from power attack’s secondary rule since it’s a primary natural weapon that uses 1 and ½ of your strength. As a DE, natural weapons will be one of the few ways you’ll be dishing out damage. Not as useful for a Feykin, but still useful.
Scaled Hide: Bonus AC is nice. But it’s nothing major.
Superior Awareness: Perception and Sense Motive are things you’re always going to use. This is blue because of that.
Unfettered Predator: And this is how the game discourages you from wearing any armor. Now, granted, you don’t get armor proficiency at all as a DE, but it does mean that you do not under any circumstances have an incentive to take armor proficiency feats or roll a fighter for one level.
The penalties are worse for medium or heavy. With light, the penalties are at least manageable and aren’t too great if you’re running a casting class. Mithril can be used to circumvent this if you really want to use armor.
Languages: Decent selection of languages I say. Covers most of the bases and you get two free, Draconic and Common. Only really matters if language becomes important in your table.
Draconic Physiology: At least with the discouragement of wearing armor or using weapons, you get the quadruped rules, which basically means you can act as the party pack mule as long as you’re not a Feykin. May or may not matter, depending on how much your group spends on Bags of Holding and how much you compulsively loot entire bandit camps.
Alternate Racial Traits
Brutish: A fair trade I say. This racial trait drops your race stats and sensory awareness for stuff more important to a frontline brawler. However, the price I feel may be discouraging to some people.
Feykin: This racial trait massively changes things for you. You start small, no tiny, and you never size out of it. Which is good and bad, but at least you get a free 60 fly speed. For the purposes of the guide, I’ll definately be listing out in some cases how Feykin should approach certain things because of how utterly different some things are.
Sagely: This trait is better for a caster oriented dragon. Not ideal for the Draconic Exemplar. Skip.
Lung: Worth consideration. It unlocks certain options as a DE that you may be interested in. Makes using items better and gives you a primary gore attack in the future instead of two wing attacks. You can also use this with Brutish and Sagely.
Favored Class Bonus: You don’t get anything special for taking Draconic Exemplar, sadly.