How powerful is the ability to properly turn into a Dragon? (3.5)

[FearlessGnome]

Heya. One of my players in a 3.5 game is a pure wizard 3 at the moment, but looking ahead he would like to take the Master Transmogrifist and make it more dragon focused. Basically, he'd be giving up breadth of options in exchange for Dragons' supernatural abilities. Since he'd be giving up a few spellcaster levels (But probably not four, like the Master Transmogrifist), I'm inclined to let him have that, especially since pure Wizard gets you Shapechange at 17. So... any weird dragons out there I should know about that complicate matters, or is it just mainly natural armour, high stats and every flavour of breath weapon? He'd be entering after level 7, so he already has polymorph at that point.

[Troacctid]

Well, druids can wild shape into dragons via a feat starting at 12th level, and they gain the dragon's supernatural abilities. So that's probably the closest comparison.

[ExLibrisMortis]

As long as the dragon doesn't have more HD than the wizard, it should be fine. Dragons generally have 'LA: you don't get to play this', but that's the designers deciding what your game should look like, not a balance decision. Mostly, they're fine with LA 0-2, depending on RHD (more RHD = less LA). In fact, you can straight up offer to homebrew a 5-to-10-level PrC that permanently transforms the character into a dragon, all bells and whistles included. If you pick a dragon with nice casting (say, a spellhoarding steel loredrake), you're basically playing a dragon wizard.

[Chronikoce]

It shouldn't be a problem as long as you're not letting them change into the really old age categories at low levels.

If we're talking 17th level wizard there are far easier ways to break a game in the core spell list than being a dragon could achieve.

[eggynack]

Well, druids can wild shape into dragons via a feat starting at 12th level, and they gain the dragon's supernatural abilities. So that's probably the closest comparison.
Indeed. My handbook has the relevant dragons that exist in the normal gameplay HD range, of small and medium size. It should cover most of the stuff he'd be able to do, but, if you're allowing bigger dragons, there're definitely a few out there that have some abilities. Plenty of dragons start at large and go up from there. You can definitely do stuff besides the really practical flight speed+high AC+breath weapon thing, but it's not utter insanity.

Edit: The rainbow of immunities is definitely a part of the dragon package too. You can immunity to a lot more things that you'd likely expect by picking the right dragon.