I talk with @JeremyECrawford about the Draconic Player Options in Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons we’ve got this band’s treasury of dragons which i am very excited for obviously because i love i’m obsessed with dragons and and you know it is d d so good to focus up on the dragons it shouldn’t be a shock but there are a lot of player options in that uh how did you come about with you know the the draconic flavored monk and the drake warden ranger like how did that come about and what did you learn from player feedback i kind of feel like everyone loved them from my side of the fence so they did and the art of the the drake warden ranger is uh will melt your heart is yes pretty painful stuff we’ll all went into that design so we started off when it comes to the playable options in the treasury of dragons thinking we would do one or two subclasses and we would revisit dragonborn well that ended up growing and i’ll talk more about that in a bit but really we started with the subclasses and the dragonborn variants now when it came to the subclasses we wanted with the monk to do something dragon oriented partly because we simply hadn’t yet and there are a lot of martial arts related stories in the real world that are connected to dragons so we thought this was a natural aesthetic fit it was also a way for us as we’ve done several times to revisit some of the elemental themes that we play with in the way of the four elements in the player’s handbook but in a way that’s more satisfying because we know that that subclass has generated uh opinions and and and so we like to experiment with new approaches and that went into our thinking uh with the draconic monk when it came to the ranger we actually went back and forth initially on whether we were going to do a druid subclass or a ranger subclass at the end of the day we went with ranger largely obviously a story reason druids are primarily associated with animals plants in the fey wild and we felt like we would be sort of pushing a bit too far outside of their aesthetic boundaries but even more importantly if we suddenly had druids turning into dragons we were concerned about druids eating the sorcerer’s lunch because the draconic sorcerer really is the spellcaster who takes on draconic uh physical characteristics and we are often concerned about sort of as turf especially when it’s highly connected to a particular class and the draconic element in the sorcerer has been in the sorcerer’s dna going all the way back to third edition and we didn’t want to undermine that but we also really love the idea of the ranger having a drake companion and we also know that ranger players love having pets and that’s possible of course for every ranger using the animal friendship spell uh and we also have uh you know the beast companion option in the player’s handbook as well as the variant in tasha’s cauldron of everything but we didn’t yet have an option where you could have your own little dragon right and so we thought okay let’s do it and play testers loved it both subclasses had very high satisfaction scores and the main thing we had to contend with when we were developing the final versions of the two subclasses is how can we make sure we continue giving all of the stuff that the play testers want without making these two subclasses absurdly uh powerful right and and so it was it was a balancing act to make sure that they continued to be really really tasty uh without uh suddenly overshadowing every other subclass in the game yeah the range was a bit of a blaster yes yep yeah well and we and we hadn’t done that in quite this way with the ranger yet so that was fun for us to explore and also it was fun to build in using the companion as a mount because many of our heavily invested uh beastmaster ranger players they know that like if you’re a small ranger and uh you know if you if you make the right companion choice you can have that companion be your mount but this was the first time for us to build that directly in where we tell you we actually talk about it being a mount right in the subclass and we leaned into that because that came through loud and clear in the play test feedback people wanted to ride their dragon uh and so yeah yeah i i did note that when i i’ve seen the book and uh yeah i i like that it explicitly states yes you can write this as a mount at some point yeah that is a thing because uh i can’t even tell you how many times someone has asked me can i ride my iron defender as an artificer like over and over and over again so it will be something that comes up yeah yeah they’re both very fun uh subclasses so people love those subclasses so much but then there was something else that came through the play test feedback and that was people liked dragons so much that then it was a litany of can you also give us uh another sorcerer subclass can you give us a warlock subclass can you give us a wizard subclass can you give us a fi it just went on and on essentially the message was can we attach draconic goodness to everything so we pondered all right do we do even more subclasses in the end we decided not to instead we decided to do the feats that are in the book to make it so that every character class has the option of getting some draconic goodness if you take the chromatic metallic or gem feet right we also made sure that there was a collection of new spells so that then also our spellcasters could get dragony goodness and so that’s why earlier when i talked about it just sort of started to grow because originally it was just going to be the the dragonborn variants and the two subclasses but we saw okay people really want whatever their class they want to be able to get something dragon related and that’s why we ended up creating this this whole buffet of draconic options for the book and there’s a lot of ways to flavor a character like especially considering the bestiary that you have which is very robust in fizzbands is uh you know there are a lot of existing subclasses that already could be dragon themed given the concept of one dragon uh having multiple echoes on multiple worlds some of those being the shadowfell or the feywild you know it in cases of like the warlock you know you could if you’re a warlock associated with the shadowfell well that could be a dracolich right or if you’re associated with the feywild then that can easily be you know the archway you just you just are going for a different flavor and you can do that i mean if i was playing an artifice or artillerist i would just be like i’m fueling it with dragon fire kind of like constantine with counter reeves in the movie where he’s got like the dragon wand yeah uh so there’s a lot of like fun ways to flavor it why why did you include new dragonborn options as well and i’m very excited for them also excited for dragonborn to be able to use their breath weapon as an attack [Laughter] so we for a while and by a while i mean for years have been wanting to do some new versions of the dragonborn and the reason for that is a the dragonborn is super popular and b one of the messages that has come through very clear from the community over the years is people love the dragonborn but they want it to be even more draconic and also as we worked on this book one of the things we kept coming back to were the three great families of dragons especially now that gem dragons are back in this book and how chromatic metallic and gem dragons are such a big part of the d d multiverse story we thought it really makes sense for the playable race that is connected to dragons i mean it’s in the name that they would have a bit more that connects them to those three great families in addition to us allowing the person playing the dragonborn to feel like a little dragon more often and so that’s why we did things like letting you use your breath weapon more often but you also could then also get some other abilities which make you feel like you truly are connected to whichever one of those three great draconic families that you’re a part of https://t.co/NhQXRvFs81 pic.twitter.com/GIy4cjSLrL

— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) October 4, 2021

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