Fizban's Treasury of Dragons introduces three ancestries for the dragonborn race. Each reflects one of the three dragon families in Dungeons & Dragons — the chromatic, the gem, and the metallic. Here's a sneak peek at the metallic dragonborn and how it compares to the original dragonborn found in the Player's Handbook.
- Metallic dragonborn racial traits
- A metallic dragonborn's outlook on life
- Building a metallic dragonborn character
Metallic dragonborn racial traits
Dragonborn with metallic ancestry lay claim to the tenacity of metallic dragons—brass, bronze, copper, gold, and silver—whose hues glint in their scales. Theirs is the fire of hearth and forge, the cold of high mountain air, the spark of inspiration, and the scouring touch of acid that purifies.
Source: Fizban's Treasury of Dragons
The original dragonborn offers two key traits that are based on your draconic ancestry: damage resistance and a breath weapon that can be used once per short or long rest. The race lends itself to martial classes — particularly the paladin — by offering +2 in Strength and +1 in Charisma at character creation.
The metallic dragonborn still offers damage resistance and a damaging breath weapon, but there are key differences to how the breath weapon works. On top of that, the metallic dragonborn also gains a second breath weapon at 5th level!
Here's a summary of the metallic dragonborn and how it compares to the original:
- You can use your breath weapon a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus. The uses of your breath weapon reset on a long rest. For adventuring parties that don't often take short rests, this change increases how many breath weapons you get per long rest. More importantly, you can save your breath weapon uses for combats that matter, rather than being limited to just one use per short rest.
- Your breath weapon is a 15-foot cone. With the original dragonborn, your breath weapon deals damage in a cone or a line depending on your ancestry.
- The damage on the breath weapon has changed. The damage scales from 1d10 up to 4d10 at 17th level. Comparatively, the original dragonborn's damage scales from 2d6 up to 5d6 at 16th level.
- An attack can be replaced with your breath weapon. The metallic dragonborn breath weapon replaces one of your attacks rather than uses an action. For example, if you have the Extra Attack feature, you can replace one or both of your attacks with a breath weapon!
- You gain a second breath weapon. At 5th level, you get Metallic Breath Weapon, a 15-foot cone attack that can be used once per long rest. When you use your Metallic Breath Weapon, you'll choose from one of two effects: Enervating Breath and Repulsion Breath. Enervating Breath forces enemies to make a Constitution saving throw or be incapacitated until the start of your next turn. Repulsion Breath forces enemies to make a Strength saving throw or be pushed back 20 feet and knocked prone.
Ability score increases for the metallic dragonborn
Starting with the harengon and fairy races found in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Dungeons & Dragons races no longer come with set ability score increases. Instead, players will get to choose one of the following options at character creation:
- Increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1
- Increase three different scores by 1
Similarly, you'll learn Common and one other language of your choice (with your DM's permission).
A metallic dragonborn's outlook on life
Much like their ancestors, dragonborn are prideful folk. They typically stand tall and are aware but unbothered by the fact that others commonly find them intimidating. Unlike many dragons, however, dragonborn rarely isolate themselves from their own kind. A dragonborn respects the clan to which they belong and will honor their position in it. However, people of this race are always seeking to improve and earn their place in the world.
Metallic dragonborn in particular are tenacious folk. If you're creating a metallic dragonborn, take a look at the personality traits and interests of the following dragons, summarized from the Monster Manual.
Metallic dragon personality traits
Type | Personality Traits |
Brass | Gregarious tricksters; irritated by those who don’t engage with them; fair in dishing out punishment |
Bronze | Tacticians; love learning about warfare; despise tyrants; happy to interfere in conflicts |
Copper | Witty; prankers and jokesters; greedy |
Gold | Wise and fair but aloof and grim; will eat just about anything |
Silver | Friendly and sociable; enjoy learning history |
Building a metallic dragonborn character
The metallic dragonborn's breath weapon traits not only allow your character to deal damage to multiple enemies. They offer crowd control, too. Consider the following as you approach character creation:
- You can use Breath Weapon and Metallic Breath Weapon on the same turn. Characters that can make two attacks in a single turn can replace one attack with their Breath Weapon and another with their Metallic Breath Weapon to wreak havoc on mobs.
- Repulsion Breath enables melee builds. Imagine a metallic dragonborn monk that knocks an enemy prone with Repulsion Breath and then follows it up with a flurry of blows made with advantage!
- Constitution matters. This is true pretty much all of the time. But if you want your enemies to consistently fail their saving throws against your breath weapons, you'll want to find room in your build for a higher Constitution score. Since the barbarian's Unarmored Defense cares about Constitution and the fighter has extra Ability Score Improvements, these two classes could be a good pairing for the metallic dragonborn.
- Bronze dragonborn can maximize their breath weapon damage. The Tempest domain's Channel Divinity, Destructive Wrath, allows you to deal maximum damage when you roll for lightning or thunder damage. A bronze dragonborn's breath weapon deals lightning damage. Not a bad pairing at low levels!
More to find in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons
The metallic dragonborn is just one of three ancestries available for the classic race. But Fizban's Treasury of Dragons is chockful of other goodies, including two new subclasses, tons of dragons, and more.
Michael Galvis (@michaelgalvis) is a tabletop content producer for D&D Beyond. He is a longtime Dungeon Master who enjoys horror films and all things fantasy and sci-fi. When he isn’t in the DM’s seat or rolling dice as his anxious halfling sorcerer, he’s playing League of Legends and Magic: The Gathering with his husband. They live together in Los Angeles with their adorable dog, Quentin.
Why did they feel the need to buff one of the more powerful races? Oh yeah to sell more books.
Arguing that the dragonborn needs to be buffed to stay inline with newer OP races just underlines how out of control the power creep has become. WotC knows that more powerful playable races will sell more books so they keep turning things up a notch. That strategy has nothing to with making a better game and everything to with money. They can and should try and make money but that doesn't mean we have to pretend that isn't what this is about.
I don’t consider them one of the more powerful, personally.
Dragonborn is considered one of the weakest races. Besides the usual stuff, they only get 2 racial features; resistance to one dmg type, and the breath weapon.
The resistance is nice, but isn't very useful if you don't fight enemies that don't do that type of dmg. The breath weapon is good at early levels, but quickly becomes useless.
And so for a lot of the time, many people feel like they're effectively playing a race with no racial features. They needed a buff from the very start.
I'm not arguing they needed to be buffed, and I'm not comparing only with newer races. I'm arguing that the new version is neither overpowered or underpowered. At best and worst, it's in line with PHB elf races. I mean, drow get darkness and faerie fire, for Lloth's sake. Tieflings get good spells too, again, PHB. A VAST number of min-max builds simply take variant human! And the Elemental Evil races are in a free supplement, and THAT has a race that flies, so the argument that they're trying to use simple power to sell things is broken right then and there.
I mean, FFS, the major rule they changed was that racial stat bonuses can get moved around now, which means MORE races are workable for more builds, not less. A gnome paladin can be just as charismatic and strong as a dragonborn now. That's not power creep, that's power redistribution.
Wow did they not read drangonlance.
I mean, in your defence, I think almost everyone uses them by default (and they really should). A feat generally develops a character way more than an ASI score in terms of embuing them with a personality. As an official rule, replacing racial ASIs with a feat doesn't work. However, I think it's a pretty great idea that I might steal for my table.
How would that interact with variant humans? Would they just cease to exist, or would regular humans get discarded and variant humans stay unchanged?
They are dragonborn variants. So same as the variant human. They are seperate from the original.
So wait, the draconian are NOT metallic dragonborn. They lack a breath weapon in all of the books and modules and have a very distinct history (from the War of the Lance) involving the murder of people and the destruction of metallic dragon eggs. Are they out of cannon now? There were whole books (Kaz's series) about them and it was really good. Would miss them and I guess ... like the main baddy of the "Dragons of ..." series goes away?
Also, Fizban was only interesting because of Tas and is kind of a failure. Not even a god anymore, couldn't prevent a single war, and pretty much enabled Ishtar (a "holy" land [theocracy] TO HIM which he had to agree to smite because it became corrupt, racist, and used slaves and capital punishment) to become what it did and require removal.
I'd have much rather had Khellendros (Skye) be resurrected to narrate this ... But hey, hopefully the Dragonlance legal issues are done and we can haz again.
Dragonborn… powerful?!? Well, I mean they’re contenders now, but the PHB Dragonborn are probably the weakest of the original PHB races. They were right down there with the original versions of the Orc and Kobold from Volo’s.
The Dragonborn’s main ASI was Strength, which is the closest thing 5e has to a universal dump-stat. For people concerned with optimization, they were mostly suited to Paladin, Barbarian, and Fighter builds, which meant their breath weapon was mosttly only useful until 4th level at the highest. Once those classes got Extra Attack at 5th level, the breath weapon would pretty much always be an inferior choice. Sure there were times it was better, but the times the cone breath was a good choice, the line was useless, and when the line would have been useful, the cone would be useless. And even if it was a good situation for them, and they used it, then they could only use it once and had to wait until after recess to use it again. Usually by that point it was back to the inferior choice again compared to simply attacking twice. And if the DM allowed feats, then GWM+PAM meant the breath weapon was less appealing as an Action. Their best feature was the damage resistance, and that was only useful when that specific damage type was happening at them.
For folks not worried about optimization they were super flavorful, but even then they were lackluster. My table doesn’t focus on optimization, some optimize more than others, but for the most part we all regularly make choices we know are suboptimal because they fit the characters better. But even then, my one friend kept getting let down. (She really, really wanted a Black Dragonborn Assassin Rogue to be awesome…. She wanted it bad enough she tried 3 times. She was let down 3 times. 🤷♂️)
They are definitely one of the most characterful races in the PHB, but most powerful…? I don’t see it. What are you seeing that I am not?
Typo in the first sentence under the "Building a metallic dragonborn character" section.
Written: "The metallic dragonborn's breath weapon traits not allow your character to deal damage to multiple enemies, but they offer crowd control, too."
Should read: "The metallic dragonborn's breath weapon traits not only allow your character to deal damage to multiple enemies, but they offer crowd control, too."
Sorry.. OCD.. But great article.. I really like the ideas at the end.. :)
That's equity for ya....I agree with you all the way. If it was a big issue you could always persuade the DM to let you change an ASI or run with it, nobody(character) is perfect.
Original Kobolds had -2 STR and +2 DEX. They dropped the -2 STR but right now they are the only race that does not follow the +2/+1 mold (Also Tritons but they have +1/+1/+1) which, from an optimizing standpoint, locks them into SAD classes.
There is also to consider that many players don't like the flavour of "Grovel, Cower, and Beg"
Personally, if I were to implement what is discussed above, I would remove variant humans (again, they're an optional rule), remove the human ASI and give them a feat. I think humans would suffer the most from these changes, and they could maybe use an additional racial feature (maybe like the fighter feature indominable or something that just give them more "never-say-die"ness) but in the long run, the relative ranking of racial power isn't a big concern for me.
Yeah, it feels like they just copy-pasted most of this stuff from UA Draconic Options.
Yeah, now it feels like every race is too close to being the same. TCE's Customizing Your Origin option was cool but they've taken it too far. The Ability Score Increases that I'll homebrew into these races will be the only balancing for this race, I predict.
Yeah, this is a load of garbage- now there's no reason to try and make your character really good by matching features and traits, you can just say "no, he gets +2 Intelligence even though he's an orc" and just ignore simple biological concepts that always exist, even in fantasy.
Every table is different, it’s not that unoptimal play is universally seen as unviable, but some people just enjoy making synergistic characters and set score bonuses can diminish that. Removing set ability score bonuses gives the whole community more options, if you and your table prefer set bonuses then you can keep using them, but those who don’t aren’t forced to because of the “it’s not in a book so it isn’t legal” argument. And obviously this opens up room for homebrew, I could make a world in which Orcs are smart and Teiflings wise without it technically being against the official ruling.
Ability score bonuses shouldn’t be removed because of people like you, who want to keep set bonuses, and because not all races get equal bonuses, human and half-elves would lose one of their most important traits, adaptability.
I agree with Panda_wat, most races should be unique because of their traits, not because of a number.