Prerequisite: Dragonborn
When angered, you radiate menace. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Strength, Constitution, or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Instead of exhaling destructive energy, you can expend a use of your Breath Weapon trait to roar, forcing each creature of your choice within 30 feet of you to make a Wisdom saving throw (DC 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier). A target automatically succeeds on the save if it can’t hear or see you. On a failed save, a target becomes frightened for 1 minute. If the frightened target takes any damage, it can repeat the saving throw, ending the effect on itself on a success.
Dragon Fear: Don’t Waste Your Breath
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
People love Dragonborn, and I completely get it. You’re a giant angry scaly lizard creature that breathes some kind of breath of death. Dope. Love that. Dungeons and Dragons is built upon adventuring in dungeons and the big bads you encounter along the way, the most iconic, of course, being dragons. What to me screams dragon is a breath weapon, giant wings, and love for treasure. It transcends all the colors, it's what foundationally it means to be a dragon. What doesn’t is their frightful presence trait; sure, they’re big and scary, but a lot of monsters in D&D are big and scary. This is why I don’t really think Dragon Fear sticks the landing thematically for me; you’re getting a new way to use your breath weapon as a fear, but not getting any extra uses. If I’m a dragonborn, I want to kill things with my cone of acid or fire.
Beyond flavor, it's mechanically kind of meh. You’re not gaining additional resources, you’re getting a new way to use a resource you already have. Yelling at large groups of creatures to potentially become frightened of you is powerful, though. It bugs me to no end that this doesn’t give you at least one more use of your breath weapon, but it does potentially upgrade it substantially, especially in the upper tiers as the damage becomes less relevant. I’m still not sold there, either, though. In higher level gameplay you won’t want to be spending your action on this instead of using other features or making attack rolls. At least it opens up an option for martial dragonborn out there to have an impact on a fight beyond just attacking from time to time, I guess?
Getting a bonus +1 to your Strength, Constitution, or Charisma score definitely makes this feat worth it for dragonborn with odd primary or secondary scores. If you’re a dragonborn sorcerer and turn a 17 charisma into an 18, you’re getting a +1 to your main modifier. That’s great. You’ll want to be doing that anyway. The fear being stapled to that is a fine enough upside that you’ll consider this. Paladins in particular will likely get the most out of this, as they are hybrid martial casters who occasionally want tools to impose conditions on enemies from fight to fight. While I still imagine in most cases they’d rather be just killing things with smites or a cone or line of elemental damage, having the option opened to you can be worth it. Is it worth it over the weapon feats (Slasher/Crusher/Piercer), though? Probably not.
I think Dragon Fear will go on people’s sheets who want to do a big spooky dragon roar. Otherwise it is lackluster. A lot of feats exist now that give you bonuses to a casting modifier (Charisma) or your main attack modifier (Strength) that give your character more things to do instead of more options for your existing resources to compete with. If you do want to make a loud angry lizard noise, though, Dragon Fear is here for you.
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