Prerequisite: Dragonborn

You manifest scales and claws reminiscent of your draconic ancestors. You gain the following benefits:

Increase your Strength, Constitution, or Charisma score by 1, up to a maximum of 20.

Your scales harden. While you aren't wearing armor, you can calculate your AC as 13 + your Dexterity modifier. You can use a shield and still gain this benefit.

You can grow retractable claws from the tips of your fingers. Extending or retracting the claws requires no action. The claws are natural weapons, which you can use to make unarmed strikes. If you hit with them, you deal slashing damage equal to 1d4 + your Strength modifier, instead of the normal bludgeoning damage for an unarmed strike.

Dragon Hide: Not Worth Seeking

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

If you squint for a second at Dragon Hide, you’d be excused for thinking this was just multiclassing monk. Functionally, Dragon Hide offers dragonborn a natural armor that’s akin to Mage Armor (or very close to monk’s unarmored defense) and d4 natural weapons. Neither of these two things is worth a feat on ANY character. Even with the +1 to Strength, Constitution, or Charisma, there just aren’t characters that exist, especially dragonborn, who want to invest an entire feat into an unarmed strike they’ll never use and an AC score they can easily get elsewhere.

Dragonborn iconically are paladins and sorcerers. It's what they do. They’re charisma, strength, and constitution based characters built around being a dragon. Paladins leverage all three of these stats, while sorcerers have an archetype literally expanding on the whole idea of being a dragon. As a sorcerer, you have access to Mage Armor. One known spell is worth a lot less than an entire feat. If you want Mage Armor AC, you can get it. Paladins have heavy armor; they’re often forgoing decent Dexterity because their AC will be better with heavy armor. They don’t need this AC. No class IN THE GAME wants 1d4+strength unarmed strikes. It's the equivalent of hitting somebody with a club. Every class has better access to dirt cheap options that outclass this. It's functionally a non-feature, it's a ribbon. Notably, if you are going for a draconic bloodline sorcerer, you already have draconic resilience, which just gives you the 13 + Dex AC anyway. You have to be specifically a dragonborn sorcerer outside the draconic bloodline that doesn’t get access to armor to begin even considering this, and that’s laughably few characters.

The +1 modifier can’t even save this feat for me. I guess maybe you’re a dragonborn sorcerer with no armor proficiencies and don’t want to take Mage Armor to help with your low AC problem AND you’ve got a 15 or 17 in Charisma. Then, and only then, does this do anything more than something like Magic Initiate, which gives you two extra cantrips (which actually have uses!) and Mage Armor once per long rest if you really want it. Even in that case, there are so many other feats you’d rather take. Shadow Touched gives you a +1 Charisma, Invisibility once per long rest, and a 1st level necromancy or illusion spell once per long rest. Fey Touched gives you the same modifier adjustment and Misty Step and a 1st level enchantment or divination spell of your choice. Telekinetic and Telepathic both give you new toys to play around with when investigating the world, and still give you +1 Charisma. There are better feats that also give you +1 Charisma than this.

This is a simple case of the words here not being worth a feat. There may be a decent amount of words, but none of them contribute enough to the majority of builds to justify this. Dragon Hide is terrible.

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