Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer 5e
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold
The Player’s Handbook wasn’t kind to sorcerers. The two Origins you have to pick from are Draconic Bloodline and Wild Magic. Both sound evocative, both seem to present powerful, magic-rich individuals charged with great power, but largely fail to deliver on their promises to varying degrees.
Draconic Bloodline fails more than Wild Magic does. It provides you with almost none of the tools you’d expect a draconic sorcerer to get until it’s far too late to get excited about them.
1st Level: Draconic Ancestor and Draconic Resilience
Your Draconic Ancestor matters for two features down the road depending on their related damage type. The language boon and Charisma improvement to communicating with dragons is a cute ribbon, but otherwise, this feature does nothing at 1st level.
Draconic Resilience, then, is left to give you a clear direction to build towards to embody a dragon. What you receive to fulfill this need is functionally a slightly larger hit dice on level and the worst possible version of unarmored defense that equates to a Mage Armor at will, or +1 Studded Leather with proficiency. This benefit means you’re probably going with as high a Charisma as you can start with followed by as high a Dexterity score as you can get for your AC. I rate Armor of Shadows as one of the worst warlock invocations, and this is close to it in power.
These defensive buffs don’t actually give you tools to be a frontline character. You’re getting the durability of rogue, not the durability of fighter or ranger. When that’s the entire feature, it's just not enough. This is closer to class proficiency than a feature, which is not what a 1st level sorcerer desperate for spells or abilities needs. You lack any other tools to reasonably want to engage and use the bonus hit points and AC this offers. You’re still a full-caster with no melee weapon options of note. You’re slightly more encouraged to take shorter-ranged spells like Burning Hands, I guess, but the competition now gives you two or more bonus spells to start with and another interesting tool to play the game with.
6th Level: Elemental Affinity
Elemental Affinity is close in power to a common feature clerics and evoker wizards get, Potent Cantrip. Adding your Charisma modifier to an elemental damage spell effect once per spell is a damage boost for your Fire Bolt or Cone of Cold, but not so much so I’m crazy about it. It’ll be a fine damage bump that definitely asks you to cast a specific spell over and over and over and over again, as with how limited your spell selection is, it can be hard to justify getting multiple spells that deal the same damage type on your sheet at once when you also want other non-damage effects accessible to you.
What really bums be out is for some reason the damage resistance costs you sorcery points to get. Most of these kinds of features give out a niche resistance for free. Resistance to a single elemental damage type isn’t great. It's not the kind of feature that impacts the vast majority of fights, and in the fights it matters I can’t understand why it costs you points to use over just existing. The cost is low enough that it isn’t a major issue, but it just makes me scratch my head.
14th Level: Dragon Wings
Getting to 14th level will finally start helping you feel draconic, as you literally have at-will growable wings to fly around with thanks to Dragon Wings. Like the features prior, we’re still not that happy with this, though. Fly is a 3rd level spell you could have been using to fulfill part of this fantasy for 5 levels by this point. Races start with flight these days. Lower-tier features give you windows for flight. Flight is still a great way to explore the world and expand your character, but it being the only feature you get at 14th level leaves me a bit disappointed.
18th Level: Draconic Presence
Draconic Presence closes out the subclass with a Frightful Presence-esque ability. To really infuriate me, the designers chose to staple concentration to this feature that costs you 5 points to use which equates to roughly a 3rd-level spell, Fear. Modern designs give you a free use of these kinds of abilities; needing to cough up 5 points to use it the first time when I’d much rather do more busted stuff with those points isn’t where I want to be.
If you were to ask me what the most iconic draconic features are, I’d say two things: wings, and breath. Presence is an element, for sure, but when you’ve only got 4 levels’ worth of features to get the feeling of playing a dragon, surely this capstone should have been dedicated to the most iconic ability, the breath weapon, instead of an expensive frightened or charm.
All Together
I’m not sure how you go about designing a magical dragon character and miss this badly. The only feature that embodies what it is to be a dragon is the wings at 14th level. This option completely lacks the breath weapon in any form, something subsequent draconic options definitely learned from at least. I would have loved to see this revised in Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons.
Where it stands now, I’d recommend literally every other option over it. Elemental Affinity and Dragon Wings aren’t good enough features to make up for no reasonable 1st level abilities and a capstone that’s a joke.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
