The Gaming Den

Hey there people. Since I've just finished reading my copy of Dragon Magic, I thought I could give you a quick review of the book. So here goes.

Chapter One: Races, Class Options And Feats

The races are actually subraces. All have the dragonblood subtype and some other boni for which they pay by losing their normal racial abilities. Most are meh, but some are really crap, while others soar to asstastic heights.

Humans get the best deal – lose 1 skill point per lvl, but gain feather fall a couple of times a day and a minor bonus to Disguise.
Dwarves lose bonus to poison save but get minor fire resistance – meh anyway you choose.
Elves and their halves lose almost every elven feature but gain teleport through trees a couple of times a day – asstastic.
Gnomes and Halflings get... whatever, nobody's gonna play gnome rangers or halflings that don't sneak well.
And of course, Orks and their kin get the bigest shaft up their... - gain minor cold resistance, but also gain fire vulnerability!! Ahem, no thank you.
There are also some drow, hobgoblin and lizardfolk substitutions, but who cares. Nobody plays these races in regular DnD anyway.

The class options are sometimes substitutions and sometimes addons. Most are so bad that I'd rather play a kobold fighter grappler than use them.
Druid: gets Aspect options similar to those from UA, must lose Wildshape. Most are really weak, xcept one that gives an unnamed bonus to WIS. Also, may gain different companion
Rogue: may chose to select ability to deny breath use to a dragon by sacrificing sneak dice, but as it is written, it may sometimes screw you over big time.
Monk: sorta worthless, lose Stunning Fist, but gain elemental damage to 1 attack as a swift action. The damage eventually gets to some 15, but by then you are 20th lvl. Who cares? I'd rather stun.
Classes with Hvy Armor Feat: get fvcked over and then get fvcked some more. Lose hvy armors to gain some weird untyped armor that doesn't stack with normal armor, has less bonus, may not be enchanted and

wrote:“This bonus doesn't stack with any feat, racial trait or special ability that would grant you a bonus to AC.”

WHAT THE FVCK???!! I use Expertise and may gain a penalty but not the bonus? I can't Dodge?? Bugger off, WotC. I hope all you characters use this option.
Familiars: may lose some crap, gain breath attack for 1 dmg or whatever. Familiars sit on my shoulder and give Alertness and some other bonus, they don't attack.
Mount: lose celestial horse, gain dragon horsey. Nuff said.
Bard: lose inspire courage, gain inspire awe. Since the DC is based on your Perform check, this might be usefull. O wait, I can't cast spells while I do it? Pass!
Cleric and Paladin: lose TU, gain Turn Dragon. It count as TU for any prereq, but you'll never use it successfully in your whole life, unless you hunt dragons with half your CR.
Barbarians and Rogues: lose Unncany Dodge, gain immunity to draconic frightfull presence. Who writes this stuff?
Favored Souls and Dragon Shamans get mentioned. I won't make that mistake.

Feats
Most of the feats printed fall into one of three categories: Draconic, Ceremony and Initiate.
All Initiate feats are bound to one dragon god and give clerics some class skils and some neat spells. I guess they are used for RP or prereq purposes only because none of them stand out in any way.
Ceremony feats are bad and i won't write about them.
Draconic feats introduce [Color] Dragon Legacy feats. And of course , they show us again that if you are evil, you should suffer and get crap abilities. Chromatic Legacies deal minor ammounts of damage or give irrelevant boni like temp hp. Metallic Legacies sleep, repulse, slow, paralyze and give boni to saves. Guess what i'd choose. Other Draconic feats are irrelevant because they work better as you gain more of them. So i'm a sorc, where am i supposed to get all those feats?

But all is not that bad. Honorable mention goes to Dragonfire Assault and Dragonfire Strike. The former states that your Power Attack damage may be fire, while the later says that your sneak, skirmish or sudden damage may be fire damage and you gain an xtra die if it is. As far as rogues are concerned it is all good news.


Base class
Dragonfire adept: What can i say? It's a warlock with a draconic theme. An it is a turd. No class abilities to speak of(DR 2/magic at 8th level?) and a breath weapon(cone 15' or line 30') that can't deal damage. As a warlock applies eldritch stuff onto his blast, so a Dragonfire adept applies breath effects which do nothing but insult you.
Most of the breath effects change the default fire damage to other type and change the shape of your breath. One particulary stupid breath efect is Discorporating Breath of Bahamut which deals double your breath damage dice, but also deals double your class level in damage to you. So lets put it in numbers. You have to be 15th level to use it so your breath damage is 7d6, times two is 14d6, which on average is 49, Fort for half. You take 30 no matter what. Not so good now, is it?
It also gains some invocations – 8 in 20 levels. None of the invocations are groundbreaking or broken. I wouldn't recomend this class to anyone. In fact, even reading about it might cause some harm.

PrC
Diamond Dragon: Psychic warrior that likes dragons and can get draconic attacks. It loses two manifester levels. Anybody who has played a psion, knows how much it hurts to lose a manifester level. No way in hell would i play this class. Also, 10th level ability is Frighfull Presence with a DC of 15 or maybe 16. Thank you, but, no thank you.
Dragon Descendant: A monk class that doesn't really help monks.
Dragon Lord: A fighter or barbarian class that revolves around Leadership and intimidating. No abilities to write home about.
Hand of the Winged Masters: A grave insult to rogues. Must have sneak attack as a prereq, only to be denied normal sneak attack progresion and to get only 6 sp/lvl. This class doesn't get any abilities at all that couldn't have been gained via spells, feats or magical items. Pass over this class or roll up a new character after the first session you play it in.
Pact-bound Adept: A wizzard class that loses two caster levels. Its prereq want you to be able to cast 3rd lvl spells and then screws you over by not giving you a caster lvl. Gain Silent Spell and Still Spell 3/day and some other minor SLA. Not really playable.
Swift Wing: A cleric class with TU and 3rd lvl divine spells as a prereq. Here goes 1st lvl – you gain Dragon domain and +5 bonus on interaction skills vs one type of dragon such as red. You don't get TU(a prereq) or spellcasting level(a prereq). The further you delve into this class, the worse will you feel.
Wyrm Wizard: I'm starting to see a pattern. Gain five bonus spells but lose three caster levels(in effect losing 6 bonus spells). Also gain some skill boni and an ability to counterspell really good by losing spell slots of equal level. But I already lost three caster levels! Where should i get those spells? Do they fly merrily arround? Wizzard and dumbass only class.

Spells

As always, some stand out as gems, others as horse manure. I will only mention those that are seriously good or bad.
Arcane Spellsurge(7th lvl) - makes you cast all your spells faster. Your standard action spells now require only a swift action, your 1 round spells take a standard action and those with a casting time of 2-10 rounds take one round less to cast. You can't ignore this effect so it is sorta a bummer. But you can shoot your wand or double move. Sorcs can ignore this effect by applying metamagic to spells. Also people with dragon type or subtype cast this spell swiftly.
Burst of Glacial Wrath(9th lvl) – cone with d6 dmg/lvl, Fort save for half, explicitly can not kill. A 9th lvl spell?????? But look on the bright side, if you learn this spell, you gain 5 resistance to cold. Sad, really sad.
Eyes of the Oracle(6th lvl) – gain boni like those of Forsight and may ready an action regardles of the number of actions taken that turn. All good as far as i'm concerned.
Path of Frost(1st lvl) – Grease that can be shaped
Primal Instinct(3rd lvl) – +5 initiative for a whole day
Undying Vigor of the Dragonlords(5th lvl) – sorc only. Heal yourself for a decent amount of damage. Works on undead and better on dragonblooded.

There are also some psi powers, soul binds, invocations, magical items and creatures. None will make you happy.

Finally, the fluffy stuff. Twenty pages short and basically boring. Imagine a world where dragons rule or are worshiped. You can? No wonder. That is the flavor of the entire chapter.
And last, but not the least, a free adventure. And as such, it is short and uninteresting.

There you have it. My first review. I hope i have succeded and persuaded most of you not to read or buy this book. Till next time, good gaming.

Might as well start in with quick notes:

On draconic races:
If you don't care one way or the other for the draconic version of your race, also note that a lot of feats in this book and Races of the Dragon have Dragonblood subtype as a prerequisite. All of these grant the Dragonblood subtype, which means you don't need to burn a feat for it. Still, meh.

Also, even if you didn't review them yourself, the tradeoffs for the Deepwyrm Drow and Sunscorch Hobgoblin are explicitly bad. I mean, bad even beyond being a drow or hobgoblin.

Aspect of the Dragon, for Druids, is explicitly worse than Wild Shape or the replacement feature from PHBII... but if your DM twitches whenever you mention Wild Shape, and you like actually stacking transformation and casting, you might consider this.

Breathstealer is pretty lame simply because it's hard to get a sneak attack in on a dragon and that still doesn't stop them from dropping wraithstrike and then power attacking you into a red stain. Bleh.

Draconic Fist gets monks energy damage punches at the cost of needing to burn a feat on Stunning Fist. If you don't have anything better to burn swift actions on, you might even take this.

Dragonscale Husk? What the fvck is this? Well, it doesn't ruin the book to have something completely utterly fvcking useless in any situation for any character you could imagine printed in it, but it's still completely utterly useless in any situation for any fvcking character you could imagine. (Yes, it really is that bad.)

Favoured of Bahamut/Tiamat is soundly meh. It replaces Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization with the ability to gain two sorceror spells over 20 levels (one 1st at level 1 instead of a cleric spell (optional), one 5th or 6th at level 12 instead of a cleric spell (again, optional), gain 1 hit point, +1 to listen/search/spot, and +1 saves versus paralysis and fear. And be dragonblooded. Oh, and you actually get WORSE DR. Yes, 10/epic is worse than 10/silver and 10/cold iron. Yes, WotC treats it like it's better. WotC just printed Dragonscale Husk on the same page though so fvck them.

On Inspire Awe, though, I disagree with the above poster. No, you can't sing and cast spells in the same round but its only good effect (frightening enemies stops them from actually doing anything) kicks in after the level at which you perform for one round and mess with your enemies for 6.

Rebuke Dragons is just retarded.

Uncanny Bravery is awful because it trades protection from something it's hard to become flat-out immune to for immunity from something that it's much easier to become flat-out immune to.

Shamanic Invocation is probably a must if you're actually playing a Dragon Shaman. I haven't looked up the invocations yet but even with the feat that gives you two auras, an at-will ability that you can use while your auras are going is probably better than the aura you thought was fvcking 5th best of the 7 in PHB2.

As feats go, Lineages are mostly pretty shitty. At least you by no means actually need to be good to have the lineage of a metallic dragon, which means you can just pick the one you want. Blue Dragon Lineage would almost stand out if you had a high Charisma - burn a 9th-level slot that you have the wrong thing memorized in for 9d6+90 damage! - but it's all delivered in bite-sized chunks that are easily resistanced down to 0. And worse yet, because of its dependence on Charisma, it's useful for Sorcerors. You know, the class that has not having the wrong spells memorized for the job as its main fvcking advantage?

Also, as a response to the poster above, Gold Dragon Lineage's bonus to saves is actually pretty temporary and useless unless you know your party is going to have to suddenly make a single huge saving throw in the next 60 seconds.

Copper Dragon Lineage's area-of-effect slow is a pretty hardcore panic button.

Double Draconic Aura is a must for Dragon Shamans or people who want to sink two feats into having auras. Yes, I know you shouldn't be playing the class, but it should be mentioned.

Draconic Armor is amusingly useless and you'll probably forget you have it since it seriously gives you a different amount of DR/magic every turn. Plus it's just DR/magic.

Draconic Aura is also neat if you want to steal Dragon Shamans' class features, and your entire party aura-ing each other for free all the time can be handy. This has a hidden prerequisite of the Dragonblood subtype because it's fvcking useless without it, but there are a million ways to get that. Like the races at the start of this book.

Dragonfire Assault is pretty hardcore if you're running up against something that doesn't resist your one chosen energy type but does resist your smashing it with your gigantic Power Attack. Possibly useful, but has annoying prerequisites (Charisma of 11 and dragonblood subtype).

Dragonfire Channeling lets you shoot cones of divine fire from your holy symbol if you don't have anything better to do. This is actually pretty hardcore and I'm all for more people taking it, because spending Turn Undead on actually turning undead stops working at high levels.

Dragonfire Inspiration lets you trade up to +4 morale bonuses on attacks and damage for +4d6 fire damage. Hey, why not?

Dragonfire Strike is like Dragonfire Assault only, uh, better in every conceivable way. But instead of being for fighters, who aren't allowed to have anything good, it's for rogues, who are.

Green Dragon Lineage lets you team instagib people by dropping their Will saving throws by up to 9 points without a save.

Initiate of Hlal makes you effectively immune to the first three grapples that hit you in a day. (+caster level to your grapple or Escape Artist check made to avoid or escape a grapple) It also gives you other bonuses so you might even want to check it out.

Ceremony Feats, as a whole, are fvcking useless ways to burn both your feats and cash. Never take any of these.

Dragonfire Adept has one semi-worthwhile trick and that's doing 35d6 damage at level 15 (up to 45d6 at level 20) and taking a bunch of damage. It's a class that has pretty odd alignment restrictions, though - none.

Only, if you're Good, you deal 14d6 (up to 18d6) damage instead of 35d6 up to 45d6 and take the same amount of damage. If you're Neutral, you get a CHOICE! You can either deal the 14-18d6 or the 35-45d6... but either way, you take twice the damage the Good and Evil people get. So you suck. In fact, the only non-sucky choice here is to be Evil, which is quite a surprise.

I mean, you still suck since you're a Dragonfire Adept, but you suck markedly less than any other alignements.

Anyway, the class is 20 levels long, but only because once you're in it, there's nowhere else to go except, uh, suicide, I guess. It's kinda like Warlock in that way.

The above poster somehow missed that the minimum save for Diamond Dragon's capstone ability is 20, and likely will be around 23-24. He did not miss that the class is not useful. 0 levels long.

Dragon Descendant gives some pretty fun abilities. Like, oh, better Ki Blasts than taking Ki Blast (5d6 no-save typeless energy blasts that count as 5th-level spells). Or +10 to hide and move silently and +7d6 sneak attack. Or +5 bonuses to all saving throws. Or +5 insight bonuses to AC and free attacks of opportunity against anyone who melee attacks you at all. And you get two of those so this class might even be worth taking. This class is 10 levels long and awesome unless there's something glaringly obvious that I'm missing.

Becoming a Dragon Lord is seriously FREE. Its prerequisites might as well not even exist. This usually heralds that the class is about as effective as just taking 10 more levels of Fighter. It is. This class may be 1 level long for Fighter types who like senseless dipping since it gets them a dip bonus to Fortitude saves and a tiny little Draconic Aura bonus for essentially nothing.

I think someone here once said that, when analyzing a prestige class to see if it fits your character, you should look at the mechanics rather than the fluff. Hand of the Winged Masters is a perfect example of this, an assassin who serves the Council of Wyrms (or other dragons), and it seems like it would make your sneak attacks better since you get neat abilities related to sneak attacks and SOME sneak attack progression... but it's actually worse than just putting those extra levels in Rogue. Fvck. Avoid like the plague, and if you want the benefits of it, take Dragonfire Strike (this book) and Darkstalker (Lords of Madness, and a feat I can't help but recommend) instead. This class is 0 levels long.

Pact-Bound Adept is a sorceror-only prestige class based around doing something fvcking useless better than anyone else. Uh, yeah, guys, this isn't gonna help. This class is -1 levels long, because it's actually worse than a class that's 0 levels long - it's a class that's 0 levels long that you'd be retarded to ever have the prerequisites for.

Swift Wing is an amusing class because it actually grants you a domain that isn't in this book, with spells that also are not in this book. It's an 8/10 cleric class that gives you a meh extra domain, a trick that's like Dragonfire Channeling but awful, immunity versus one energy type, wings, DR 5/magic, and a permanent typeless +1 to one physical and one mental ability score at level 10.

The prerequisites for this class are essentially free, but only a fool would sell a lame dog with fleas. 0 levels long.

Wyrm Wizards are essentially free to join. At 1st level, you can spend an hour doing research to get +your class level on Knowledge (arcana) checks, +2 more if you consult with a dragon, for 8 hours. Same with Spellcraft checks once you turn level 5. They can also add 5 non-wizard spells to their spell list, get free metamagic (of up to +4 slots) on up to 3 spells, and spontaneously fling dispel magics as counterspells. (Now, if only that worked.) At level 10, they can sacrifice a spell slot as a free action after beating a creature's SR to make that creature no longer have SR for effectively the rest of the fight.

Some useful abilities until you get to the part where they have 7/10 casting. You don't technically drop a caster level until level 2 in this class, but the level-1 bonus isn't too handy, so I'll say this is 0 levels long.

Thank you both for the critique/review! Very entertaining too, I might say.

I'll be combing over your opinions and all when I sit down with the Dragon Magic book tonight.

This may just be me, but seriously why the hell was this book even published? There's a "Races of the Dragon" and a "Draconomicon" already. What does this book do that's supposed to be unique or different?

It's like how they're releasing "The Complete Mage" when there's already a Complete Divine. Or the "Complete Scoundrel" when there's already a Complete Adventurer.

What the hell is going on? It's one thing to make more books endlessly, but it's quite another to make new books covering exactly the same topic as books you've already written. These books do not have a different focus than the ones already printed. Can't they make something which is more general or more focused? Is creativity so dead that they are left writing the same books again and again?

-Username17

My best guess is that those other books were so well recived that it was economically feasible for them to publish another book on the same subject. They are, in fact, riding the hype.

I'm willing to bet that in a couple of months we'll be seeing a book called something like "Tome of Stealth - The Bows of The World".

It's like how they're releasing "The Complete Mage" when there's already a Complete Divine.

You meant Complete Arcane, right? Complete Champion is the sequel to Complete Divine.

In any case, Dragon Magic attempts to cover areas that Races of the Dragon didn't, at least - the latter being a race book and the former being a general supplement full of weak and lame crap you don't care about.

About half of Draconomicon was devoted to similar themes as Dragon Magic, while the other half of it was explicitly devoted to NPC use since it was about running dragons and dragons just aren't viable PCs.

(Complete Mage is probably along the lines of the economic feasability issue. Also, "Core + Complete" is a common material restriction, second only to "Core only", so designing more Complete books is probably one of the most economically sound decisions they could make.)

And actually, the latest news is that in a couple of months (well, okay, next May, so more than a couple) we'll be seeing Drow of the Underdark. Remind you of any other published WotC book names and subjects?

They're not very 'Complete', then, are they?

-Crissa

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1160590728[/unixtime]]
It's like how they're releasing "The Complete Mage" when there's already a Complete Divine. Or the "Complete Scoundrel" when there's already a Complete Adventurer.

What the hell is going on? It's one thing to make more books endlessly, but it's quite another to make new books covering exactly the same topic as books you've already written. These books do not have a different focus than the ones already printed. Can't they make something which is more general or more focused? Is creativity so dead that they are left writing the same books again and again?

Honestly it's because those books are the big sellers. Writing specialized books draws fewer and fewer people to actually buy them. When you write something for broad groups like "All arcane casters", then you're going to get a big group of people buying the book. As opposed to some book themed around troglodytes which hardly anyone is going to buy. The only thing bigger than reprinting complete warrior and complete arcane under different titles is reprinting the core. Of course, reprinting the core tends to get people pissed off so they can't do that all that mcuh. They can however create 10 separate volumes of complete arcane and nobody really cares. I mean, we had tome and blood, now we have complete arcane, and now they're making complete mage. You can bet this won't be the end of it.

They pissed me off and I stopped buying.

And they must've pissed off alot of other people, because their sales are at the lowest since the buyout by Wizards.

-Crissa

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1160636023[/unixtime]]They pissed me off and I stopped buying.

And they must've pissed off alot of other people, because their sales are at the lowest since the buyout by Wizards.

-Crissa

Where did you get those statistics from, Crissa? I'd be curious to see their sales totals per books ... or the comparative WotC bottom line from year-to-year.

You can get numbers that are estimates from various booksellers or game stores; Hasbro doesn't publish their total sales publically.

But while they're remained the largest game sales, their sales have crumbled for the last six years. Total Hobby sales have been on a downslide for fifteen years.

-Crissa

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1160636023[/unixtime]]They pissed me off and I stopped buying.

And they must've pissed off alot of other people, because their sales are at the lowest since the buyout by Wizards.

I don't know about pissed off... I think mostly they make people wonder "why do I need this new book?"

As more and more crap gets published, you really start to wonder why you need the latest new supplement. What will Dragon magic or Complete mage really do for your game? Do you need mages to be any better? Doesn't core + spell compendium already have enough spells? Do you need another book wtih 20 ill thought out and unplayable PrCs? For most people, the answer is going to be no. You've got the diehard people who buy anything WotC produces, but the majority of gamers just aren't like that.

If WotC were smart, they'd have fewer releases and actually do stuff like playtest and think over the material they release, instead of using the "million chimps with typewriters" principle.

WotC is just figuring out now why TSR went broke. RPGs are a diminishing returns business, with each book you produce getting less and less sales. Trying to flood the market with cheap products to try to compensate just doesn't work. TSR did exactly that, and they collapsed.

They'd be much better buckling down and producing fewer books but with a higher quality. There are enough fanatical gamers that they can almost certainly get people to playtest their new material for free or almost for free. There's just no excuse for putting out poor material.

There's just no excuse for putting out poor material.

It's still cheaper in the short term.

What if you wrote a book, playtested it, and found out nothing but the fluff was salvageable. What would you do then? You still have an author to pay (presumably), and you have no book.

While we all would certainly prefer that they playtest the material, and think it over, it may not be the economical thing to do. Of course, in the long term, it might actually be the most profitable.

Joshua

The thing is that for me it has very little to do with quality of the material or anything like that: really it has to do with interest. Yeah, they may print out another magic reference book, but the thing is that I have very little interest in buying a paladin feat/skill book - heck, I don't even like playing paladins that much. If I really wanted to gain some mechanics into my campaign, I've still got my copy of Book of Hallowed Might, various Dragon magazines, and Unearthed Arcana that I could cobble together various options and flavor if I really wanted to do so. The stuff I'm buying are the Fantastic Locations modules, the Forgotten Realms modules, Dungeon magazine since I link reading over dungeons for encounter ideas, and possibly a Forgotten Realms book if it is heavy on fluff/history and not rules (I haven't been too lucky on that recently). To each their own.

AlphaNerd at [unixtime wrote:1160702282[/unixtime]]
It's still cheaper in the short term.

What if you wrote a book, playtested it, and found out nothing but the fluff was salvageable. What would you do then? You still have an author to pay (presumably), and you have no book.

Well, hopefully you tweak the stuff that you found out sucked. If nothing is salvageable at all, well then your writer screening process suxxorz and you need to really consider who you hire.

The advantage of producing fewer books is also that you need fewer writers and you can keep around the guys who do good work and not bother with people who don't know the system well enough to be writing. If you're producing books with no salvageable content, then you might as well not put it out at all, it's only going to hurt sales in the long run.

Generally, writers only get paid if the published book makes money. There's some forward cash, maybe, but not always. It almost always comes out of any returns later.

And wizards knew the lessons of TSR - the problem is that Wizards 3.5 isn't the same company as Wizards 3.0 - the people are completely different, and incapable of complex math.

-Crissa

The Dragonfire Adept is actually decent at low levels, particularly level 1 and level 5. You see, Dragonfire Adepts have a hidden class feature that replaces their first level feat with Entangling Exhalation, so their breath weapon does between 1.5 and 4.5 as much damage as normal and keeps enemies entangled for 1d4 rounds. This power starts tapering off fairly quickly since the damage doesn't scale well and you only have one, maybe two, good tricks, but at level 5 you take slow breath and keep at least one group of enemies slowed, entangled, and taking half-decent damage at all times.

Get much past 5th level and suicide is your only option.

[TGFBS]
Locked because spammers seem to like it. Will unlock on request.
[/TGFBS]