My little sibling wants to play a literal dragon, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to flavor swap something. Make it medium sized for balance, then what? Make it a race, then give him class levels? Or should "dragon" be a race/class all to his own, so he can keep getting levels in "dragon"? Also, has anything been done like this in a 3rd party book maybe.
I did this with my (now ex-) wife in 3.5, using some directions from Savage Species and a lot of work. It's doable, if you don't mind giving them levels where they do not gain HD.
Your best bet would be to make it a class. I would start with the Super genius games - Genius Guide to the Dragon Rider. Basically a dragon rider is just a guy with full bab and good saves with a dragon. Just have the player play the dragon, combining the class abilities and the abilities the dragon gets into one creature.
Sorcerer (Draconic bloodline) goes into Dragon Disciple
Synthesist Summoner
Play an actual Dragon
Half-Dragon Template (I really think it could use Dragon Magic and DR/Magic.)
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Use the ARG's race builder to produce a balanced and playable draconic-like race, and check Quanerious's Dragon Acolyte.
There are actually rules for giving monsters class levels, also... Something to the effect of adding a certain number of points to their stats first, since monsters are built with 11-11-11-10-10-10 for stats before racial modifiers and then just adding the class figures as normal, I think. Though yeah, Dragons are very powerful, so a pseudodragon or something would probably be easier to balance.
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I have used the savage species rules and they work.
I've even adapted it to pathfinder, based on the bestiary.
The core design was based on a dragon magazine article, I think from issue 300 but can't remember exactly.
Every level the character gains something, but might not be hit dice. It is a very powerful character to play, but it sacrifices class for race.
Class can be taken at any time (this also slows down the age category progression) and can keep the dragon at the same size as the party.
Class can be taken at any time (this also slows down the age category progression) and can keep the dragon at the same size as the party.
I ruled that class levels could be taken once the dragon reached the highest hit-dice for it's age category, basically yes.
In Dragon issues 320 (metallic) and 332 (chromatic) there were rules for dragon species as character classes.
someone had actually done bestiary levels a while back and all the true dragons were actually statted out totally in levels, it looks pretty good as quality goes. hear is the savage species conversion by zerzix
yo
You might find this of use. I haven't worked on it for a month or so but it contains my initial notes for dragon PCs. Admittedly it is for a Council of Wyrms type setting where all the players play dragons so you may prefer to go with the Savage Species style of of play.
Note that I normalised the dragons a fair bit so that they all have similar ability bonuses that are also modified by dragon colour and their breath weapons all use the same die type for damage. I did this so that people wouldn't think to themselves, why play a white dragon when I can play red of gold.
Director of Narrative
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When Mike Welham and I wrote the Book of Drakes we specifically included rules to use drakes (and pseudodragons) as PCs. Give it a look. You can even make your own drakes!
the guy who did bestiary levels for a savage species conversion had them statted out as classes too.
here ya go
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Take a gander at the old 3.5 books being Draconomicon and Races of the Dragons and convert it to Pathfinder. there is a lot of cool stuff in there. Thx to those books I was able to legaly send a level 20 Kobold Dracolich Sorcerer at the party and they almost made code brown at the game table. Ahh fun times sending that kinda crud at the party.