the description of the Dragon Disciple prestige class gives a class ability at level 1 of Dragon Disciple that reads:
"Blood of Dragons: A dragon disciple adds his level
to his sorcerer levels when determining the powers
gained from his bloodline. If the dragon disciple does
not have levels of sorcerer, he instead gains bloodline
powers of the draconic bloodline, using his dragon disciple
level as his sorcerer level to determine the bonuses gained.
He must choose a dragon type upon gaining his first level
in this class and that type must be the same as his sorcerer
type. This ability does not grant bonus spells to a sorcerer
unless he possesses spell slots of an appropriate level.
Such bonus spells are automatically granted if the sorcerer
gains spell slots of the spell’s level."
Now, I took a level of Sorceror with the Draconic bloodline (red dragon type), then two levels of Dragon Disciple. According to the above, I clearly count as a "level 3 red dragon bloodline" guy (or whatever) for the purposes of determining my bloodline powers, which means I get the lvl 1 claws and the lvl 3 natural armor and the fire resist 5 deal. Do I also get the lvl 3 bloodline spell, Mage Armor, or do I have to wait a level for my effective spellcasting class to hit 3 before getting that?
Actually, you just need one level of a spontaneous casting arcane class. Sorcerer 1/Whatever 4 works fine.
Greetings, fellow traveller.
First off: you need 5 skill ranks in Know (arcana). Since you can only spend 1 skill rank in any skill per level this means you need to accumulate at least 5 levels in any other class able to spontaneously casting arcane spells, e. g. sorc or bard or a combination with at least one level of bard or sorc.
Next Blood of Dragons states:
Blood of Dragons: This ability does not grant bonus spells to a sorcerer unless he possesses spell slots of an appropriate level. Such bonus spells are automatically granted if the sorcerer gains spell slots of the spell's level.
Emphasis mine.
For determining if you get access to your bonus spell you add up your caster levels (CL) - bear in mind that DD does not grant a CL at every level of DD, so you're right.
E. g. you'd need to have Sorc5/DD3 to have a CL of 7 getting access to your bonus spell fly which a pure Sorc would've gotten at Sorc7 (=CL 7).
EDIT: Ninja'ed.
Ruyan.
I took a level of Sorceror with the Draconic bloodline (red dragon type), then two levels of Dragon Disciple. I count as a "level 3 red dragon bloodline" for the purposes of determining my bloodline powers. Do I get the lvl 3 bloodline spell, Mage Armor?
Yes. Mage armor is a 1st level spell. You possess spell slots of the appropriate level (i.e. you can cast 1st level spells), so you get the bonus spell.
If you continue to take levels in Dragon Disciple, eventually your bloodline will be high enough to grant a spell of a level that you can't cast, and then you will not get that spell until you do possess spell slots of the appropriate level.
Ok, so where it says "powers gained from his bloodline" it DOES NOT mean "bloodline powers" and only "bloodline powers" it means "bloodline powers, bloodline spells, and anything else that has the words "bloodline ____" as it's description. Thank you all.
A little off topic but related to the Dragon Disciple. This came up in one game where a player was a Bard level 7 who had taken the Eldrich Heritage feat Draconic. Then they decided to go Dragon Disciple at level 8. So the sorcerer level for blood line powers was 1 at level 9 but they had the claws bloodline power at level 7 due to the feat. The GM ruled at the time that the two stacked but could not exceed the characters total levels. So this character then counted a level 8 for the claws.
With that it appears you would get 2 level of bloodline for each level you take as a DD assuming you had the feat for the level of bloodline power.
It worked fine in the game. Just not sure if that's how it should work.