Can the true dragons serve as balanced PCs and advance in age categories instead of levels? Maybe! How does this look?
It seems dragon CRs go up by 1 if they don't grow or 2 if they do. I'm considering making a same-size age category equivalent to a level. In the case of the categories where dragons grow a size, I'd give them the Giant simple template the first time they level up and the rest of the age category the next time.
This would allow for pure dragon PCs starting from levels equal to the CRs of the various wyrmlings all the way up to CR 20, or even beyond.
I'd allow players of true dragon characters to pick out their own feats and spells, place their own skill ranks and tweak their ability score totals, but I'd leave them on the same point-buy totals as the Bestiary wyrmlings.
Obviously this has true dragons growing up very quickly unless the campaign has abnormal amounts of downtime, but I'm happy to change their life cycle to accommodate something like this.
This is a very simple rule to achieve a very complex end that the game was not designed to cope with, so I'm sure that it will mess things up dreadfully somewhere along the line. Can you name any specific problems with this? I'd love to know.
Ok, cool. That was... unexpectedly fast and positive.
How about the bare-bones implementation outlined in the post though? And pitfalls to look out for?
I'm hoping to be able to make the existing dragons work, rather than creating similar-looking dragons from the ground up.
I know. That's why I'm trying to figure out where it's likely to go wrong and how best to handle it, rather than rushing ahead.
According to the rules for monster PCs, a monster of a given CR should be roughly equivalent to a PC of equal level, so I'm trying to figure out how well that holds in this particular case, and what, if anything, should be done to shore it up.
Well, I've noticed one problem already: I was going to use the Giant template as a partial step towards gaining +2 CR age categories, but dragons don't actually gain as much Strength and Constitution as the Giant template offers. I'm thinking I could advance their size, armour, ability scores and breath weapon instead. That way they get everything that's on the main dragon advancement table the first level and everything species-specific the next. Nice and simple. Thoughts?
As far as life span is concerned, there are some different things you can do with that. My favorite comes from the Dragonrider class where the dragon forms a bond with a character. As the characters levels up the dragon increases in size. If that character were to die but the dragon escapes or still remains, he retains the powers and abilities of the larger size but does not age.
So, if the players wants to have a dragon as a character, you can come up with in-world reasons why he might seek such a life. Gain power and experience versus waiting for age to progress his power. Seems like a logical gamble to me.
Yeah. I'm not thinking that specifically, but things along those lines for sure.