Any Plans For Making Playable Dragons?


Product Discussion


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Out of the long history of fantastic and evocative 3rd party products created for the first edition of pathfinder, one of my favorites has to be In The Company of Dragons Expanded by Rite Publishing (with several other companies providing their own cool little sections to the book). For those of you who do not know, it was basically a mix of a campaign setting and a well-developed rules set for playing dragons. You could either go the path of the dragon exemplar (the racial class) or you could play as a member of a normal class but with an archetype that would (when combined with certain feats) largely give you the feeling and abilities of playing a dragon while still maintaining much of your class abilities.

While a fantastic product, In The Company Of Dragons also suffered from several issues rooted within the pathfinder 1e system itself. Chief amongst these was that the size penalties for getting larger would eventually outstrip the bonuses that were gain from your growth. Moreover, when playing a dragon with a focus on spellcasting ability, meant that at a certain point your dragon abilities stopped coming into play, as the extreme power of spells in pathfinder 1e warped the game around them.

Pathfinder 2e however, seems like it might actually be able to work with playable dragons. Size no longer matters for most purposes, meaning that changing size will not cause major disruptions in-game balance and rules interactions. The tighter math means that even spellcasters can occasionally get into melee against lower-level foes, which would allow even dragons with a focus on spellcasting to do dragon things. Size increases no longer boosting damage will also make things easier from a conversion and game balance standpoint.

What I am asking is this. Does anyone have any plans for making playable dragons in pathfinder 2e? I know that we are only a year into the game's release, and that Paizo is coming out with products at such a high rate that gambling with creating a product that they might soon invalidate is a real risk, but playable dragons seem like something that Paizo is unlikely to tackle. So I am wondering if anyone has considered attempting this for pathfinder 2e.


Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I haven't bought and looked at it, but this 3rd party product may have what you are after.


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

I want a powerful ancestry book designed to let you play a member of a powerful species in a regular adventuring party, reaching appropriate power levels of full members of the species at the correct character levels and scaling up or down as necessary at other levels based on PC math.


WatersLethe wrote:
I want a powerful ancestry book designed to let you play a member of a powerful species in a regular adventuring party, reaching appropriate power levels of full members of the species at the correct character levels and scaling up or down as necessary at other levels based on PC math.

I absolutely and fully agree. One of the benefits that I see in doing this in pathfinder 2e is that with dual classing and free archetype variants in the gamemastery guide, as well as archetype feats in general, the focus can be put primarily on an ancestries natural abilities. For example, giving dragons a whole bunch of spellcasting ability is not strictly necessary, because the player can just multiclass into sorcerer if they really want those spells.


Rite Publishing's In the Company of Dragons for PF1 did this, and we expanded on the idea further with our Play Manga d20 supplement.

For PF2, I could see it being relatively easy to incorporate. I know we have our Dragon speaker class (Think 3.5 dragon shaman) that we introduced in The Faithful Few and are expanding on with our Lands of Theia campaign setting. They have a path that allows them to eventually transform into a dragon. So that's kind of a start. :)


I had no idea that you had done your own expansion along the same lines as In The Company Of Dragons! I am going to have to check that out.

I have seen your dragon speaker class, and I must say that I really like it! You managed to take and utilize a lot of the abilities displayed by dragons in Pathfinder 2e, along with some very cool new abilities, and turn them into class feats. I can definitely see a dragon class for Pathfinder 2e being built along the same lines. Of course, such a class would require a dragon ancestry and heritage to go along with it.

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