Hello adventurers of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 10th episode of our feat series. Are you a dragonborn who just wants to be a more thick skin, do you constantly find the world just beating you down and your scales not being able to keep up or are you just a nudist.
I mean either way no judgement but if either of those resonate with you or your character then the dragon hide feat dnd 5e is for you. This racial exclusive is found in the xanathar’s guide to everything handbook and it is definitely worth taking a look at. Let’s take a quick look at the description here so we know what we’re talking about.
Table of Contents
Description
So there is a prerequisite, you gotta be a dragonborn. Not super surprising. The description reads as followed: You manifest scales and claws reminiscent of your draconic ancestors. You gain the following benefits: Increase your Strength, Constitution, or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20. Your scales harden. While you aren’t wearing armor, you can calculate your AC as 13 + your Dexterity modifier. You can use a shield and still gain this benefit.
You grow retractable claws from the tips of your fingers. Extending or retracting the claws requires no action. The claws are natural weapons, which you can use to make unarmed strikes. If you hit with them, you deal slashing damage equal to 1d4 + your Strength modifier, instead of the normal bludgeoning damage for an unarmed strike. Very cool stuff there! let’s take a look at the walkthrough.
Walkthrough
So plus one to strength, CON, charisma kind of standard. The unarmed strikes dealing a additional 1d4 plus strength is pretty cool too. And the AC is your 13 plus dex. Now some things i like to point out here.
The dexterity doesn’t have a cap on it for the modifier. Now you’ll notice with a lot of armors, a lot of other kind of class related armor abilities and more notably the warforged, there’s always a cap on the dexterity modifier in this case there is not one, so you can exceed two, three whatever. Also check out barbarian, monk.
On the subject of the claws it says that takes no action to retract them or put them back in. So there are actual physical instruments as such you can use them to picture things open bottles, pick locks, a cut thing was the stuff of that nature, so there is some utility there. Let’s take it to some thoughts on the matter.
Thoughts
Personally you know if you are a gish character, i think this is for you. Reason being is you usually can’t wear a whole lot armor to begin with. So you’re pretty much unarmored. So this gives you a little bit more to work with there if you’re a mage and you’re using something like shadow blade where you have to maintain concentration that plus once your con would help you out a bit there.
The unarmed strike is what it is, it adds a lot of utility but outside of that one die four isn’t a huge damage die to be working with. So who would benefit most from it? you know gish casters probably or if you’re in a campaign with no real armor taken around, then it could be helpful there or if you’re in a gladiator pit where you’re not allowed any weapons then the one die four would really be helpful.
Wrap Up
Yeah that’s my thoughts on it. If you have any thoughts feel free to add them below as well as if you have any other alternative uses, crazy stories or build ideas you would like to play around with. Thank you so much guys and as always happy adventuring. You can also check out some useful topics such as how does hide work 5e?, does dragon hide count as armor?, dragon fear 5e, dragon hide belt 5e.