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"I want to play a dragon!"

These are words every GM has heard at one point or another. It's almost always followed by "Well, they're really not meant for play by characters...."

I don't know about you, but I never like giving that answer to people. So I've come up with a better one. It goes a little like this "So you want to play a dragon..."

Ranger 4/Sorcerer 1/ Dragon Disciple 2

So we start with a ranger. "But Research," you say, "Rangers aren't arcane casters, why would you use them for a dragon disciple!?" Because I'm building a Dragon, not a dragon disciple! First level is pretty basic. Little bit of flavor in the human feat: Fey foundling (PFCS 81) giving you a little bonus to your wild empathy and a little DR/Cold Iron. You'd be surprised how handy DR 1 is. Downside? Cold iron weapons do an extra point of damage to you.

First level feat is power attack. Why? Because power attack is really, really good. It opens doors, too. Also pick up track, wild empathy, and a favored enemy. If you're going into society play, I recommend Humanoid (Human). Otherwise, favored enemy Fey is also a good one.

Second level of ranger gives you combat styles, and we take natural weapon combat style. This opens up aspect of the beast (Read the special rules for the feat at the bottom of its entry), giving you claws. Can't disarm you now, and two claw attacks are rather draconic.

Third level gets us cleave and the shapeshifter variant class for the ranger (APG 126), taking form of the dragon for some major AC bumpage when it counts.

Fourth level of ranger brings us to "spells". Well, we can't cast spells with a low wisdom, so let's take skirmisher. Ranger spells aren't inherently amazing for this character anyway, and mixing arcane and divine spells is a bookkeeping nightmare. Skirmisher doesn't come online until ranger level 5, but you lose nothing for it. You also get an animal companion of some kind or a nature's bond for your friends. Depending on what you're working with, animal companions can get pretty awesome, but this character doesn't need one to work out.

5th level is when we really get draconic. First level of draconic bloodline sorcerer. Pick some spells, doesn't really matter which ones. What's important is draconic claws, and the access to great cleave.

6th level we're finally in Dragon Disciple levels and man does it feel good. Blood of dragons means your draconic bloodline continues to increase as if you kept taking levels of sorcerer. A little natural armor increase helps too. Finally, that d12 hit die really helps offset the loss of HP on the d6 from the sorcerer level.

7th level gives us access to a bite attack a few times a day when we're working with draconic claw rounds, and we also take Improved Natural Attack (Claw) to get us a die size increase. This is important because enlarge effects are all kinds of good for this character. We also get a bloodline feat, and I recommend Toughness. Dragon disciples are a tank, and they draw a lot of fire. Good thing we get draconic resistances from the bloodline at this level and

Easy feat progression breakdown:

H - Fey Foundling
1 - Power Attack
2 - Aspect of the Beast
3 - Cleave
5 - Great Cleave
7 - Improved Natural Attack (Claw)

Let's examine the character at seven.

Base Stats:

BAB: +5
Fort: +5 + Con
Ref: +5 + Dex
Will: +4 + Wis
AC: 12 + Dex + shields + armor

Which puts us almost in line with monk defenses except on the AC front, and a quick breastplate and shield ensemble fix that. Like a dragon, we're weak on the touch AC, and that stays on flavor so I'm ok with that.

What's important to remember is all three attacks (Claw/claw/bite) are on full BAB! that's HUGE. 5-6 rounds/day you've got 3 attacks a round at full BAB before haste. At level 7. That's insane. Fighters usually only GET 5 or 6 full attacks per day.

GM Note: I would always consider the draconic bite a two-handed weapon. It gets 1 and 1/2 strength and you can use it limited amounts per day. If someone were to take furious focus and the like I'd let it apply.

The character qualifies for spells as a 2nd level sorcerer, but due to magical knack casts them as if 3rd level. (This is a sticky ruling even I'm not sure on. See disclaimer)

Magical Knack Disclaimer: NOT LEGAL in society play. This thing is a sticky talent. It boosts caster level by two, up to your HD. The question in play is does it grant access to spells. Practiced spellcaster specifically stated that it did not grant access to spells, knack doesn't clarify that. I doubt it's meant to give access to them.

I have a recommendation for fans of the CCW: fire-up HeroLab on your laptop and create the character along with Research. I did that on the train to work this morning and more than an hour flew by. I liked it so much I bought the HL player companion update package when I got wi-fi access, so I could do some of the other other builds. (Ice Dragoon was one I couldn't do.) I'm a GM, so I'm saving these bad boys as NPCs!

By the way, Research, you're doing a really great job, I'm a fan, but I lost you a few times. You might want to do the HeroLab exercise yourself when preparing this segment -- it may help organize the explanation and avoid glossing over steps. Also, remember to tell listeners what book a feat, trait, etc. comes from. Keep up the good work. The podcast gets better every episode. I can't wait for the train ride home!

EDIT: On re-read, I realized that this sounded like a commercial. No, I'm not employed by HL.

I suggest using the "Heart of the Wilderness" alternate Human racial trait: "Heart of the Wilderness: Humans raised in the wild learn the hard way that only the strong survive. They gain a bonus equal to half their character level on Survival checks. They also gain a +5 bonus on Constitution checks to stabilize when dying and add half their character level to their Constitution score when determining the negative hit point total necessary to kill them. This racial trait replaces the skilled racial trait." APG pg. 23.

Hi Research,

First post here. Love the show. Especially love the character builds. I love looking at Character builds. I probably end up doing that more than I end up playing.
I think there's a flaw in your build.
At 3rd level you took the Shapeshifter Variant for Ranger. That makes sense and was a good choice.
At 4th Level you took The Skirmisher Variant so that you could move away from Divine Spells.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought you could only take one variant per class and I would have thought that you had to choose that variant when you started the character.

It would also have been good if there had been some discussion on getting around Arcane Spell Failure. It's a pain that Rangers get medium armor and shields but thats going to really mess with the spells that this character build gets with its Sorcerer/DD levels.

Cheers....

In response to the HeroLab comments:

I currently have logistics issues preventing me from using HeroLab during a cast.

On the subject of Arcane Spell Failure: Yes, you will have arcane spell failure. In a Mithril Breastplate, it's not incredibly debilitating. It is significant, but spellcasting isn't really the primary point of the build. The Dragoon build is the most complex build I've done since I stopped playing 3.5 in favor of pathfinder.

Which brings me to glossing over parts of the character builds. If I were to explain everything about the Ice Dragoon in detail, the podcast would get another 30 minutes of time on it. And it would be extremely boring, Number-crunchy time. Numbers are different from game to game depending on rolls. I strive to highlight interesting things about the character. Mundane things like Arcane spell failure are rules I assume people will account for. Granted, spell failure chance is somewhat obscure. That one I probably should have covered. However, if you're listening to this cast, I'm assuming fairly advanced GM/Players. Hell, threads like this one are here specifically for this Q&A.

On the variant question, this is an excerpt from the APG page 72:

A character can take more than one archetype and garner additional alternate class features, but none of the alternate class features can replace or alter the same class feature from the core class as another alternate class feature.

So yes, you can take skirmisher and the other variants. Skirmisher only replaces spells, and none of the other variants touch spellcasting. Which goes to show Paizo did it right for the most part. The only issue with the Ranger variants are interactions between taking variants that remove favored enemies and favored terrains, which sometimes deny functionality to abilities without denying access to those abilities. (IE, Variant A removes Favored Terrain, while variant B has an ability that keys off favored terrain. Variant A and B are not mutually exclusive. They do not overlap at all, and therefore you can take both. However, Variant B no longer functions. These situations should have been avoided, and in most of the other classes they were. Ranger is just a fairly complicated and interwoven class.)

Wow!
Learn something new every day. Thanks mate. Paizo really has gone out of there way to make character flexibility a big part of character creation.
The chances of two players sitting down with the same build are really slim.

Hey, Research, any chance that you would put up a cumulatively updated CCW pdf like they've been doing for Monster Mash?
Thanks and keep up the good work,
Mairkurion

Thanks for the feedback, all.

As far as PDFs go? I do not have Martial Software Proficiency (Adobe), therefore I only know how to read PDFs at the moment and have no knowledge of how to put out a PDF product that would come to my standards. All PDFs from Monster Mash are handled by far more artistic (and organized) folk than I. It's something I'll consider in the future, perhaps.

Love this concept.

I want to recommend a similar build to one if my players but I want to know about higher level play. Since we are doing two attacks at 1d6+str twice per round and a bite attack (razortusk feat at -5 to hit [he is playing a half-Orc]), will this become obsolete at higher levels, i.e. the monk?

The stat increases from dragon disciple will help offset damage, but his claws cannot be enchanted with additional powers and I see him falling behind in damage potential at higher levels. What can we do to this built to keep in the field instead of dropping back?

Thanks and I look forward to your input.

Let me point you to the Amulet of Mighty Fists wonderous item. It applies magical enhancements to all natural weapons on the wearer's body, including things like keen, flaming, and ghost touch.