Since D&D's Dragonborn predates Skyrim by five years, why not just either not use them (as they're totally optional in any given game) or just work out your issue with Skyrim's unintended D&D reference? Maybe cement in your mind that D&D has Dragonborn and Skyrim has Dovahkiin to mark the distinction, or just go back to Races of the Dragon and read through that, reminding yourself that it's older.

As you've found, just about any name you could use is also in use elsewhere for a different thing. Half-dragon (which dragonborn aren't, anyway, they're way less than half), dragonkin, dragonmen, Draconian, Drakon, all kinds of stuff already in use somewhere else. The overlap with Skyrim may just be a thing you'd have to live with.

I read Drakken somewhere, but I can't remember where.

Dragonborn, I believe, first featured in Races of the Dragon in 2006, as a sort of amalgam of half-dragons and draconians made for a less strictly evil origin story.  Draconians, of course, have their roots in the earliest Dragonlance stories, and predate 2nd edition.  As Skyrim came out in 2011, I really don't think that there's a contest as to who came first.

Personally, if I had to change the name, I would choose Arkhosians.  Arkhosia is embedded deep in the modern (post 4e, when Dragonborn were included as a core race) Dragonborn lore, although that would make it more of a nationality than a species.  Although you can argue that Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, Aasimar, and Tieflings aren't exactly "species" in the traditional sense either.

I've always referred to them by the proper term of "dire kobold".  Mostly because I dislike them as a core race.

I hope you find a name you like, but you might also want to work on your general suspension of disbelief, if this is the kind of thing that causes you problems with your immersion.

What about Saurians? I know have heard that used elsewhere, but seems to fit..

For the record, I'm well aware the D&D Dragonborn came years prior but Skyrim has a much more prominent profile and I spent hundreds of hours on it back in the day; for me, the association is carved in stone.

Aren't dragonborn made by a ritual?  You could call them dragonforged, or dragon chosen.  Something along those lines.

In reply to Xiane (msg # 9):

I remember them from the novels. Birthed from corrupted dragon eggs and turn to stone upon death. Wouldn't worry about it unless Wootsy is serious about a Dragonlance revival.

The 3.5 version are made by a religious ritual, but they recycled the artwork into the D&D4e race and then just kind of kept that for D&D5e. In 4e, they become their own race without the ritual side of things.

I've never really understood how they and Tieflings made it in to "core race" status when many much more interesting races never even got a reprint.

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Saurians are a group of Forgotten Realms races of dinosaur people.  They're cool, except that their speech is too high pitched for humanoids to understand.

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Really, if you're not going to go with the perfectly reasonable "dire kobold", it's probably most interesting to just give them a name that doesn't directly tie to "dragon".  Name them after a city or a civilization or something.  Make up something that is their name in their own language and means, basically, "human".

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 20):

Hahaha, "dire kobold".

Arkhosians is a great option

How about Wyrmkin, or some variation: Wyrmkith, Wyrmkind, Wyrmborn, Wyrmbreed, Wyrmidrin, Wyrmiri, Wyrmirae, Wyrmirin, Wyrmirain, Vurmkith, Vurmborn...

Dracamen, Dracadain, Dracadim, Dracaniri, Dracanir, Dracanith, Dracanor...
This message was last edited by the user at 19:50, Thu 10 Jan 2019.

Which races would you have preferred?

Many of the core races (except perhaps human and half-elf, and possibly the dwarf) were a good fit, in terms of their ability bonuses (and, for some, tradition), for one or more of the core classes:
Eladrin: Wizard
Elf: Ranger
Dragonborn: Paladin/Warlord
Halfling: Rogue
Tiefling: Warlock

Of the races you would have preferred to see, would any of them have been a really good fit (in terms of ability bonuses or tradition) for paladin, warlord, fighter, warlock or cleric?

Of the races you would have preferred to see, are any of them as well-known as tieflings?

Dragonborn were rather out of the blue for me, as were eladrin. I had known of eladrin, but only as high-level monsters, not as a playable race. I knew a lot of people liked to play half-dragons, and I assumed dragonborn (as with tieflings) were a way to play a popular "type" of creature without needing permission or adjustment.

Anyway, dragonborn really worked for me and I didn't particularly miss any of the other races. I'd played Dungeons & Dragons for a while prior to 4th Edition and dragons had never featured as much as I always thought they should, and now they could!

To speak to the question, if I were in your position I think I would consider tying the race to a particular cultural theme. They could be long-ren or ryujin (dragon people, according to Google Translate) if you wanted a Chinese or Japanese theme, or something like "coatl" for a Mesoamerican theme (Google Translate doesn't currently do Nahuatl).

Are we talking 4e or 5e?  Because while they're related, they aren't entirely the same (namely because the automatic answer is Gnomes and Half-Orcs, which aren't in the 4e PHB but are in the 5e PHB).

Beyond those, if you're going to have Tieflings, why are Aasimar an afterthought in the 5e DMG (and didn't really show up in 4e at all, unless you count the throwaway line about Deva being able to interbreed with other races, presumably alluding to a half-deva race that would effectively be the Aasimar)?  You could have tweaked the stat mods and had Aasimar cover everything the Dragonborn does.  Then you'd at least have the symmetry of Heaven/Hell going on.

If we're talking "popular", then Goliaths and Catfolk would both be better picks than Dragonborn.  Personally, I'd have picked Lizardfolk if you wanted a scaly critter, though.

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 24):

Aren't all those in Volo's? Including an expanded Aasimar, as I recall

I would not have guessed that anyone who liked dragonborn liked them because they were "scaly."

Thanks for addressing some of my questions.

Sure, but we're talking PHB races.  Volo's was published two years after the PHB and you're likely to have a more difficult time getting a race from there into a game than a PHB race (though that will obviously vary).

I can't speak to 4E, but this is completely wrong for 5E. As mentioned above, Half-Dragons exist in 5E and are not the same Dragonborn.



What's "more interesting" extremely subjective. Plus, your two main examples of better races did get a "reprint", just not in the PHB.


A nice thought, but that tactic rarely works. The players are going to call a dwarf a dwarf, even if the GM insists they call themselves "Dawi" or "Droich" or whatever. Same with dragon-born/kin/folk (or whatever the terms the players are already familiar with them as).


That was true of those races in earlier editions as well. Your pet favorite race not getting bumped up to a "core" race isn't really relevant, especially since they never had that status in the first place.
This message was last edited by the user at 01:57, Fri 11 Jan 2019.

Try Drakhim, Drakhen, or maybe Ryuujin if you're looking for a Japanese twist to it.

Ironhides, Demi-Dragons, Toughfaces, Dragomichi, Dra-Go, Scaleborn, Wyrmtouched...honestly I suspect polite people would use the race's own name for themselves and impolite Common-speakers would quickly come up with some kind of slang like "'Zards" or "halfdrags".

Isn't everyone's own name for their race "Human" basically. At least after translations. Or maybe just "People".

After all, we named our planet Dirt.

"People", definitely. "Human" is just the human word for people.

Got a Dragonborn from an unintegrated community somewhere out in the fantasyland boonies? See how long it takes for the rest of the party to work out they only use the word "people" to refer to other Dragonborn, and refer to other races specifically, e.g. "there were a couple of scruffy male humans back there who tried to mug me, but an old lady showed up and hurled them over a wall".

It's actually pretty likely that in that kind of instance, the party wouldn't have met many [Dragonborn] from that isolated population before, and could come up with an in-game name on the fly (or just refer to them as "Sue's people" or "guys like Bob").

In reply to tmagann (msg # 31):

Like the trolls in Glorantha, whose name for themselves is "Uz".

No, it's the ENGLISH word for humans.

My understanding, possibly flawed, is that Cheyenne is the Cheyenne word for "Human Being" so..I'm thinking that most any race's name for themselves would translate pretty much the same.

So, yes, "Human" is the English word for "Human". Cheyenne is the Cheyenne word for "human" and each race would have a word in their language that, translated, would be "Human".

Or, if you carry the original Darkness Rune, Uz. Their word for elf...and pretty much anything else, is "food", BTW. It's a simple language.

I was talking in linguistically-crippled D&D terms, where there's often inexplicably one language per species, parsed as English for humans by English speakers...however, the word "Cheyenne" actually means roughly "same language-speaker", since the Cheyenne tribe is actually a post-colonial alliance of the remnants of at least two ancient nations whose dialects were mutually intelligible; if you want tribes whose word for people is the same as the word for the species homo sapiens only, you have to look at far more isolated folk, like Copper Inuit. "People", in the sense of something that would nowadays be socially granted human rights, is a more accurate translation for the majority of tribal ethnonyms, I promise. This is partly because in many animist belief systems the boundary between humans and other things is relatively permeable, and that mysterious old folklore lady might be a spirit, disguised animal, or monster out to sell you snacks made from poisoned brains.

However, to stay on-topic rather than hijacking the thread here, a) this all becomes moot if these people have agriculture, since they will then probably develop land ownership and after a millennia or so they'll have areas named after strong surviving polities and/or the warlords of those polities, like the Frankish-dominated areas became France, which the people will then be named after as suggested above, and b) ...it's D&D, the worldbuilding is supposed to be Rule of Cool, not make our-world sense.

So...thank you for coming to my TED talk, more on that...whenever someone pokes any of the archaeologist's specific interests...

*shuffles rapidly offstage*