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Okay, I'm too lazy to read through 19 page of the thread. But after the first couple of pages all I could think was, "Damn! I've never seen so many boobie hating guys in my life outside of a gay bar." :D

Okay I cannot believe I am actually posting in this thread.

One- This is utterly hilarious

Two- Maybe there's some other really observant people out there, but based on the printed artwork for dragonborn, I can tell the gender based on their FACE. Yes their face, if you look carefully, wizards obviously instituted a style guide of some sort for dragonborn, and that there must be a note on gender differentiation other than the presence or lack thereof of breasts. The main one I noticed first, the chins. Male dragonborn in all the art have pointy-ish ridge like structures underneath the chin. The females notably, do not. Go ahead, go look. I can't recall but there might have been some sort of difference with the scale size/pattern on their brows too, but don't hold me to that one.

Three- I believe a Dragon article mentions that the dragonborn were created for whatever reasons I don't remember which exactly. Point being, divine intentions were to create a HUMANOID race of dragons. Why do female dragonborn have breasts? The same reason female dwarves do, and female elves, and female halflings. The gods FELT like it. They obviously have some concept of what humanoids should be like, otherwise why would Moradin create dwarves remotely like humans or anything else? Obviously you can end up with exceptions to this, but the point is still there. They are humanoids.

Four- Dragonborn also have scales that are directly analogous with hair. No questions come up about that (I haven't seen it yet at least). But its not really hair. Same thing here really. Dragons have neither of these, but dragonborn do. Going on my second observation you can say the male dragonborn more or less have beards too.

On a final note, point three is how I see the default flavor they're going with in the books. Don't like like it? Change it. Nothing wrong with that. IMO they have a perfectly good explanation set up for why things are that way, art and all, but that doesn't mean that's going to be the best for everyone, so change it, takes next to no effort to do so. You can come up with perfectly reasonable explanations any of the sides on this. Pick one and go with it. Mine is basically comes down to "The gods have a conception of what humanoids are and one created a race of humanoid dragons." Perfectly reasonable if the gods already have a concept of humanoids. Go with what works for your group. Also I apologize if I have repeated anything. And with that, I am done.

Bow_Seat wrote:

there is a point to be conceded that, assuming that dragonborn are like real life lizards, that they should have no bosoms. That said, the assumption is a little unfounded, the only thing that we know about dragonborn is that they are somehow descended from dragons, and seeing as we don't have any dragons in real life it would be impossible to categorize them as "lizards" because not enough information is presented. in the end it is quite an arbitrary decision that should be made with the rest of your gaming group.

also, just drawing the boobs will sure make your life easier :P

A more realistic argument than pointing out that female lizards don't have mammaries is to point out that female dragons don't have mammaries.

That said, Wizards has made their decision and the artwork is out. It's now up to individual DMs to decide whether to adopt it in their games or not.

pbh2 has a pic of a female dragonborn with mamaries.

I left it up to the one player in my gaming group who wanted to play a dragonborn character, since she had the most interest in the race of the members of our group. According to her, dragonborn have none of the typical human gender cues, but they can tell their males from their females as easily as we do ours. Once the decision was made, we backfit it with the appropriate explanation.

It's fluff, so WotC has less sway over it than the players as far as I'm concerned. Let their artists draw them any way they like.