Editing Half-Dragon (section)

==3rd Edition==
In 3rd edition, half-dragons changed dramatically. No more were they restricted to TSR's frail attempt at some kind of realistic biology. Instead, "Half-dragon" became a template that could be slapped on literally any corporeal creature, including aberrations, elementals, and even constructs, under the logic of "it's magic, we ain't gotta explain shit".

The list of dragons capable of producing half-dragon offspring is huge. When the template was first introduced in the 3.0e MM1, only the 5 Chromatic dragons and 5 Metallic dragons existed, so the template only mentioned immunities and breath weapon attacks for those 10 kinds of dragons. But 3e and 3.5e wasted no time putting out over 9000 splatbooks full of new kinds of dragons, so they had to update the template afterward in the [[Draconomicon]] to cover the 5 Gem dragons, 8 Lung dragons, and 15 other kinds of dragons (Battle, Brown, Chaos, Deep, Ethereal, Fang, Howling, Oceanus, Pyroclastic, Radiant, Rust, Shadow, Song, Styx, and Tarterian. Please don't ask what books they're from; we don't know either).

Needless to say, half-dragons ''exploded'' in popularity in this edition; even despite the scourge of [[Level Adjustment]], it seemed like everybody wanted to play a half-dragon. Perhaps this is why, when the [[Draconomicon]] rolled around, WotC came up with the ''Draconic'' template; although still a racial template, this represented a being with much more distant draconic ancestry - being to the half-dragon what a [[tiefling]] is to a [[half-fiend]] or an [[aasimar]] is to a [[half-celestial]] - and thus whilst it wasn't as strong, it was also much easier to play.

Half-dragons and draconic creatures would go on to get a chapter devoted to themselves in [[Races of the Dragon]]. This splatbook also tried to introduce alternatives to the half-dragon to scratch that "I wanna be a dragon!" itch, in the form of the first iteration of the [[Dragonborn]] and the justly forgotten [[Spellscale]]. It also featured a Racial Class, allowing a player to give up progression in a normal class to instead advance through the draconic template and even into the half-dragon template.

This was a vast improvement over the Dragon Disciple [[Prestige Class]] in the core books, which allowed one to acquire the half-dragon template over 10 levels of prestige class. It's pretty meh since it required casting but didn't actually advance it and didn't really advance melee ability either.

3E also introduced [[Eberron]], which has a unique view on half-dragons. There, the one known true half-dragon - an [[elf]] with [[Chromatic Dragon|Green Dragon]] parentage - was considered an abomination the dragons and elves worked together to destroy. [[Races of the Dragon]], in a side-bar, explains that half-dragons are extremely rare in Eberron (for obvious reasons), but are sometimes bred to serve as agents for the dragons of Argonnessen amongst the Seren people. More likely, they are the product of the cultists of the Dragon Below, who perform horrible experiments in [[fleshcrafting]] with dragon grafts and draconic essence, or else they are fiendish allies of [[Tiamat]], blessed with draconic might for service to her. Shapeshifting dragons can also take a feat that lets them take an alternate form with the Half-Dragon template to retain their dragon abilities while having the size and thumbs of "lesser races".

3rd edition also introduced a more twisted version of the concept in the [[Dragonspawn]] in the [[Monster Manual]] IV. [[Draconian]]s and [[Dragonkin]] both returned as well, and even became playable races in this edition.

Whilst the concept of half-dragons as their own distinct race was basically dropped, it did survive in one form: the [[Duthka%27gith|Duthka'gith]], a species of [[Fiend]]ish Half-[[Chromatic Dragon|Red Dragons]] of [[Githyanki]] stock engineered by [[Vlaakith CLVII]] as her elite warriors.