D&D leaving out orange, yellow, violet, and indigo while bringing in black and white makes me question certain things about word choice, but it’s only like 47 years too late for this argument, so… fine.

Chromatic Ancestry assigns you one of the five classic chromatic types.

Let’s just get these out of the way in one bullet. (Not that the PH dragonborn paints chromatic dragonborn as evil, of course.) Not surprising at this point, but still cool.

Okay, no reference to alignment, just elemental nature. I wonder if there were clarity challenges, or if it just felt bad that some races got the “extra” of a subrace and some didn’t. The strong indication here is that “subrace” is going away as an information-presentation concept.

One of the big deals of this document is that Chromatic, Metallic, and Gem dragonborn are presented as three distinct races. I’m not doing a line-by-line comparison, but nothing is jumping out at me as different. The document opens with what looks like the new character creation/race boilerplate. Rather than drag on with an intro, let’s wyrm our way in. A squamous new Unearthed Arcana has hatched today, with a hoard of new content: races, feats, and spells.

D&d 5e dragon race