If a Dragonborn is affiliated with a particular dragon race, is it more likely to inherit that race's alignment?

Question

I'm DMing for a homebrew quest with vanilla material, where the party is getting very close to a Dragonborn village. I haven't yet decided which dragon most of the village Dragonborn will be descended from, as I feel this may affect how the villagers behave towards the adventurers.

Since the quest is geared around finding a dragon, I'd like the villagers to be friendly to a degree towards the PC party. However, I'm also tending towards having the villagers of chromatic dragon descent - preferably black dragon descent with a mix of other chromatics and a few metallics.

Does this mean that villagers would tend towards Chaotic Evil, since Black Dragons have it in their nature to be Chaotic Evil? Or is their alignment entirely determined by their own moral choices?

Answer 1

Not on most worlds

5e in general de-emphasizes alignment, and in particular de-emphasizes alignment 'tendencies' tied to groups. Early in 5th edition (2015) the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide presented as a 'legend' one of several creation stories for Dragonborn. Dragonborn were originally created, it said, to be the companions of the creator Io, while dragons were created later, during the war with the primordials. According to this legend, dragonborn are neither the descendants of specific dragons nor the creations of Bahamut and Tiamat. While that might not be literally true, the important metaphorical understanding is that dragonborn are free to choose their own destinies and are not constrained by the alignment tendencies of their 'type'.

As an exception that proves the rule, the 5e PHB singles out the draconians of the Dragonlance setting as being a race with evil tendencies, saying:

In the Dragonlance setting, the followers of the evil goddess Takhisis learned a vile ritual that let them corrupt the eggs of metallic dragons, producing evil dragonborn called draconians. Five types of draconians, corresponding to the five types of metallic dragons, fought for Takhisis in the War of the Lance: auraks (gold), baaz (brass), bozak (bronze), kapak (copper), and sivak (silver).

By contrast with the draconians ('evil dragonborn specifically from Dragonlance') we are to understand that the other dragonborn of other settings are not specifically evil (even the chromatic ones), or indeed are of any specific alignment.