Wild Shape / Polymorph and elemental damage with natural attacks.


Rules Questions


1 person marked this as FAQ candidate.

I'm running a game with a druid and transmuter in my group and I'm one of those DMs that likes seeing their players have plenty of options to play around with.

So we're flipping through Bestiary 2 looking at all the new creatures they can use with the polymorph school and wild shape (alright more dinosaurs!) and noticed that some of the monsters do some form of extra elemental damage with their natural attacks. A couple of noticeable examples are the Viper Vine which does extra acid damage with it's bite and the Dragon Horse which does an extra electricity extra with it's hooves. We got curious and checked Bestiary 1 and saw that the Ankheg and Winter Wolf do acid and cold damage with their bites respectively.

There's no mention of extra elemental damage being added to attacks in the universal monster rules other than the burn ability. And it's not mentioned in the creature description other than Ankheg's acid spray, but it only says you don't get it if you use the acid spray. So I'm curious, would changing into a form that does extra elemental damage with natural attacks do you gain the ability to do extra damage with your natural attacks?

Scarab Sages

I don't know about the Bestiary 2 monsters, but the ankheg and the winter wolf are magical beasts, so wild shape doesn't get you those creatures. (Unless there is some errata I don't know about, which would be awesome.)

Still, with beast shape IV you can take those forms, and you're right, it isn't clear if that extra energy damage should be part of the natural attack or not. I'd lean toward granting it, since energy immunities/resistances/vulnerabilities are transferred.


Generally, those extra damages come from a "special ability" which is mentioned in the attack section and explained in length at the end of the monster entry. Like all special abilities, they aren't available to someone using polymorph unless the spell lists them.

This might annoy your players, because new abilities are then automatically excluded from the list even if there was a logical use to them. That is, unless the Bestiary 2 (which I don't own) actually contains a list linking such-and-such ability with the spells. Is there?

$0.02


Nothing really new has happened with Bestiary 2 other than new monsters.

But the monsters this pertains to usually have something like this;
Melee: Bite (2d6+5 plus 1d6 acid).

Then the extra damage would mentioned nowhere else in it's description other than the regular melee attack itself. Not even something like the Burn ability. I'm more leaning toward granting it as it would make sense for many monsters. Especially when you consider cave druids turning into oozes, it'd be just silly to be an ooze with no additional acid damage to attacks.

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