| Nephelim |
I'm not sure if WS still engenders the same knee-jerk nausea that it did with 3.5, but with the tremendous and, frankly, deserved nerfing Pathfinder put down on Wild Shape, it strikes me as a niche that could be carefully and equitably filled.
My idea is to construct a Spell akin to Enhance Wildshape, or alternatively, a set of Feats that would add additional chains of "Form of the" spells to a Druid's wildshape repertoire.
I would hazard a guess that I can not be the first person to think of this, but I have not been able to find one myself.
The idea is that I see no "flavor" reason why a Druid could not Wildshape into Vermin, for instance. Having a feat or Spell (which essentially would read "The next time the Caster uses their Wild Shape class ability...") that would add an additional sentence to the Wild Shape entry under Druid, stating that a Druid of at least 6th level can take the form of Small or Medium creatures of the Vermin type, as per Vermin Shape 1, and Druids of at least 8th level can take the shape of Tiny or large creatures of the Vermin type as per Vermin Shape 2.
I am purposefully delaying the effect of this ability to 1 level past where the Druid can use the spells directly, as an off-set of the advantages that Wild Shape has over mere Spell casting.
Does this seem reasonable?
Thomas LeBlanc
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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The desert druid archetype can WS into a vermin. I allow druids to WS into vermin in my River Kingdoms game.
I also have an Artificer class that can WS into a construct (used for a gnome campaign).
Your post reminds me I need to update my vermin shaman archetype for my homebrew.
| Nephelim |
Along the same lines, why can a Druid use SNA to call Giants, but not be able to Wildshape into them? I would argue that if a creature has a sufficiently strong tie with the natural world that they can be summoned via SNA, then they are sufficiently natural to be something that a Druid could reasonably WS into.
Having said that, I see no reason not to require the expenditure of a Feat to enable this, and to delay its availability to at least a level later than a Caster.
Furthermore, I would say that certain types of creatures such as Undead, Outsiders, Fey, and Dragons should not even be considered. Just for the sake of completeness, I mention that here.
Oozes, though? I'm not so sure. What about Swarms? There are plenty of Druid spells that manage, control, and create Swarms, and even at least one that lets them slough off their flesh as a swarm, but nothing to enable WS into a Swarm.
Constructs? Leave that to a Gnomish Artificer to be able to do! Typical for gnomes. ;) Sounds cool and flavorful, but I would think that it would be a dangerous thing to power-balance. As it is, Artificers were potentially very powerful.