| glosz |
Hi,
What wildshape forms do you allow in your campaign?
Under the druid class it says you can transform into any animal and that includes many strange creatures that are considered "animals"
What would you say to these options?
1 - Rules as Written (simplest)
You can take the shape of any bestiary animal of the size allowed by your druid level and his knowledge of such creature. The bestiary dictates what is a natural creature in the world (so someone seeing a giant gecko wouldn't freak out. It would be the same as seeing a dog or wild pig).
2 - "real world" (most restrictive)
All animals must be as close to real world as possible. This would include extinct animals like the sabre tooth, mastodon and the dire variants (basically megafauna) and (maybe) dinosaurs (depends on the campaign world). Anything with "giant" in it's name like the giant gecko is considered a magical beast.
3 - "real world" plus some flexibility (complex)
As 2 but with certain concessions. Any animal can have "dire" tacked onto it therefore considering it megafauna. Tiny and smaller animals become small and everything else goes up one size category. You can't tack "dire" onto dire animals as they are already considered megafauna and any creature that is basically already megafauna like the mastodon can't become dire. You can also reduce the size category by 1 to have a young version. So a young elephant would be considered large. This way you could have a dire grizzly bear as a huge animal option.
5 - any size goes (open to abuse)
You can just pick an animal and decide what size it is. Tiny Mastodons and Huge Wolves are ok.
| Aralicia |
My first though here is : the appearance has no influence on the stats&abilities, so it's only a matter of "what fits the campaign".
Personally, I would usually authorize any animal (including Dire version and Dinosaurs) at his normal size, given that the player can reasonably explain that his character already met this kind of animal.
I usually also accept any Templated-version of them, so long that the template doesn't alter the creature type away from animal, and the player can reasonably explain that his character already met this kind of template. This mostly includes the Giant and Young templates, but can also include stranger templates like Aerial (if the character has visited the plane of Air), or Celestial.
To take the wolf example a Druid (of high enough level) can change into a Young wolf (Small), or go big and take the form of a Giant Dire wolf (Huge).
Of course, even if they look like a templated animal, they don't get the template's modifiers. They're still limited to what Beast Shape allows.
On the point of "not frealing out" : a NPC shouldn't freak out as long as the animal is common (and not feared/hated) where the npc is. That mean unless the local fauna contains many giant animals, a Giant Gecko would probably cause some kind of surprise/panic, even if it is allowed. In the same vein, Dire animals tend to induce fear in the common people.
On another note : beware the kittens ! who know they're not 8th level Druids ?