One of my players is currently a 3rd level Hunter with an animal companion. I think she has a great character, however, she recently seems to have realized that unlike a Druid, she does not get the wild-shape ability as a standard hunter. (I think she just assumed she did when making a character, her first hunter).
She has been quite bummed since and we've been looking at options to get her a wild-shape ability of some sort, but each has issues.
Option #1. Multi-class with Druid. This makes 2 abilities redundant. Orisons and Wild Empathy. She may be willing to endure this however. My issue is how her spells would work drawing divine spells from essentially the same source (Gozreh).
So as an example: She becomes 4th level hunter/ 1st level druid she gets:
Hunter - Unlimited 0 level spells a day from the 6 she knows. 3 1st level spells a day from 4 she knows. 1 2nd level spell a day from 2 she knows. No studying needed.
Druid - 3 0 level spells that must be prepared ahead of time (which does not need to include only the 6 she knows as a hunter). 1 1st level spell prepared in advance. (which does not need to include just the 4 she knows as a hunter).
Just seems damn inefficient. Like if I was a deity and this was my worshiper I'd make this easier.
Option #2. Multi-class with a totemic skald.
Disadvatage: Only wild shape to 1 critter, not get wild shape for another 5 levels as opposed to another 4 with druid.
Option #3. Convert her to a Feral Hunter. Disadvantage: She would lose the animal companion she likes quite a bit.
Option #4. I'm thinking of homebrewing her an archetype that would just give her wild-shape at 4th level
Looking at Feral Hunter they say wild shape replaces bonus tricks, improved empathic link, greater empathic link, master of the wild, and raise animal companion class abilities.
Option #5 ? Anything I hadn't considered?
Right now I'm thinking Option 4 may be my best choice. She technically has a bonus trick at the moment, but I'm pretty sure she'd give it up.
Anyone have thoughts? Would this homebrew be overpowered? If there another option I haven't thought of?
If you concerned about Wildshaping then go straight druid. You will be more powerful going straight Druid.
If you wanting martial ability with the Hunter the main dip that most people use and I use it too. Wild Child Brawler 1. This gives lots of toys to play with and keeps your animal companion at full HD. Martial Flexibility is pretty sweet. Improved unarmed strike, Brawler's cunning, and D10 HD are also very nice additions.
The only reasons not to go #4 is if you don't think you can get it balanced right, or if it will piss if your other players that she is getting something outside of the rules/extra attention.
I'd also consider just retraining/rebuilding as Druid, or retraining/building all but one level(so proficiencies, equipment and backstory don't need retconning)
There's the mooncursed barb that shifts to an animal when they rage.
I hadn't considered retraining, I guess I just looked at that as a 1 time skill or feat thing. But this may be the answer. Only real inconvenience is it puts her character out of commission for a month or so. I may go with that if not Option #4.
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downtime and how long stuffs take is technically just there to avoid abuse, but you can simply speed up the process with a quest or adventure. Like make a quest of it, to become a druid for your PC.
Not only it keeps the pc active, it has all other pc involved in this moment in her life, where the PC is trying to impress a druid grove by going on a quest and understanding what it means to become/retrain as a druid.
I'd suggest retraining to Feral Hunter, but also allowing her to retrain her feats to the feat tree that let's her gain an animal companion. It'd cost three feats for a full power animal companion (or two four a ranger's animal companion), but since the character is lower level it shouldn't be too painful.
downtime and how long stuffs take is technically just there to avoid abuse, but you can simply speed up the process with a quest or adventure. Like make a quest of it, to become a druid for your PC.
Not only it keeps the pc active, it has all other pc involved in this moment in her life, where the PC is trying to impress a druid grove by going on a quest and understanding what it means to become/retrain as a druid.
I REALLY like this idea. I'm going to suggest this to the PC.
I'd suggest retraining to Feral Hunter, but also allowing her to retrain her feats to the feat tree that let's her gain an animal companion. It'd cost three feats for a full power animal companion (or two four a ranger's animal companion), but since the character is lower level it shouldn't be too painful.
This is a good idea as well.
While there are some difference, for the first few levels a Druid and a Hunter are going to be really similar. Some of the particulars on their character sheets will be different of course, but what they can 'do' is about the same. Both have an animal companion, both have similar spells, but have some combat capability.
My point to this is, that it shouldn't really require to much for the group to 'pretend' that the character was a druid all along and just allow a rebuild of the character with druid instead of hunter.
Personally, I would allow that for my players even with a much bigger difference in the rebuild of the characters, particularly someone who didn't understand all the choices they made at character creation.
A rebuild and minor retcon might be simpler than trying to explain the change in the story, and would let everyone get on with the main plot without issue.
That said, if you like the quest idea, and it will work for your group, that is a perfectly fine solution. Sometimes other players balk at a special quest for one PC though, and that is understandable, as the story should really be about the entire party, not just one them. I would certainly not make it a long drawn out quest, a single session or maybe two at most.
Good advice Dave. I agree with your points.
Rather than simply ret-conning the situation I was hoping to find a workaround within the rules.
I don't want to get into a situation where the group expects me to ret-con everything from bad decisions on character creation, to bad decisions on roleplay, to bad decisions in combat, to bad rolls, etc.
That's not to say I don't want to accommodate the player, I do, I just want to do it as within the rules as possible.
When I first started looking into it I was kind of surprised how hard it was to acquire wild shape (or anything like it) if you are not a druid. Most other powers have several options. It seems like it's easy to be practically anything you want as a character in pathfinder.
But this thread has really helped.
I don't want to get into a situation where the group expects me to ret-con everything from bad decisions on character creation, to bad decisions on roleplay, to bad decisions in combat, to bad rolls, etc.
Well, my main point was that probably just about everything the hunter has done a druid could have done as well. You don't have to retcon anything that happened, just have everyone pretend that what happened was done by a the character via druid abilities, rather than a hunter. Same character, sames things happened, just very slightly different mechanics (prepared spells, stuff like that.)
And while I would never 'fix' something that happened as far as bad decisions on roleplay or in combat (unless perhaps I had screwed up) I think bad decisions on character creation are a different category. Screwing up building a character is going to impact an entire game and might seriously reduce a persons fun. Or even if not a 'screw up' per se, if it is something they thought they would enjoy, but don't it has the same effect. Retraining can mitigate this, but either the costs are inconsequential (not really much expense, the group just all does nothing during the downtime, so it passes in minutes during game play) or also seriously fun negating (the group is poor enough that the expense puts the character significantly behind everyone else, the player has to sit out multiple sessions retraining while the group adventures) so typically for anything but a minor tweak, if the player isn't happy with their character I'll allow a fix for free, and we will explain it in terms of the story in some way (in your example, the easiest explanation is that it was always a druid.) I generally would rather try to work with a player to 'fix' a character but keep their past (and future) involvement in the story alive then have them retire or kill off their character to get a new one.
Prettymuch agree on every point Dave. My goal was to see if I could find something within the written rules that would satisfy everyone and at the same time preserve continuity and with this thread's help, I think I did.
Talked some of this over with the player.
This seems to be the plan going forward:
She'll continue playing the Hunter character she is, up until level 5. There will be an understanding that during her free time, this character is training with a goal in mind.
When she hits 5th level she'll get an additional feat and with correct timing also complete her training. She wil be training on 4 issues - Changing her archetype, and learning 3 replacement feats.
She will then:
#1. Move the character through her training to the Feral Hunter archetype. (effectively dismissing her animal companion).
#2. Get rid of her three exising feats and replace them with Nature Soul, Animal Ally and Boon Companion. (being able to take animal ally now that she has no animal companion).
#3. Take her former companion back as her current companion but at +1 level higher than it was.
And I think everyone's happy.