| Staffan Johansson |
Having played a primal sorcerer for a while (11th level now, though the campaign is on hold for a bit), I was at first really impressed with the polymorph spells like Animal Form. But having played around with them for a few levels, I have noticed one glaring weakness: hit points.
Animal form and its ilk are mostly designed around druids, an 8 hp/level class. Functionally, the intention is to turn the caster into a martial for the duration, with Animal Form being slightly offensively slanted. Martials generally have 10 hp/level, so one of the things polymorph spells usually does is to provide temporary hit points, about 2 hp per level (rounded to a multiple of 5).
But druids aren't the only ones who have access to these spells: wizards, sorcerers, and witches also do. But those are 6 hp/level classes, so turning into a beast (or whatever) doesn't give them martial-level staying power the way it does druids. So I'm thinking that there maybe should be a feat available to these classes that does – something like this:
Resilient Shapechanger — Feat X
Sorcerer Witch Wizard
When you cast a polymorph spell that gives you temporary hit points, double the number of temporary hit points you get.
What would be an appropriate level for this feat? I'm thinking 4th, as that's where sorcerers have their Evolution feats which can direct their future development by quite a bit, and which generally have effects that scale well.
| Staffan Johansson |
I like this feat and level 4 or 6 certainly seems like the correct level for it. Maybe give it a requirement that you have to be a 6 HP class to take the feat otherwise it would be a big buff to druids and martials who are dipping into transformation.
Yeah, it would definitely be too much on a wild druid. My thought was that making it a class feat for wizards, witches, and sorcerers would solve that issue indirectly, but I guess there's room for a druid multiclassing into one of those classes to take it. But in order to do that, they'd need to spend three class feats from level 2 to 6 (well, 8 if it's a level 4 feat) on it. I'm not sure if that's enough of a deterrent.