Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Ethren 01-24-05, 12:43 PM	As usual, a player of mine who just reached 5th level as a Druid brought a few questions about Wildshape. No one in our group has ever played a druid, nor have I given much thought to them in general. The problem I noticed was with the lack of "special qualities." Examples: If you wildshape into a (off the top of my head) wolf, why don't you get scent. A wolf's scent is based off the structure of its nose... why wouldn't you be able to replicate this via wildshape? If you wildshape into a bat, why not blindsense? How would you expect to find anything? The answers became clear as I started thinking about other special qualities... (strangly none come to mind as I right this) There are some extremely powerful special qualities out there, that no DM would ever want to see a player wield... So that being said, how about this? I've already started working on this with the player, and will present it to everyone in the group (we have two campaigns going at once, with two different DMs and a lot of the house rules carry over). Add a NATURAL descriptor. You already have Su, Ex, and Sp, how about adding an extra category for the Scents and other "normal" abilities. Now I still realize that a lot of this stuff could still be overly powerful, i.e. blindsense, so I'm working on a system to fix that. Something like at 5-9th level druid, blindsense would only be 1/2 normal distance, and spot checks are -4, 10-14, 3/4 distance, -2 spot, 15th+ full... or something like that. Has anyone out there done anything similar with these "natural" special qualities and wildshape? Are there any abilities I should watch out for? General comments?
sooperspook 01-24-05, 08:07 PM	personally i just allow wildshape to grant any sensory ability that the animal normally has. i dont think there are any particularly powerful Ex abilities out there available to animals anyway. we've never had a problem with anyone abusing this.