Limiting Druids

[sambouchah]

I'm working on a campaign setting and was thinking "Druids are pretty powerful, how can I fix it?". So I got to looking around at druid variants and things and remembered the shapeshifter variant. Would it be horrible of me to limit the players to only that version of druid?

I added in Starsign things that are sort of like dragon marks or standing stones(Skyrim) and I was thinking of doing one that would allow an animal companion if someone wanted one.

Thanks, Sam

[OzymandiasX]

I'm not much of a powergamer, so I don't know all the high-end tricks, but I never thought druids were OP at all.

The Shapeshifter variant allows a druid to be combat-effective with just his forms, leaving all of his spells for buffing before combat or healing afterwards. I recently had a player with this variant and I've never had a party be as consistently buffed as he did to them. lol

[Xervous]

*waves hand like a jedi* There is no natural spell

[eggynack]

I'm not much of a powergamer, so I don't know all the high-end tricks, but I never thought druids were OP at all.

The Shapeshifter variant allows a druid to be combat-effective with just his forms, leaving all of his spells for buffing before combat or healing afterwards. I recently had a player with this variant and I've never had a party be as consistently buffed as he did to them. lol
There actually isn't all that much in the way of high end druid tricks. There are quite a few druid tricks, but they're fine without them. Druids are OP because they're effectively a tier one class (full casting with summons) tied to a tier three class (wildshaping) tied to a tier five class (animal companion). The result is a class that can compete pretty efficiently with wizards and clerics, while simultaneously completely obsoleting melee guys with a pile of bears. To the OP, you should be fine making that restriction. I think that the test of spite actually had an identical restriction on druids, and it's certainly not going to leave the druid underpowered unless the campaign is severely high op.

[OzymandiasX]

*waves hand like a jedi* There is no natural spell
The Shapeshifter alternate class feature replaces Wild Shape, so no Jedi mind tricks needed... Natural Spell doesn't work with Shapeshifters. :)

[sambouchah]

I'm not much of a powergamer, so I don't know all the high-end tricks, but I never thought druids were OP at all.

The Shapeshifter variant allows a druid to be combat-effective with just his forms, leaving all of his spells for buffing before combat or healing afterwards. I recently had a player with this variant and I've never had a party be as consistently buffed as he did to them. lol

I accidentally teach my group optimization tricks when I play a character and they use them when I dungeon master. So I thought getting rid of the companion(which I optimized as my last druid, making it the best creature in the party) so they couldn't use it haha.

[Steward]

Think of a ranger as a severely nerfed Druid. No shapeshifting at all, weaker animal companion, weaker spells, and marginal combat ability. You probably want to be less extreme than that. Keep the spells, but weaken the animal companion to be like the ranger's (or remove entirely -- between Summon Nature's Ally and Wild Shape does a Druid really need an animal companion??) Removing Natural Spell is probably needed too, and the variant rules for Wild Shape are good.

Druids as written aren't as cheesy to optimize as, say, wizards, but the issue is as someone mentioned above - they can pretty much eliminate most of the rest of the party with all of their abilities. The animal companion alone ends up being as strong as a fighter, for instance.

[rot42]

That is a perfectly reasonable houserule. The Shapeshift variant scales nicely and gives the Druid plenty of versatility without the hassle of going over every possible form in the game and wondering if the designers were considering player characters when they wrote the stats. There are a few cases in disparate books (e.g. [Wild] feats) where the new mechanic does not interface cleanly with the default, but you can deal with those on a case by case basis as they come up. Shapeshift lacks a low level aquatic form, so you might want to add one if there is a lot of swimming in your game.

The Wild Cohort (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/re/20031118a) feat gives an animal companion. It is lower powered than the default Druid AC, but gives a nice target for all those sweet animal buff spells.