Wild shaping and eating people

[lytokk]

So, a question that just came up in my head that I know has occured in someone else's game, and is likely to come up in mine.

Imagine a druid, wildshaping into a creature with the swallow whole ability. Now imagine that druid ends the wild shape, becoming medium sized again. Now imagine that druid was a warforged and no longer has a digestive tract. What happens to the creature he swallowed whole? is the creature just crushed into oblivion or is it expelled via some sort of extradimensional transport?

[XionUnborn01]

I don't think there's a RAW answer for this. I think that I would personally just have the person shunted out of the warforged during transformation, probably causing like 1d6 damage to both.

Similar to teleporting into something.

[AstralFire]

I don't think there's a RAW answer for this. I think that I would personally just have the person shunted out of the warforged during transformation, probably causing like 1d6 damage to both.

Similar to teleporting into something.

Would modify this a bit to be 1d6 damage per HD of the swallowed creature.

[SiuiS]

It would be like wrapping a toy doll in shrink wrap and then blasting it with a hair dryer. The warforged shrinks like a bean casing, and forfully expels the swallowed creatures as it shrinks down to being too small to encase them. Warforged are partially hollow, after all, and they need somewhere to move air in and out of in order to generate speech... Unless they have speaker tonsils?

So yeah, regurgitation. Like a bean from a casing. Or a blackhead sliding with sickening wetness out of a shrinking pore.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

All I can say is...

ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

[Dalebert]

Seems kind of cruel to add interpretations that injure him for using abilities he's supposed to get from his wild-shaping. Couldn't he just regurgitate the creature before he changes back, or even have it happen automatically as he's changing back?

Has anyone seen the (bad) movie Anaconda?

Also, they don't necessarily have to generate the sounds of speech in the same way as humanoids. They just need a way to make vibrations. They're magical. It could just be like a limited, permanent ghost sound ability.

[ellindsey]

I'd simply rule that the swallowed person is automatically expelled when the wildshape ends. After all, the druid no longer has the swallow whole ability after the wildshape ends, so they can no longer have another person swallowed.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Doesn't the druid's equipment and items and such morph with her when she wild shapes? So couldn't the creature's "gullet" transform back incorporating the objects within?

[ellindsey]

If the swallowed person is dead (and therefore an object), sure. I'd expect them to just blend back when the wildshape ends. But a living person isn't an object, and doesn't blend along with the shape change even if you're carrying them when you do it. Just as you can't pick up someone and then shapechange and expect them to blend into you like a carried object would, the rules are different for objects and creatures.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

If the swallowed person is dead (and therefore an object), sure. I'd expect them to just blend back when the wildshape ends. But a living person isn't an object, and doesn't blend along with the shape change even if you're carrying them when you do it. Just as you can't pick up someone and then shapechange and expect them to blend into you like a carried object would, the rules are different for objects and creatures.

But what about all that creature's ITEMS? *woggles eyebrows* :smallbiggrin:

[Dr. Cliché]

I have to say, if I was DM and someone tried something along these lines, I'd be far more tempted to have things get... messy.

Think along the lines of the chestbuster scene in Alien... except that the alien is fully grown when it emerges (or possibly even bigger, depending what the wild shaped druid managed to force down their gullet).

Not sure what I'd do if they were a Warforged.