Master of Many Forms; Gargantuan Wild Shape

[ByOdin'sBeard]

Bare with me, it's currently 4am, and i work in the morning so I do not believe that I will have sufficient time to find my answer before our session the following night.

When the MMF reaches level 10, he gains Wildshape (Dragon) as well as (Gargantuan); does this mean that he can assume the form of say, a juvenile black Dragon, whose size is regularly Huge, but grow to be Gargantuan, or must he choose a creature that is gargantuan in size already?

Another example being, could he change himself into a gargantuan sized Dire Wolf?

I've always ruled this as "you turn into the creature stated, size and all" but a new player is arguing that you can shape into any creature available, but also choose the sizes available to you by MMF.

Thank you in advance.

[Crake]

Bare with me, it's currently 4am, and i work in the morning so I do not believe that I will have sufficient time to find my answer before our session the following night.

When the MMF reaches level 10, he gains Wildshape (Dragon) as well as (Gargantuan); does this mean that he can assume the form of say, a juvenile black Dragon, whose size is regularly Huge, but grow to be Gargantuan, or must he choose a creature that is gargantuan in size already?

Another example being, could he change himself into a gargantuan sized Dire Wolf?

I've always ruled this as "you turn into the creature stated, size and all" but a new player is arguing that you can shape into any creature available, but also choose the sizes available to you by MMF.

Thank you in advance.

Your ruling is correct. You gain the statistics of an average member of the species when you wild shape into it, size and all. The increased size limit merely means you can turn into something that is normally gargantuan. In the case of dragons, it's usually an issue because they will tend to have too many HD for you to turn into a gargantuan dragon, at least for the true dragons, but if you had vermin wildshape and 16HD, you could, for example, turn into a gargantuan monstrous spider.

[Hackulator]

Bare with me, it's currently 4am, and i work in the morning so I do not believe that I will have sufficient time to find my answer before our session the following night.

When the MMF reaches level 10, he gains Wildshape (Dragon) as well as (Gargantuan); does this mean that he can assume the form of say, a juvenile black Dragon, whose size is regularly Huge, but grow to be Gargantuan, or must he choose a creature that is gargantuan in size already?

Another example being, could he change himself into a gargantuan sized Dire Wolf?

I've always ruled this as "you turn into the creature stated, size and all" but a new player is arguing that you can shape into any creature available, but also choose the sizes available to you by MMF.

Thank you in advance.

Gargantuan is a limit, not a requirement, he can now turn into things UP TO gargantuan size, so a huge black dragon is fine.

As for the other part Crake is 100% correct.

Wildshape doesn't let you design new monster stat blocks, so you can't turn into something that doesn't have a MM entry. I'm not using the actual wording of the rule here, that's just how I think of it to make it easy.

[StreamOfTheSky]

True Dragons are a bit special. Each dragon's separate "age category" is effectively its own stat block and a different monster, it's not quite the same as the usual advancement by HD the CR system uses.

So he should be able to turn into any true dragon that he meets the size and HD limits for, if he has the ability to wild shape into a dragon. He wouldn't choose a "gargantuan green dragon" for example, he'd choose an "Ancient Green Dragon" since that's a green dragon age category that is Gargantuan (but that has 32 HD, so good luck...as others mentioned, the problem w/ dragon wild shape forms is they tend to have a ton of HD so you can't anyway).

[ByOdin'sBeard]

Awesome, thanks guys, I figured I'd get playgrounders opinions before I start throwing books at people.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I'm not entirely sure of the RAW answer, but I've also never seen a problem w/ allowing the "advancement by HD" to get larger/stronger forms with wild shape. Usually they'll still be weaker than just picking a higher level monster, aside from some of the ridiculously OP splatbook monsters like War Troll that are so good that they're worth using many levels later even if you can't squeeze out a few more HD-based increases, but that's a fault of the monster, not the wild shape ability. You either ban them from the game for all uses, by DM or player, or deal w/ it if you allow them.
I definitely would require any such "advanced HD" forms to have stat blocks figured out before a session, though.