Giving players control of a monster and what to do?

[Dankus Memakus]

So, this comes with a long story to explain. Essentially, the 10th level druid in the party I dm for recently encountered wood woads. He became very intrigued with them and asked to learn the ritual to create them. And my response what’s to make a magic item similar to the manual of golems that would allow him to make one wood woad and then it would disintegrate. I assumed he would create a little buddy and no problems would be caused. However, as players do, he used the item in a completely unintentional way. During a particularly hard combat the outlander fighter died. The druid quick thinking decided he would attempt to perform the ritual on the fighter and making a wood woad. After success, the party is now down one fighter but has gained a wood woad. Of course, the player wants to play the wood woad, I am not against this because I thought the whole situation was awesome and I personally do not want to discourage this player or the druid. So now I turn into a giant in the playground. How can I balance a wood woad to play with the players. Should I give it levels? Also it’s a CR five monster, What equivalent to player levels is that? I really could use some help to turn this awesome scenario into a balanced one. Please and thank you.

[Man_Over_Game]

So, this comes with a long story to explain. Essentially, the 10th level druid in the party I dm for recently encountered wood woads. He became very intrigued with them and asked to learn the ritual to create them. And my response what’s to make a magic item similar to the manual of golems that would allow him to make one wood woad and then it would disintegrate. I assumed he would create a little buddy and no problems would be caused. However, as players do, he used the item in a completely unintentional way. During a particularly hard combat the outlander fighter died. The druid quick thinking decided he would attempt to perform the ritual on the fighter and making a wood woad. After success, the party is now down one fighter but has gained a wood woad. Of course, the player wants to play the wood woad, I am not against this because I thought the whole situation was awesome and I personally do not want to discourage this player or the druid. So now I turn into a giant in the playground. How can I balance a wood woad to play with the players. Should I give it levels? Also it’s a CR five monster, What equivalent to player levels is that? I really could use some help to turn this awesome scenario into a balanced one. Please and thank you.

I think the best thing to do would be to make a character who's racial changes match that of the beast race. This also fixes any long-term problems trying to figure out how it levels or how its abilities are balanced.

Give him vulnerability to Fire, make him Resistant to Bludgeoning, allow him to cast daily spells like a Tiefling, casting Druidcraft at-will at level 1, Entangle at level 3, Spike Growths at level 5, using Constitution for your Spellcasting Modifier, and castable once per day. Attributes are +2 to Constitution, +1 to Wisdom, and it has Darkvision.

It's a little on the strong side, but considering this was a risky gambit (and offset by the fact that it has vulnerability to a common damage type), I feel that erring in the side of the player is a good choice for special cases like these.

Other than that, I'd just make him whatever level of character that the party is.


All of this combined ensures that neither the prior Fighter or the Druid feel punished for their risk-taking investment. Best to make sure that they feel rewarded by making the situation better than what the alternative would be (which is the Fighter rolling up another character and the Druid using his Wood Woad spell for later). Players should be regretting their risks because they were stupid, not because of a DM's decision, and they weren't stupid in this case.

[Callak_Remier]

The Wood Woads susceptibility to fire leaves room for interesting situations, honestly have him start 1 character lvl behind the Pc's ( my standard rule for PC death). And see how it goes.
For HP use the highest die between Class or Race and just go by class levels for how many.

For its Regeneration ability Specify that the soil needs to be able to support vegetation,
I would consider having an aversion to axes be mandatory.