Skinwalker (wild shape class) (abandoned WIP)

[Elves]

The druid tries to cram three class concepts into one (beastmaster, shapechanger, nature caster) which is one of the reasons it's overpowered. This is a simple concept for a class based only on wild shape.

Skinwalker (Gdocs)

Specifically, it's based on the druid Shapeshift ACF. Here's the problem: not using actual creature statblocks is meant to make changing shape less of a hassle. But if you're changing shape frequently during combat, it may actually be more of a hassle to keep adding and subtracting buffs than it is to simply switch to a different statblock when you change shape.

Maybe the solution is to use predefined statblocks instead of spell formats for the different forms. Then all you have to do is append the skin benefits to them each day when you choose skins.

[Morphic tide]

In general, "build-a-beast" setups aren't thematically sensible, as they don't actually let you become a wolf, bear, or bird, they give you an emulation of capabilities from those creatures. The slightest bit of weirdness in an outlier, whether that be a Cheeta's run or some forsaken splatbook creature having a staggering bias to the defensive end of things, makes it so that you cannot meaningfully be that creature, because the iconic properties aren't necessarily available to you.

There's also the issue of the flat bonuses making it so you have to type out each and every style of function you want, which is a very extensively losing proposition against spellcasting without being near enough unusable without several days to digest, while a small pool of changes one can make to any Animal/Plant/Elemental ever printed makes for a quite solid ability to keep up with the casters in breadth of ability, even if fully keeping up in scale remains futile due to the utter lunacy of the higher-level spells.

The biggest thing is that people are "primed" to look at the shapeshifting class as confined to nature, because it's a thing iconic to the Druid and has been as long as the Druid's been a class. This combines with the very extensive differences between types, and divisions within them, to make an all-purpose shapeshifting class thematically unpalatable to an extreme degree. Because of this, my own "take" has generally been refining the existing Wild Shape feature, because it doesn't need much more to be a solid t3 class.

Generally, my thoughts have surrounded giving "normalizing" properties that give a floor to the biggest variance sources so you don't lose much in digging for something that's just interesting or perpetually staying on-brand with things that have a lot of big gaps. Possibly have it be by hit dice, so turning into a Polar Bear would reduce your level for those purposes by 8, while your "native" form gets the most room for improvement, which allows anciliary mechanics for Totemist and Psychic Warrior setups to apply instead of writing up full suites of feats, item properties, spells for the casters to use on you, and so on, doubling as a way for the character to interact with a decent share of regular gear items instead of being restricted to basically just the Wild Shape stuff.

[Elves]

In general, "build-a-beast" setups aren't thematically sensible, as they don't actually let you become a wolf, bear, or bird, they give you an emulation of capabilities from those creatures.

It's about plausible mechanical emulation, just like the original animal statblocks. The mechanical basis of a shapeshifter class is that it should change between different ability rigs. In this case the statistical bread and potatoes is shared between animals of a similar type, and you sprinkle on a couple traits from a specific animal's statblock in order to simulate that animal.

The slightest bit of weirdness in an outlier, whether that be a Cheeta's run or some forsaken splatbook creature having a staggering bias to the defensive end of things, makes it so that you cannot meaningfully be that creature, because the iconic properties aren't necessarily available to you.

The cheetah run I did put in, but that's actually an advantage to not using the game statblocks. There are always multiple ways to represent something mechanically, and if a creature has an ability that would be overpowered then the skinwalker skin for them could omit that ability or include a weakened version.

There's also the issue of the flat bonuses making it so you have to type out each and every style of function you want, which is a very extensively losing proposition against spellcasting... while a small pool of changes one can make to any Animal/Plant/Elemental ever printed makes for a quite solid ability to keep up with the casters in breadth of ability

T1 casters aren't my standard for what I think any subsequent class written should be able to achieve in breadth of abilities.
The disadvantage to having an open emulation of statblocks like wildshape, polymorph and shapechange allow is that you get a weird meta where there are a few obscure forms that dominate gameplay. Using a custodiated list where they can be balanced relative to each other means more choices actually see play and creates less hassle to dig through sourcebooks. The scalability it offers has a downside: if you want to create a balanced class, there's just no sense in preemptively tying it to every creature anyone ever sees fit to print.

The biggest thing is that people are "primed" to look at the shapeshifting class as confined to nature, because it's a thing iconic to the Druid and has been as long as the Druid's been a class. This combines with the very extensive differences between types, and divisions within them, to make an all-purpose shapeshifting class thematically unpalatable to an extreme degree.

YMMV. I've never seen why druids get the shapechanger role when that's sufficient to furnish its own class.

Generally, my thoughts have surrounded giving "normalizing" properties that give a floor to the biggest variance sources so you don't lose much in digging for something that's just interesting or perpetually staying on-brand with things that have a lot of big gaps. Possibly have it be by hit dice, so turning into a Polar Bear would reduce your level for those purposes by 8, while your "native" form gets the most room for improvement

Specifically, what might this rule look like?

[aglondier]

What about using the Summoner's Eidolon from pathfinder as a base. Rather than specific forms, be a more freeform shapeshifter...having a pool of points to attribute to your form as needed...

[Grod_The_Giant]

YMMV. I've never seen why druids get the shapechanger role when that's sufficient to furnish its own class.

"Changing into beasts" is a much more common fantasy trope than "changing into anything," with the possible exception of doppelganger-type magic, so I think that's a big part of it. A bigger part might be from a game design perspective, though.

Animals are simple. While there are the inevitable weird exceptions from later in the game's life, the majority of animals have simple, predictable abilities. They claw and bite, grapple and fly, the have good senses and new movement types. What they don't have are oodles of weird magical powers--no innate spellcasting, no spell-like abilities, no minion-making or summoning or teleporting or mind control or anything else that goes so far towards making spellcasters as insane as they are. There's a reason that options like Aberration Wild Shape rank so highly for Druids.

What about using the Summoner's Eidolon from pathfinder as a base. Rather than specific forms, be a more freeform shapeshifter...having a pool of points to attribute to your form as needed...

I've done that! It's fun but can get dangerously strong.

I've also done several takes of the "wild shape warrior" archetype. The good one has at-will Wild Shape, but into a limited set of creatures, and also includes provisions to make sure you can't dump all your ability scores. The older draft has a more traditional take on Wild Shape, but stood up well in a campaign alongside the likes of Warblades and Sorcerers. More interesting for you, maybe, is the Shapeshift-based alternate version.

[Elves]

The summoner eidolons have base statblocks like I suggested above, so it would be mainly a modification to the skins, making them buildabear instead of prepackaged. Yeah, that could be fun. I know the eidolons come with presets for specific creatures, but I don't think there's an incentive to actually use those. Maybe give each creature preset a perk that puts them slightly above the normal point equivalent. Could call the class "protean" at that point since it's more freeform.

[Morphic tide]

It's about plausible mechanical emulation, just like the original animal statblocks. The mechanical basis of a shapeshifter class is that it should change between different ability rigs. In this case the statistical bread and potatoes is shared between animals of a similar type, and you sprinkle on a couple traits from a specific animal's statblock in order to simulate that animal.

The problem that I have with this approach every time I see it is that Dungeons and Dragons does not work that way. Sub-sublists like that, where you fill out a suite of options multiple layers deep for specific use-cases, isn't something the Wizard has to deal with, and even Artificer have to actively try to end up in that situation on the back of spamming staves. Sure, it's easily digestible compared to other examples, but it's still nested options, and ones that you change constantly at that. People are still nursing their grudges over psionics breaking the design trends about effect modularity!

And your own approach doesn't actually have the granularity that makes the nested choices a real design upside, instead intruding multiple layers of additional annoyance from it because it's all restriction. You can't become anything resembling a Roc (Gargantuan Str/Con flying animal), because the Aerial Form is capped at Large and only does that if your base form is Large. You're also not getting any of the feel of relying on the resilience of your assumed form because you don't get Wild Shape and your armor is directly and explicitly visibly carried over. By and large, yours is simply worse at the concept than being a Wild Shape Ranger, which has something to be doing when they aren't an animal themselves.

The disadvantage to having an open emulation of statblocks like wildshape, polymorph and shapechange allow is that you get a weird meta where there are a few obscure forms that dominate gameplay. Using a custodiated list where they can be balanced relative to each other means more choices actually see play and creates less hassle to dig through sourcebooks. The scalability it offers has a downside: if you want to create a balanced class, there's just no sense in preemptively tying it to every creature anyone ever sees fit to print.

3.5 is a very nearly solved game, there's been far over a decade of debate on the best options. There's a great deal of work put into working out the best Wild Shape forms, so one can look at those and identify the problematic outlying properties responsible for being the best and integrate any qualitative factors as something relatively easily applied to whatever. A big one is being a good combatant that also flies, so having Flight be something you can apply to basically whatever gives a ready solution to most of the outliers by making things suddenly much more competitive.

And Wild Shape has a familiarity clause that isn't actually crunched out. The DM is entirely within their rights to deny ultra-obscure creatures or ridiculous outliers, and it's basically definitionally munchining to ask to be something crazy from a setting-specific sourcebook when the campaign isn't in that setting. The fact that this will often cripple Wild Shape above level 10 is actually intended by the game designers because most of the nasty things were of the depreciated Beast type in 3.0 and they just copy-pasted to 3.5, causing the ability to access things it wasn't intended to. Like the Dinosaurs and Dire animals.

YMMV. I've never seen why druids get the shapechanger role when that's sufficient to furnish its own class.

Two reasons to my understanding. Because Druids are The Nature Class, and natural threats are usually rather physical in decidedly non-humanoid fashions, and because Druids started as a variation of Cleric, which have always operated on self-buffs, so they needed their own self-buffs to slot in the same broad party functions. CoDzilla's playstyle is mostly intended by the original designers of the legacy code, because Clerics, and by extension Druids, were supposed to be line-holding characters alongside the Fighters to be doing something proactive instead of sitting back as healbots or stepping on the Wizards' toes. Clerics had heavy armor and maces, Druids turned into bears.

There's also the issue of "A shapechanger class" not really having much in the way of fluff to work with of its own. A person who can use any degree of both Archon and Demon abilities is doing Something Screwy by D&D metrics, because they are literally contradictory forces. For wide-ranging capabilities that actually have a coherent theme, you basically have the Extraplanar block of Abberations, Elementals, Fae, and Outsiders, or the Nature block of Animals, Elementals, Fae, Magical Beasts, Plants, and Vermin. You don't really get another large block of types that are "safe" to roll into one theme, as most of the remaining types either lack internal thematic coherence to begin with (Humanoids, Giants, Monstrous Humanoids, and Oozes), or don't make basic sense within the published settings to transform into alongside anything else (Constructs, Dragons, and Undead).

Specifically, what might this rule look like?

The gist of it would probably be a set of columns grouping modifiers as +X/+Y (Skill, Ability, maybe Defense with NA, Ref, and Fort as the options), a split X ft/+Yft column for movement (granted mode and bonus), and a column for Natural Attacks with X/YdZ/AdB formatting for number, primary damage, and secondary damage, with the rules text for the off-form reduction being something like "When in the form of another creature, such as through Wild Shape or a Polymorph spell, reduce your effective {class} level for this ability by that form's hit dice".

Were I actually writing it out, I'd probably go with an option list of archetypical groupings for these base form bonuses, on the level of Serpents, Avians, Ursids, and Bats, to avoid weird efficiencies cracking parts of the game open, particularly surrounding the astronomical potential AC from having full "priority" Natural Armor alongside Dexterity as the primary stat in the form of a Leopard or something, because there's not actually that much Dexterity scaling among Animals, as you're entirely able to find 16+Dex at 3 RHD or less.