D&D 5E Wildshape oddities.

So I've noticed something odd about wildshape. The description of the ability says it replaces your game statistics, and then lists the exceptions (intelligence, wisdom, charisma, and hp). My understanding is that you lose racial abilities, class abilities, feats, and skills, since these are all game statistics. If this is true it creates some odd situations for the druid.

1) You lose your druidic class abilities. Many of these represent mystical abilities gained from your connection with nature. It is particularly odd that while using your mystical shapechanging you lose your poison and disease immunity, your increased healing rate (which is specifically stated to have come from studying and shapechanging into animals), and your slowed aging.

2) You technically lose access to all your hd since they are not mentioned in the new statistics. These could be interpreted as being retained along with your hit points, but I believe it should be called out.

3) Though you retain your own mind and (intelligence, wisdom, and charisma) you lose training in sneak and similar skills. Most odd of all is that you lose your advantage on recall natural lore checks from being a druid. I should point out that this is understandable and flavorful if you assume that your mindset has changed into a more animal like one, but retaining your own intelligence, wisdom, and charisma seems to contradict this.

4) You would retain the effects of a feat that increased your maximum hp, but would not gain the benefits of one that allowed you to regain more hp when spending hit dice. This is because the wildshape ability specifically calls out your hp as a statistic that doesn't change even if you technically don't have that feat in this form, but says nothing about hd or healing rates. Particularly noticeable since the druid gains an increased healing ability, as stated above.

5) You can wildshape and bite someone's head off as part of the same action, but cannot wildshape directly from one animal form to another. This is because in animal form you technically lose the wildshape abiliy. The ability to change back as an action is easily interpreted as being part of the initial activation of wildshape (like a spell that you can dismiss as an action), rather than as a class ability.

6) You lose the abiliity to cast spells, and the benefit of your feats and skills while using the "Thousand Faces" class feature. I do believe a more reasonable interpretation of this ability would be that it consumes a use of your wildshape but does not use the same rules. It should be pointed out that "none of your statistics change from using this ability" to avoid possible confustion.


I think that if nothing else the druid's class abilities should be called out as remaining active during wildshape. Also, I would advocate that intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are changed as well, though your personality remains mostly the same. This would then dovetail better with the loss of skills and feats. I see some possible issues with this as well, but they seem to be less jarring than #3 above. I expect others to feel differently on that one though. Anyways, I just thought I would point this out for discussion.

I have the feeling that whatever the rules, wildshape will always be a nightmare... if the rules are precise and encompassing of every possible feature kept/lost/changed, it's a nightmare to remember or check everytime. If the rules are vague and open-ended, it's a nightmare for all those DMs who don't want the burden of adjudication. If the rules try to distill a compact logic, the nightmare starts when you stumble upon an ability that is borderline between two groups.

My preference would be the vague but short rules, such as "you change all your physical abilities but retain all your mental abilities", specifying only the most important and common ambiguities ("you retain HP and lose spellcasting") and let the DM decide on the rest.

Good points. I wouldn't run a wildshaping druid unless I knew how the DM would rule in advance, i.e. a druid should know the limits of his own abilities, or that of other druids. But I do prefer that most of these cases be made clear from the beginning, in the rules of the druid, and clearly so you know exactly what you can and can't do. I'm fine with no spellcasting, but no sneaking? really? Or no tracking? Or no bullrushing maneuvers? Or tripping? Sure, it wouldn't make sense for certain animals, and there you'd have DM fiat, but if you change into a rhino and can't charge, I'll be very disappointed.

Late in 3.5, they started to change how they did polymorph spells to each spell was a specific form, and it modified your physical stats, not replaced them. It didn't need the whole "you get everything of this form so you need to loose everything of your old form", and just worked nicer. I'd love to see that, instead.

I would like to see them move away from specific animal forms and instead have "types" where you gain specific abilities, stat modifications, limitations and so on.

IE: "Bear" form, granting you increased HP, defenses and saves, but reduced speed, limited to no spellcasting.
"Eagle" form, granting you flight, increased speed, better reflexes but lower HP and maybe some minor spells.
"Snake" form, granting you increased speed, a few special abilities, increased damage and so other things.

These "aspects" or "forms" could then be re fluffed as necessary, basically giving you a damage, support, defensive or other bonus and appropriate limitations, with the specific appearance being up to the player. Perhaps give them some suggested visualizations for each one, as a "scout" you could be an Eagle, Hawk, Crow, or Bat. As a "defender" you could be a Bear, Rhino, Hippo or other large animal. As a "damager" you could be a snake, a tiger, wolf or raptor. Or whatever your imagination wants.

I think this would resolve a lot of the abuse that comes from stealing specific rulebook forms. Leave "Specific forms" as features to be gained at high levels to druids who specialize in one area, defensive druids get access to elemental abilities. Offensive druids get dragons or something.

One of the biggest abuses with "wild shape" was the fact that the Druid could, at any given time, step on everyones toes, and often outdo them. We need a way to ensure that the druid is not capable of doing that. I hate to claim the "hybrid tax" but really if you can be anything, you shouldnt be as good as someone who can ONLY be that thing.

I think it definitely ought to swap only your physical ability scores. When it comes to perception and senses, I don't think animals need a high Wisdom score - no, they should have a feature that just gives them a (skill equivalent) bonus to all checks involving their good senses. A wolf might have Beast Senses (Sound, Smell), an eagle Beast Senses (Sight). Then, when the Druid wild shapes, they shouldn't change any of their skills or mental scores, but they would gain Beast Senses.

It's clear that you don't want a Druid to be able to cast spells in animal form, but many other features ought to remain, provided they are mental or mystical (spells obviously require a voice). The question of hit points is a tricky one - it depends how Con affects HP. Currently it's very important, so I think Druid HP ought to adjust according to their new Con score. I would much prefer if Con score had less of an impact though, in which case you wouldn't have to adjust very much at all, if anything.

I think that when they said you lose your "game statistics" they meant your ability scores, AC, speed, and the like, not skills, feats, or class abilities, since those have no number value attached to them and thus are not "statistics." They do need to clarify this, though.

Gorgoroth said:

I'm fine with no spellcasting, but no sneaking? really? Or no tracking? Or no bullrushing maneuvers? Or tripping?

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I think the issue here, is that players may want to combine their PC's abilities with the wildshape animal form abilities.

In principle there's nothing wrong with a gamestyle based on looking for combos. In practice, some people love that, and some others hate that, so problems are mostly the result of playing in a group where players and DM have different tastes.

Personally I think consistency is important for a game to work out smoothly. And the problem with sneaking, tracking, bullrushing is that sometimes your PC abilities are better, and sometimes the animal form abilities are better. I would expect the average gamer to bias his opinion depending on the circumstances, i.e. what is more convenient for his character, and then try to justify it with common sense (but he would be able to justify the opposite just as well).

If you want to think more about the nature of those skills, ask yourself: how much does your body matters, how much does your mind matters, and by "mind" I mean including what you have learned. Sneaking and tracking are represented as ability checks, first is Dex and second is Wis or Int, and it makes sense that a high-Dex form (such as a cat) will make you sneak better than your human form, while you'll still have your Sneak skill dice bonus because you learned how to improve your sneakiness. Tracking OTOH would remain the same, unless the animal form has a racial bonus e.g. due to scent. Bullrushing is different since it's not a skill, it's based on Str so this will change, but if you have a feat that improves your bullrushing why not allowing it also in animal form? OTOH what if the animal form has a bullrushing feat?

Unfortunately things are often blurry... can you generalize these examples into consistent rules? My opinion is that you cannot. Because for instance that bullrushing feat you might have as a PC is something your character has learned and while the bullrushing check depends on your physical form (Str), the feat normally represents the result of training (at least because you can take it at level 9, thus the question... if it was innate, why didn't you already have it?). But the same feat that a bull might have by default, is not the result of training, it is innate in all bulls... but is it because of the body or the mind of the bull?

Same question can come up about racial abilities. A bonus to Spot and Listen can represent something innate but is it because your ears and eyes are better or because your mind is more alert (you might argue that Wisdom represents that, so you keep the Wis but lose the Spot/Listen benefit while wildshaping)? How about increased weapon dice (unlikely to come up in wildshape, but just as an example) is that coming from the race's nature or from the race's culture? How about increased hit dice? Physical therefore lost in wildshape, or more because of strong fighting spirit therefore retained?

My bottom line is, if even racial features cannot easily be sorted out, there will never be a consensus of what should remain and what should change in wildshape, so I would just always seek for the shortest, most compact form of the rules, and let each DM/group agree on a case-by-case basis about specifics.

Also, I would always remind my players that wildshape is there so that the Druid can change form when in different scenarios. Valid scenarios could be fighting, sneaking, tracking, climbing, flying, scouting (with increased perception), running fast, long-time travelling (including going without water), swimming, water-breathing, seeing in darkness... Most of these are going to be very useful in the game even without the player trying to stack or overlap all sorts of benefits. Personally I think the game is great when your Druid has tactical choices to make which imply changing shape, and not so great when you can just stack everything and remain in one single uber-form all the time.

shidaku said:

I would like to see them move away from specific animal forms and instead have "types" where you gain specific abilities, stat modifications, limitations and so on.

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I think the first druid draft is already doing this... You have "shape of the hound" but it's up to you to choose if it's a wolf or something else. The point is, that while a wolf, a coyote and an actual hound might have different stats in the MM, their wildshape stats are the same. This reduces quite a lot the old problem of having unlimited options from monsters book...

WotC should take a page from 3.5's PHB II Shapeshift Druid variant. It basically did everything right, up to and including rendering the Natural Spell feat useless. Love the variant, although more support in later sourcebooks (feats to take more forms, or to specialize in one form, or to combine certain aspects of two forms etc.) would have been exceedingly nice.

I surely hope WotC learned their 3.x lesson and don't re-incorporate ANY "replace such-and-such stats" mechanic. Those are just invitations to dump whatever stat you won't ever be using because you'll be in a different form!