Need help to build a proper druid.

[Stormrunner]

Actually, most animals ought to be able to just wear a belt as a belt, unless it's a "hipless" form like a snake or a porpoise, which would have trouble keeping it on. Given that the Glove and Boot slots are probably going to be unusable 90% of the time in animal form, taking away the Belt slot as well (or taking away the Necklace slot and allowing belts to be worn as "collars") seems excessive. Cf. Andre Norton's _The Jargoon Pard_, where the hero wears a magic belt that lets him wildshape into leopard form (and gets "stuck" in that form when an enemy's eagle familiar Sunders the belt with a surprise attack, so it obviously didn't "merge" into his form). The Monk's Belt is a good idea; I'm not sure I would allow the unarmed damage to supersede the natural claw damage, but the Wisdom bonus to AC alone is worth it.
Z, where are you getting the "darkwood full plate"? In the DMG, darkwood is lighter than normal wood, but no stronger, so wooden plate would not give the full protection of steel. FR has "duskwood", which is as strong as steel, but specifically states that armor as complex as full plate cannot be made from it (though breastplates are an option as they're just one piece). MotW has a "Grey Ironwood Suit", basically +2 full plate made of permanent ironwood, but costs it at a whopping 137,650 gp! Where they get that cost I'm not sure, and anyway _ironwood_ isn't on the list of spells you can use _permanency_ on, so it breaks the rules.

 

[Thanee]

@Frank: I havn't seen anything on your side, which proves your point.

When I look into the rule, I see no signs for that recalculation you claim, moreso, everything hints towards a simple adjustion (the one I quoted above and also pg. 146 PHB 3.5 about Constitution Changes).

The "custserv" answer can mean both. Yes, of course do hit points change with Constitution and of course does Alter Self mean base hit points, but what are base hit points, as there is no differentiation between hit die hit points and con bonus hit points, this is more likely to mean the character's regular hit points (hit die + con bonus).

Anyways, you obviously have a different view and that's absolutely ok, everyone can play the game as he or she wants!

But as long as you don't have any prove, don't assume that the rules are meant to be your way, and please don't speak of "spirit of the rules" in combination with increasing your hit points in the described way, as this is surely not within the spirit of the rules, otherwise polymorph wouldn't have such an inherent limitation!

Bye
Thanee

 

[Norfleet]

This is a common misconception.

When you add 6 to your Constitution, you don't add three to your statistic modiifer, you replace your modifier with the new value on the chart on page 8 of the Player's Handbook. Really. Look it up.

Now, when you recalculate your hit points, you recalculate based on the new modifier, not on the delta value of that modifier. So if you bump up your Constitution to 27 and recalculate your hit points, all of your hit dice are recalculated based on a Constitution Modifier of +8 - even if you didn't recalculate your hit points when your Constitution jumped to 25.

The D&D Statistic Modifiers system, at its core, cannot fix this "hole" - which is why in 3.5 they did away with the idea of changes to Constitution that didn't affect hit points altogether. The fact is, even if a change in Constitution doesn't affect hit points, a further change in Constitution will affect hit points as if the previous modification had done so. Thus, in 3e clever players could choose whether to modify their hit points to the new Con scores by either taking their bracers of health off and putting them back on again or simply leaving them on the whole time - in 3.5 hit points always change to a new Con score with no exceptions.

-Frank

Egad. And they were trying to make 3E less complicated and consistent than previous editions, too. I swear, if you tried to nitpick something like this in a previous edition, you would be pelted with dice. Gah!