D&D 5E Can your Druids wear metal armor?

[tetrasodium]

Then you're not following the rule. This is not hard.

You are confusing the word won't with can't. One implies a choice or inevitable result, the other implies inability. A vegetarian won't eat meat, people of some faiths won't eat pork... unless they decide "yes I will". Someone with alpha-gal syndrome can't eat meat. Physically they can all put a baconator with extra bacon & a side of bacon in their mouth to chew and swallow but the alpha-gal syndrome sufferer can't due to the penalty. Druids in 5e are like the vegetarian & the person of faith who won't eat meat because of a choice.

Honestly, I really feel that a druid would rather rip their own arms off than wear something unnatural like metal limbs. Now, if those prosthetic limbs were made of wood, or even bone or horn, yeah, sure they wear them.

And yes, a druid could be borged or something thanks to Ravenloftian horrors (see: Ahmi Vanjuko from the second Ravenloft MC appendix), but that's something done to the druid, not the druid's choice. And no DM who is also a decent person worth playing with is going to force something like that on a PC in order to make them lose abilities.

Your "I feel" unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything in 5e to support it with reasons & wotc recently made an announcement that even denies you the ability to use the lore of past editions in this 5e discussion. There are lots of reasons why a free willed individual might have a prosthetic limb. I'd hack one of mine off with a spoon if I could replace it with one half as capable as the one in rising.

 

[J.Quondam]

We have arrived at the place where 'strawman' and 'like a videogame' have been engaged. We have entered the discussion death spiral.

Nah. I mean, no one has invoked Godwin's Law yet! My prediction is that won't happen before post #2000.
Any takers on that bet?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You are confusing the word won't with can't. One implies a choice or inevitable result, the other implies inability.

I am not confusing them. But they both have the same result: the thing not being done.

A vegetarian won't eat meat, people of some faiths won't eat pork... unless they decide "yes I will". Someone with alpha-gal syndrome can't eat meat. Physically they can all put a baconator with extra bacon & a side of bacon in their mouth to chew and swallow but the alpha-gal syndrome sufferer can't due to the penalty. Druids in 5e are like the vegetarian & the person of faith who won't eat meat because of a choice.

Yes. And that choice was made when you decided to create a druid. You cannot choose otherwise, because that's the rule!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Nah. I mean, no one has invoked Godwin's Law yet! My prediction is that won't happen before post #2000.
Any takers on that bet?

...I enjoyed JoJo Rabbit, and hope to see the same people in the next Thor movie?

 

[Oofta]

We have arrived at the place where 'strawman' and 'like a videogame' have been engaged. We have entered the discussion death spiral.

I think we started that spiral over a thousand posts ago.

 

[Laurefindel]

For clarity, nowhere does it say (to my knowledge) that druid don’t like metal, or are allergic to it. Only that they will not wear armor (and shields) made of metal.

they are perfectly happy fighting with their steel scimitar, sporting their silver pendant, and use their golden sickle. But some reasons that are stated but not explained, the will not wear armor made of it. They won’t combust if they sit on the iron throne (unless they cast heat metal on it beforehand) and may still enter the gate even if they have to push an forged iron.

i believe the idea is that plate armor is a symbol of «modern» and «technologically advanced» civilisation, and Gygax imagined the druid as a symbol of an ancient, perhaps even antiquated civilisation. Unlike the cleric that was a chassis for priests of different religions, the druid IS a religion with it’s own philosophy and, apparently, taboos.

 

[Faolyn]

EDIT- look, let's simplify. People loved to find exploits in the rules, even back then. If you were right- that wasn't much of a penalty, since most druid spells (at least until 3rd level spells) were cast out-of-combat, and they couldn't shapechange until 7th level. So it would be a massive advantage to wear metal armor most of the time. Just find one reference- a single reference- to any contemporaneous source from 1976 - 1986 (10 years) showing a Druid wearing metal armor. I'll take any rulebook, any module, any official TSR publication, and even Dragon magazine. Good? Good. Done and done.

Slightly outside your time frame but still clearly for 1e: "The New, Improved Druid" by Richard Hernandez from Dragon #139, published in '88.

Sure, this is specifically one type of metal armor, made by elves--but it strongly suggests that it's not metal armor that's bad, it's that metal armor is not usually made in a way that doesn't mess with druids.

And, in 5e, that could be extrapolated to indicate that certain other armors could also count in that manner. The DMG has the "Who Created It or Was Intended to Use It?" table for magic items, with Fey as one of the options. I could definitely see fey armor as being acceptable here.

Of course, the real issue is that 5e could have fixed this whole problem by simply including a sidebar called "weapons and armor made out of unusual materials" and included a few rules for stone, bone, wood, shallacked paper, or fantasy materials, instead of just limiting themselves to mithral and adamantine.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

For clarity, nowhere does it say (to my knowledge) that druid don’t like metal, or are allergic to it. Only that they will not wear armor (and shields) made of metal.

they are perfectly happy fighting with their steel scimitar, sporting their silver pendant, and use their golden sickle. But some reasons that are stated but not explained, the will not wear armor made of it. They won’t combust if they sit on the iron throne (unless they cast heat metal on it beforehand) and may still enter the gate even if they have to push an forged iron.

i believe the idea is that plate armor is a symbol of «modern» and «technologically advanced» civilisation, and Gygax imagined the druid as a symbol of an ancient, perhaps even antiquated civilisation. Unlike the cleric that was a chassis for priests of different religions, the druid IS a religion with it’s own philosophy and, apparently, taboos.

So, part of the problem is that Gygax ... didn't create the Druid, Dennis "Bunnies & Burrows" Sustare did. And there is very little that he has said about it- one of the few sources I have found that is informative is this interview he did with the Grognardia website:

You're specifically thanked in the credits of Supplement III to OD&D, where you're called "the Great Druid." There's also a druid spell in AD&D called "Chariot of Sustarre," which was named in your honor. What role, if any, did you have in the creation and/or development of the druid class?

When the thief class was released in the Greyhawk supplement, as an addition to the original fighter, cleric and magic-user, we became interested in other possible classes beyond these four. I wrote up and mimeographed a set of rules for a new druid class, for our internal play. After some playtesting in our game, I revised it with a new mimeograph rule set, still just for our own use. But when we went to early GenCons, a copy got into Gary's hands, and thanks to some advocacy by Tim Kask, they revised the rules once more and published them in the Eldritch Wizardry supplement. Tim added the Chariot spell at the time (it was not one of my original spells, and the misspelling of my name was deliberate). I consider this my first published game design, although Bunnies & Burrows was released the same year (1976).

What were your inspirations in creating the druid class?

...I was familiar with druids from literature about early England, especially during Roman times. The most immediate inspiration, of course, was their mention as a monster in Greyhawk (but not as a character class). Initially, I was trying to make them related totally to plants and animals, but felt they needed a little more firepower (literally).


Another great source is Dragon 12 (February 1978), which has a great historical article called The Druids. If you look through it, you'll probably see all sorts of antecedents for Druid rules, like Pliny the Elder's discussion of mistletoe.

The one thing you don't find, and I've never found, is a discussion of the basis for the armor rule. Here's the original wording:

Druids are able to employ the following sorts of weapons: Daggers, sickle or crescent-shaped swords, spears, slings, and oil. They may wear armor of leather, and use wooden shields. They may not use metallic armor.
Eldritch Wizardry p. 2

So where did it come from? Got me. Best guess is a combination of two things-
First, the general wilderness vibe.
Second, and just as important, Sustare does say that he was looking at the new Thief class when he made the druid. The new Thief, of course, also had the same armor limitation.



@Faolyn - Great find! Thanks. There is always more stuff out there; that said, I limited it to 1986 for a reason; in the interregnum after UA and before 2e, there was some strange expansions to the rules and the classes as the superstructure of OD&D/1e was groaning and falling apart (IMO). Still, I can't think of any other clear references like that.* Awesome!

*DMG, p. 43, states that "Elfin" chain mail is not subject to heat metal because it's ... not ferrous based? So it's not metal, maybe? At some point ... I can't even.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I think we started that spiral over a thousand posts ago.

This thread is gunning for "longest circular discussion without being shut down by the mods."

 

[Faolyn]

Your "I feel" unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything in 5e to support it with reasons & wotc recently made an announcement that even denies you the ability to use the lore of past editions in this 5e discussion. There are lots of reasons why a free willed individual might have a prosthetic limb. I'd hack one of mine off with a spoon if I could replace it with one half as capable as the one in rising.

Not to devolve this into the canon-vs.-non-canon thread, but you are not denied anything whatsoever. You, the player or the DM, can use whatever lore's edition you want or make your own lore up. It's that WotC isn't going to be sticking with the old lore exactly as written. Their published books are going to change canon or ignore it as they see fit. The only way that affects you is if you do AL gaming--but you have to stick with what's in those adventures anyway.

Yes, there are lots of reasons why a free-willed individual might have a prosthetic limb. There are also lots of reasons why they won't. For example, look at the real world Deaf community and their feelings on cochlear implants, which can be best described as "complicated." To sum up, many (not all!) Deaf people reject these implants because they feel, in part, that it treats their deafness as a disability rather than as a mark of their cultural identity; in some cases, this has lead to people who get the implants being shunned by other Deaf people. They would rather be at a "disadvantage" than lose their culture.

Because there are no mechanical penalties for wearing metal armor, and Crawford described it as taboo, then yes, as written, druids would rather be at a AC disadvantage than wear metal armor, and would rather hobble around on a peg leg than get a fully-articulated semi-magical metal prosthetic.

Whether that's different in your campaign is up to you. Maybe you have a Circle of the Uplifted and Circle of the Transhuman in your setting. That's fine. That's even cool.