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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5833344" data-attributes="member: 54877">Here's one of the elephants in the liviing room. (I'm not claiming it is the only one. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />): The 4E designers didn't make the decisions they did in a vaccuum. The 3E players, collectively, playing 3E and talking about it, taught them to care about the stuff that 4E tries to address. To a lesser extent, you can see the same thing from 2E to 3E, though 3E mainly going after polish and organizational issues in 2E made it less obvious. (There are other influences on 3E and 4E, too, of course. I'm not concerned with those in this post.) So is the 4E druid a little off-putting to someone who wants animal summoning and shapechanging flexibility? Undoubtably? Is the 3E druid easily out of control if not specifically manged by the people at the table? the evidence is pretty strong that it is. OK, so if the 4E druid needs work, it is still not a good solution to say, "Naw, nothing will fix it. Just go back to what we had before, and throw it back on the DM and the players. Put the baby back in the tub, and dump the dirty bathwater in while you are at it." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Now, giving the tricky nature of what summoning and shapechanging can do to extreme character flexibility and power (for a number of reasons), it may very well be in the particular case of the druid, that going back to 3E, more or less, is about the best we can do. If that is so, let us not pretend that it isn't a potential problem, though. At the very least, put a section in the PHB or DMG telling people they will need to deal with it, and some of the tried and true ways to do so.  It may also be true that part of the way out to reconciling those two camps is indirect. The split was always with us, but became heavily noticable in 3E play due to other changes that aren't immediately imbalancing or narrowing. One of those changes was the increasing numbers--BAB, ability scores, magic buffs, etc. compared to 1E/2E. If changing into a bear gives you a hefty increase in tight but rapid scaling, then changing into a bear is inherently more difficult to balance. The numbers matter a lot. Rein in the scaling, and suddenly it doesn't matter so much. Get the bears' numbers in the ballpark of where they need to be (which is easy to see), and "being a bear" becomes more important than the numbers. At that point, there is nothing left to reconcile between the two camps, even though the change isn't directly concerned with balance or concept flexibility.</blockquote>

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