Druid form expolit

[5ekyu]

Aside from common sense ruling on sound (I mean, have you ever heard a spider?), the advantages I cited are all pretty direct applications of game terms and statistics. The rules on hiding in the PHB stipulate that, in order to hide, a character needs to be totally obscured. A Tiny creature is going to be totally obscured by much smaller objects than even a Small creature. Spiderclimb, the ability for the spider to climb up almost any surface, and into crevices in the ceiling, for instance, is right there in the statblock. There's more to "RAW" than skill modifiers.

By RAW, a spider is able to hide in tons of situations where a humanoid won't even be allowed a roll. (Total concealment.) By RAW, a spider is able to climb into hiding spaces a humanoid could never reach. (Spiderclimb.) The balance issues are handled by common sense and broader thinking on the part of the DM.

If, as a Druid, I wildshaped into a spider to sneak into a treasure vault, and the DM called for a stealth check while I was climbing along the ceiling of a corridor, and, upon a low roll, told me that the goblins playing dice in the room around the corner, noticed me, I would be beyond cheesed.

By the RAW a lion is stealth +6 and a cat is stealth+4 both as "stealthy" and frankly i have not heard ever in my life a human intelligence cat or a human intelligence lion sneaking up on me either... but i a pretty sure that in a DND 5e game dealing with lots of fantastic creatures your players and perhaps others would be at least inclined to bat an eye if they got jumped in darkness by an approaching druid-lion without any check of their character's perception chances.

Now, i am not, again as stated earlier, saying you are wrong for any ruling you want to put into your games. You can rule spiders or cats or lions all unnoticeable in all sorts of situations all day and all night long... I have not one problem with that at all.

have a blast.

Knock yourself out.

But...

Just sayin'...


again...

the more beautifully creative additional abilities you choose to add to "creatures" (or really any game element) that can also be accessed by player abilities - well the more you hit any planned balance upside the head with the Great Club of IRL and after a while with enough hits balance may be needing to start making death saves.

heck, if i knew a GM was into this kind of animal empowerment, i would be looking up venom potencies IRL for my next druid.

So have a ball and go for it.

 

[pemerton]

I basically agree with [MENTION=6777696]redrick[/MENTION] but, to be honest, Stealth doesn't seem that important anyway. If a goblin who lives in a dungeon notices a spider crawling along the wall or ceiling, so what? Even if the goblin is an arachnaphobe, it's not like s/he has a can of bug spray ready to hand! I think most dungeon denizens would be used to spiders as cohabitants.

The real issue here is that shapechange is often very strong - broken, even - relative to other comparable effects in the game (like invisibility spells, flight spells, infravision spells, etc). Yet it's also a highly compelling fantasy trope. And so these problems keep recurring.

I would suggest having some out-of-game discussion to find a "gentleman's agreement"-based solution, rather than establishing an ingame arms race where the player of the druid is afraid to use shapechange because s/he doesn't want to risk being killed by a rat, and your dungeon is full of contrived goblin spider-traps.

 

[5ekyu]

BTW for the record, in my games where these kinds of issues occur, i explain right off the bat that when you "gain the abilities of creatures" by whatever means that is referring to their in-game DND 5e (or whatever rules) stats. they should evaluate their expectations based on those cuz anything beyond those stats as a "magic transformed version of..." should be seen as a circumstantial exception and not an expectation.

Even with that, i have not had any player-based complaints about wildshape being too weak for a class feature for a class with a full spell suite and the usual whistles and bangs.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Druid: "Ok. I turn into a spider and go down the corridor"
DM: "The corridor goes about 30', then it....uh, what are you doing?"
Druid: "Huh? Just drawing the map"
DM: "How?"
Druid: "What do you mean?"
DM: "You're a spider. You don't have opposable thumbs, let alone a piece of paper and a pencil. You can't draw a map."
Druid: "...oh...crap... I guess I turn back into myself and go back out to the party".

Problem solved.

I see new-ish DM's fall into a kind of "the game rules allow...so..." mentality. Can't blame them, really. Most newbie DM's grew up with video games as their basis for "RPG reality". In a video game, you frequently hit "M" to bring up a map of where your character is and this map is perfectly drawn/scaled and doesn't actually exist "in the game world". Well, with RPG's, that shouldn't fly (unless you're playing some kind of game that has something like that...sci-fi, for example).

My suggestion is when something pops up that has you pause and go "Hmmm...that seems....powerful". Stop and try and think of the situation from the PC's perspective, and then think how the character would be able to do whatever that thing was/is. In the Druid case...as soon as he starts to map (or anyone else at the table; they aren't there, remember?)...think of how they'd be able to do that. Even if the PC's are using magic...say, Telepathy...what and how things look from a spider perspective is probably VASTLY different from that of a human/demihuman. I mean, to a human, 30' is a dozen or two steps. To a 1" spider...hell, it probably can't even 'see' more than a foot, and that's being generous! Having the DM say "Ok, you are on a vast plane of stone, to your right is another plane of stone, the wall, that goes on for as far as you can tell". A particularly cruel DM would pull out the Wildness rules and consult the chances for getting lost while on the Plains. (Yeah...I might do that... lol!).

IMHO, the druid is better off turning into a rat and hoping he isn't captured and eaten (well, 'killed'). At least then he'd have a more 'normal array' of senses and sense of scale. There's still the whole "drawing a map" problem though, so using wildshape to get a sense of particular threats is a better idea...mapping, not so much.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[MarkB]

Yeah, the point of scouting a dungeon in spider form isn't that it's impossible for anyone to notice you - it's that even when someone does notice you they're generally not going to care. Likewise, druids make excellent eavesdroppers in urban environments by taking the form of a domestic cat or dog, or a rat.

Wildshape is an excellent utility ability that can be used in many ways by an imaginative player. But, as pointed out, the character can only do it twice before resting for an hour, and is limited in what they can do while transformed.

If something bad does happen to them at some point in the depths of a dungeon they're going to be all on their own and a long way from help. So it's a useful move, but also a risky one. Most intelligent denizens of a dungeon won't bother to do anything about a spider, but any place that's been around for a long time will have developed its own little ecosystem, and a spider won't necessarily be at the top of that food chain.

 

[Darren Campbell]

In this case there was a few skeletons to observe, and down another dungeon hall was a Spectator floating and guarding some loot. He did use the form to scout the area, and since he hadn't seen a spectator before it was just a giant floating ball.

I will include the idea that a spider can also be prey to a host of other things. I will consider the lack of vision as his spider scouting. And consider whatever other animal he turns into a part of the adventure. I might have a random encounter feature for the beast he turns into in place so that he can't turn into everything and get away with it trick.

Thanks for your advice.

 

[pemerton]

Druid: "Ok. I turn into a spider and go down the corridor"
DM: "The corridor goes about 30', then it....uh, what are you doing?"
Druid: "Huh? Just drawing the map"
DM: "How?"
Druid: "What do you mean?"
DM: "You're a spider. You don't have opposable thumbs, let alone a piece of paper and a pencil. You can't draw a map."
Druid: "...oh...crap... I guess I turn back into myself and go back out to the party".

Alternatively: "I guess I remember which turns I've taken, and the approximate distance between them, and tell the rest of the party when I get back to them." Traditionally many druids have a decent WIS, and hence (presumably) a reaonable sense of direction, and so can remember where they've travelled and tell others about it.

Even if the PC's are using magic...say, Telepathy...what and how things look from a spider perspective is probably VASTLY different from that of a human/demihuman. I mean, to a human, 30' is a dozen or two steps. To a 1" spider...hell, it probably can't even 'see' more than a foot, and that's being generous! Having the DM say "Ok, you are on a vast plane of stone, to your right is another plane of stone, the wall, that goes on for as far as you can tell". A particularly cruel DM would pull out the Wildness rules and consult the chances for getting lost while on the Plains.

In my experience, spiders can scuttle in reasonably straight lines over interior surfaces - they don't seem to get "lost" and wander around aimlessly in circles. I don't see why a druid spider, who probably has above average WIS and doesn't necessariy have INT as a dump stat, and who (at least in many games) will have had ample opportunity during downtime to practice life as a spider, is going to be too confused by the fact that, because as a spider s/he is small and has crappy eyes (is that actuall part of the game rules for spiders? but we'll let that pass), the process of scouting out a corridor is a bit different from what it is for a human.

IMHO, the druid is better off turning into a rat and hoping he isn't captured and eaten (well, 'killed'). At least then he'd have a more 'normal array' of senses and sense of scale.

So now we're quibbling over rat form (which can swim, and also climb fairly handily, and is pretty good at squeezing through narrow spaces) vs spider form (which is smaller than a rat, with better climbing but weaker swimming and poorer visual and olfactory senses)? That doesn't seem to me to get even close to addressing the actual issue at hand.

If something bad does happen to them at some point in the depths of a dungeon they're going to be all on their own and a long way from help. So it's a useful move, but also a risky one.

Personally I don't think this is a very effective balancing factor.

If the player figures that the GM isn't going to want to run a whole solitaire adventure which - if it ends in the death of the lone PC - has the potential to be disruptive of the game as a whole, then the deterrence hasn't worked.

Conversely, if the player is deterred then the player only pulls out the ability when the stakes are super-high - and then if it works the strategy has succeeded despite the countervailing factor, while if it fails then the result is that the party is one PC down in a situation of super-high stakes.

This is why I think a "gentlemen's agreement" on how to handle the ability is probably a better way to go.

 

[pming]

Hiya.

Alternatively: "I guess I remember which turns I've taken, and the approximate distance between them, and tell the rest of the party when I get back to them." Traditionally many druids have a decent WIS, and hence (presumably) a reaonable sense of direction, and so can remember where they've travelled and tell others about it.

Sure. I suppose hand-waving to get to the "good stuff" (re: whatever the group enjoys the most about playing 5e) is a totally viable solution.

In my experience, spiders can scuttle in reasonably straight lines over interior surfaces - they don't seem to get "lost" and wander around aimlessly in circles. I don't see why a druid spider, who probably has above average WIS and doesn't necessariy have INT as a dump stat, and who (at least in many games) will have had ample opportunity during downtime to practice life as a spider, is going to be too confused by the fact that, because as a spider s/he is small and has crappy eyes (is that actuall part of the game rules for spiders? but we'll let that pass), the process of scouting out a corridor is a bit different from what it is for a human.

Again...it's find to just decide yea or nae based on the characters Int and Wis. I wouldn't, in this situation at least, but that's my "style" of DM'ing.

So now we're quibbling over rat form (which can swim, and also climb fairly handily, and is pretty good at squeezing through narrow spaces) vs spider form (which is smaller than a rat, with better climbing but weaker swimming and poorer visual and olfactory senses)? That doesn't seem to me to get even close to addressing the actual issue at hand.

Not quibbling. Just trying to point out that a human (assumption...can't remember if the actual Druid PC was human or some other race) suddenly seeing life as a Rat would be unusual enough...a spider isn't even in the same Phylum or Class (e.g., insect vs mammal). Then again, if the Player has consistently decided to spend 'down time' wildshaping into something specific (e.g., "a normal spider"), and has told me about it each time I say "Ok. Everyone has some down time. What does everyone want to do?", then great. At that point I'd happily decide that based on the characters Int and Wis, after "X amount of time" the PC would be used to being in a spider form/shape. But that wasn't what I got the impression the OP PC in question had done. I got the impression it was a spur of the moment "lets pre-map the dungeon and find out where everything is" type of thing.

If the player figures that the GM isn't going to want to run a whole solitaire adventure which - if it ends in the death of the lone PC - has the potential to be disruptive of the game as a whole, then the deterrence hasn't worked.

I wouldn't be making my own judgement (as in my OP) to "deter" the player from doing it...just that doing it wouldn't be as "easy as expected". A player is free, and encouraged, to think 'outside the box'. But rarely is an idea so perfect, so clean, so unfettered, as to be "significantly better than what is normally done". I mean, a fork with 4 prongs vs a fork with 2 prongs isn't "far superior". It may be slightly better, but it also takes a bit more metal, a bit more time and a bit more skill to make. So, not about "deterring", more about "cost/benefit and risk" assessment.

Conversely, if the player is deterred then the player only pulls out the ability when the stakes are super-high - and then if it works the strategy has succeeded despite the countervailing factor, while if it fails then the result is that the party is one PC down in a situation of super-high stakes.

This is why I think a "gentlemen's agreement" on how to handle the ability is probably a better way to go.

First part, as I said right above; "cost/benefit and risk" assessment.

And I totally agree with the "gentlemen's agreement" (e.g., table expectations). If and when a group has played enough together that they 'know' what is likely to be a good vs average vs horrible plan...well, I've found that the actual nitty-gritty rules tend to get used less and less.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Ovinomancer]

Um, since no one else has pointed this out, the spider in the MM is tiny in size, but that means it's about a foot across. I dunno about you, but that's not a spider anything except maybe an ettercap is going to ignore. While the bite only does 1 damage, that means that this spider can easily kill a goblin with 7 good bites without poison. Do you know of any teeny, non-threatening spiders that can actually bite you to death? That's a scary spider, man.

If that kind of spider is roaming around a dungeon, almost anything that sees it is going to take exception to it's existence, likely in an violent way. Once you make this point clear, and then have things react to the 12" spider running across the ceiling appropriately, this issue takes care of itself.

Also, by the by, hiding does not require total obscurement. The new term of art is just that you "can't hide from a creature that can see you clearly." What "see you clearly" means falls under the overall rule that the DM determines when circumstances are appropriate for hiding.

 

[Wumpus]

If that kind of spider is roaming around a dungeon, almost anything that sees it is going to take exception to it's existence, likely in an violent way. Once you make this point clear, and then have things react to the 12" spider running across the ceiling appropriately, this issue takes care of itself.

Aren't your players going to say "I turn into a more typical housefly-eating spider"? I don't remember a minimum size on 5E wildshape but I might be forgetting it