Druid form expolit

[Ovinomancer]

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

What does a "more typical house-fly eating spider" have for stats? Do you, as a player, really want to have me stat up a "typical house-fly eating spider?" Okay, sounds like a strength of 0, dex of maybe 5 (my less than perfectly coordinated but still gorgeous wife has no real problem ending spider lives with a well wielded footware as an improvised weapon, so it can't be very high at all), a con of 0, 1 hp, 7 AC, and a move of 5'. Now, are you really saying that you want to turn into this spider and conduct a slow recon of the area of interest while everyone else here waits on you?

Nah.

You can turn into the spider, and you can do your recon. My guess is it will take many hours to do even a quick scurry through the dungeon. So, here's what'll happen, I'll run for everyone else while you go on for a few hours, and we can resolve this whole thing through a moderate INT check -- succeed and you get the layout and general inhabitants. Fail and you get the layout and general inhabitants, just jumbled a bit. Oh, and I'll roll the check behind the screen. Sound good? Great! You set off on your grand spider adventure. What do the rest of you do?

 

[Wumpus]

Okay, sounds like a strength of 0, dex of maybe 5 (my less than perfectly coordinated but still gorgeous wife has no real problem ending spider lives with a well wielded footware as an improvised weapon, so it can't be very high at all), a con of 0, 1 hp, 7 AC, and a move of 5'.

Sounds reasonable to me? It's the budget version of "I scout the dungeon ethereally", I expect, or the Shadowrun equivalent of waiting for the decker to hack all the security cameras. Good call on "make an int check and get the quick scouting report," it'll keep the rest of the players from becoming too restless, as with any split-the-party sort of situation... though it seems like it'd be a shame if Bilbo exploring Smaug's lair were simplified so much, always good to let the players get in more trouble by pocketing the Arkenstone along the way hahaha

 

[TwoSix]

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.

Or an Australian.

 

[jasper]

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

I going have totally disagree with you, due to in game rules. Spider is tiny beast speed 20 climb 20. darkvision 30. In game vision is vision. A spider would be about to see what a pc sees. This just to keep down the rules.
As to the mapmaking skill of the pc. This is up to the group and dm. How much rulings do you want for mapping. I generally let the group have good map. Most of the time during homebrew I just give the players a blank copy of the map. Or I leave the room numbers.

 

[jasper]

So I'm new to being a DM for 5e.

Second game and my druid learns the ability to turn himself into things. Namely a spider. Which he can use to act as a scout, all the time. He can also go into this form during combat and if he's hit just returns to his normal form.

How do you DMs work this where they can't really exploit it. I mean I can play it against that ability but thats not fair or fun.

Thanks.

He is only a spider for an hour which means he only gets a total of 1/2 of hour inside. Give him a rough map of the first 300 feet and call it good. Or let him make stealth checks and on a fail than how far he gets before he has to retreat.

 

[5ekyu]

I going have totally disagree with you, due to in game rules. Spider is tiny beast speed 20 climb 20. darkvision 30. In game vision is vision. A spider would be about to see what a pc sees. This just to keep down the rules.
As to the mapmaking skill of the pc. This is up to the group and dm. How much rulings do you want for mapping. I generally let the group have good map. Most of the time during homebrew I just give the players a blank copy of the map. Or I leave the room numbers.

I would use this as a good opportunity to use attributes... let the "how much do i recall.." for a map or second run thru be an INT ability check... memory after all is not perfect. Was INT your dump stat? Now i would have it be easy to hard depending on how long they were inside, how much drama there was and how complex it was. After all it was also seen from spider eye view which means it will look different when you go back in.

 

[schnee]

There are a lot of people here that are making up all sorts of stuff to nerf something that's incredibly useful in some situations and worthless in others.

For scouting a cave system? A spider is great, and they will be able to see and do a lot and will either be not seen at all - due to Disadvantage on Perception from dim light, good Stealth bonus, really weird and uneven surfaces that give plenty of hiding places, the spider being the same color as the surroundings, and a high probability that the monsters in the cave have far worse things to worry about than a spider.

For scouting the hut of a Green Hag? They are familiar with woodland creatures, sly fey, and (probably) Druids, so expect a bunch of alert pets that will be the type to attempt to eat a spider or mouse or bird - if they find them and can catch them. But, a Hag will have a crazy, fanciful home full of stuff that gives plenty of places to hide. So, this one might be fraught with peril, and if the Hag sees an odd creature that isn't familiar to it, it may use it's at-will Detect Magic to see what kind of thing it is. So, the scouting Druid has to be smart, and if they go in with further counter-measures - i.e. Pass Without Trace running - they're much more likely to succeed, but it's still potentially bad.

For scouting the royal palace? That's going to have smooth clean surfaces, colorful paint, excellent lighting, and extremely alert guards with missile weapons at critical junctures trained to shoot first and ask questions later. I mean, a spider as big as your foot running around would be killed on sight just for the 'eewww gross' factor. This isn't even covering things like Glyphs of Warding in critical places and airtight doorways that were probably designed after the king's planners consulted with high level mages.

So my advice is to think of the world in 'what would these creatures/people do' terms, and consider their abilities, personalities, amount of experience with magic, and levels of smarts and alertness, then it will all play out well. The player will not feel cheated if they are clearly given enough narration and world-building.

I mean, it might be *fun* if the 'guard in a cave full of Kobolds' rolls really high, sees the spider, rubs it's belly and says 'ooooh, I know whats we eats tonight, SPIDER STEW!' and starts walking over to the javelins - giving the Druid time to escape. That makes sense, and isn't killing them just because you can. But stuff like 'paste that's bad for spiders'? Maybe use that for a paranoid alchemist, but everyone else, that's way too specific and will seem like the DM is just being unfair.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

I going have totally disagree with you, due to in game rules.

Fair enough. Every DM and every game is different...that's one of the things that makes TT RPG's so amazing and different!

Spider is tiny beast speed 20 climb 20. darkvision 30. In game vision is vision. A spider would be about to see what a pc sees. This just to keep down the rules.

Again, fair enough. In general this is how I handle 'other things with sight' as well. However, the OP was saying that in his current campaign, the Druid player is....abusing?...overreaching?...basically, he's "wrecking" the game. My reply was basically a means to show the player that just because someone finds a supposed "exploit" to the game, it doesn't mean one should use it.

As to the mapmaking skill of the pc. This is up to the group and dm. How much rulings do you want for mapping. I generally let the group have good map. Most of the time during homebrew I just give the players a blank copy of the map. Or I leave the room numbers.

And again, fair enough. As I said at the top, differences between DM's and campaigns are one of the cool things about TTRPG's. I generally don't make players keep track of which of their PC's has the paper, pencils, inks, and whatever else they would use for 'mapping' a dungeon. The Player at the table is the PC that is mapping. If that PC gets teleported away, then the map that the player was drawing gets handed to me. If the PC is eaten by a Grue in the dark...the map goes to me; until such a time as the other PC's start retracing their steps correctly, then I'll hand the map back to them (assuming that the PC's will/are now mapping the area they already covered).

All that said, however, if a player finds something in the game to use that more or less completely negates a third of the entire premise for the game (the Exploration part/pillar), that's when I have to step in as DM and do something to fix that. With a wildshaped-spider-druid, using the scale differences and the 'paper/pencil' thing would do that in a more or less 'logical' way. I have, in the past (using a different RPG system) had a PC with a spell that basically let him cast it and then see through everything in some redonkulous area (like, 1000' or something). I said, "Well then, you sure you want to do that? Yes? ...ok then". I think took 15 minutes of game time roughly sketching out what he could 'see' of the dungeon layout (which was basically the ENTIRE Upper and Lower dungeon levels). The players just sat there. I handed it to them, and was met with disappointed and confused stares. They thought it was a GREAT idea at first. Then, when they had the map, they suddenly realized that they had basically just used a "cheat code" for the game. They had, by their own hand, "sucked all the mystery and excitement" out of the game. They sucked it up and we continued with the adventure. It was still a lot of fun, but they definitely knew they had 'ruined' a good chunk of the dungeon crawl. Oh yeah... they never cast/used that spell again.

Each DM, and each table have their own preferences and rulings. If, as in the OP here, the player(s) seem cool with using a "cheat code", and the DM isn't...then it is up to the DM to find a way to mitigate that. If he/she doesn't...well, the campaign will end sooner rather than later.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[jasper]

...That's going to have smooth clean surfaces, colorful paint, excellent lighting, and extremely alert guards with missile weapons at critical junctures trained to shoot first and ask questions later. I mean, a spider as big as your foot running around would be killed on sight just for the 'eewww gross' factor. ......
I used to be an adventurer to I took an arrow to both knees.

To the op, he followed the rules. Reward him. Hey the evil granny murdering druid did it in my against the giants game. See my write up on Season 6 in the Adventure league forum.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Hiya.



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.

It isn't hand waving though. It's acknowledging the fact that hearing a DM describe scenes is vastly weaker sensory input than actually BEING there, which the character is. The character will remember much more than the player. Actually using the character's attributes/skills bridges the disconnect.