The game tells you how you must roleplay this one aspect of your character, simple and straightforward.
But doesn't this sound out of place, when it's practically the only instance of such roleplay restriction in the game?
It is at the same time
minor from the roleplay point of view, and
annoying in some circumstances. It's
minor because it doesn't represent a strong ethos like "you must not ally with evil people" (Paladin), not wearing wooden armor sounds more like a petty restriction like don't eat this, don't drink that. It's
annoying because it does have in-game consequences such being unable to use some common or magic items. And yet on the long term, it's easy to trick yourself out of the annoyance, by figuring out some alternative materials as you suggest... so then it's pointless. I don't want a trick out of a bad rule, I want a good rule in the first place.
I'm not going to rehash the debate from the WotC forums that happened on this a while ago, but I will bring up some points.
1) I think it was a mistake for this to be in the book. It's the kind of goof that the designers would likely have done differently had that thought about it.
2) It is a mistake because it singles out druids as the only class where players do not have the option to play against type and suffer the consequences.
3) Rather than listing consequences, it eliminates player choice by dictating that you may not choose to do something if you take this class. This is the sole place in the entire ruleset that does this. Paladins can break their oaths and may or may not suffer consequences at the DMs discretion. But it doesn't say "a paladin won't break their oath."
4) This is in direct violation of the meta-rules of the game which state: "1. The DM describes the environment...2. The players describe what they want to do...3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers' actions..."
Anything would be better than this. Even if it were, "A druid who attempts to don metal armor must make a Wisdom check or suffer intense apprehension causing them to take disadvantage to all attacks, checks, and saves for as long as they consider the action. If they do don metal armor, in addition to the former penalty, they take 1d6 psychic damage per day."
My dwarf wizard can choose to be an elf-loving hippy vegetarian. A paladin can choose to abandon his oath.
I can't, however, be a druid who abandons his oath. Druids lack free will. Choosing to be a druid means you lose the capacity to choose to wear metal armor.
Some people have a problem with that.
You summarized it 1000 times better than I could, thank you! I do believe it was just a goof, after 2 years of asking playtesters if they liked various characters restrictions or not, and never ever having this one show up in the playtest, some lousy editor just suddenly remembered there was something like this before and slipped it into the final book. But now if you ask WotC designers they will back it up as it was intended, just because it's much easier than admitting it was a mistake.
I don't get why you would say that. All druids should have the same restrictions. All druids belong to the same ethical group, follows the same tenets, etc. It's not like the difference between War clerics and Life clerics and Death clerics.
And that's another reason why it sucks!
We have
many Circles of the Land, and a Circle of the Moon, but they are all equal from the roleplay/ethical/flavor point of view? Why does the Druid need to be such a homogeneous class, while the Paladins have multiple (very different!) versions of their ethos (and this is
independent from their choice of Deity)?
Legacy is a feeble explanation, when similar legacies were dropped from all other classes. The Warlock might have been originally just a Witch, but it's quickly growing into an archetype with plenty of room for variants, why should the Druid remain a narrow concept? Why can't there be many druidic religions or ethos or at least variants? There are already different possible existing focuses or themes: any specific land you can think about, wildshape, beastmasters, plants & vegetation, weather, the elements, cycle of life... There's plenty of room here for each one to have its own different ethical restrictions other than "just don't use metal armor and you're fine".
Not to pimp our own homebrew, but in the course of our 3e years we had a few different Druids PCs, one player wanted a stereotypical treehugger, another was primarily intrigued by the idea of a religion that predated all others, and the third had an evil Druid but just couldn't stand the idea of "Anti-Druid" (he wanted a Druid that hated civilization, not nature!). So we made up the Druids of the Moss ("want to get one with nature"), the Druids of the Standing Stones ("scholars and preserver of ancient knowledge") and the Druids of the Crescent ("kidnaps and sacrifices to please the wild forces of nature"). Each got their own do's and don'ts, but IIRC no armor restrictions made any sense to any of them.
