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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2655728" data-attributes="member: 7240">Sorry to join the thread so late but I am 100% on board with Reynard here. Because I go for campaigns that are, in not historically believable, at least anthropologically believable, I have a real problem with the way the core rules suggest that people play druids in a number of ways. "Nature" comes from the Latin word natura which means everything or the rules by which everything operates; it is a synonym of the ancient Greek word physis from which he get "physics." Until sometime between the 13th and 16th century, nature was a concept inclusive of everything including God. But, partly due to Aquinas's decision to lock God outside the crystalline sphere containing the earth, partly due to Aquinas's idea that the world in the sublunar sphere operated by precise, predictable, quantifyable rules largely independent of influences from without and partly due to the re-emergence of Platonic thought in the Renaissance, people began to exclude God from nature. From about the 15th century forward, the universe was split into two categories: God and his angels (fallen and otherwise) and the physical universe. Because human beings were ensouled and in some ways like God, we, and some things we did that invoked God, like transsubstantiation were, in part, super-natural. We began to function as the point of intersection between the natural world and the supernatural world.Then, in the 18th century, with the rise of Enlightenment thought, we began to exclude God from our scheme, leading us to see ourselves as both natural and not. We live with the heritage of this completely incoherent, paradoxical and unstable vision of the universe to this day that allows us to somehow believe that things we do and make are not part of nature. In my view, D&D druids, at their best, should hearken back to the world before the 13th century. In those times, gods, humans, buildings, trees, everything were part of nature because nature meant everything and the principles by which everything operated. So, first of all, I have a lot of trouble with the idea of druids not worshipping gods but somehow, instead, worshipping an impersonal force. This is bad history, bad anthropology, bad theology and bad mythology. Of course, many people like playing campy or modernist versions of RPGs where it is not important or, in fact, not even desirable to do those things well. I'm not saying that people doing that are having the wrong kind of fun; they are just having a different kind of fun than I like to have. A good druid, for me, is going to be someone who won't distinguish between the altar in the middle of the sacred grove and the trees surrounding it in terms of value; not only will he not see one or the other as inferior; he won't make a category distinction between these things. Similarly, like early forms of polytheism, as shown in Shinto folktales and North American indigenous cultures north of the Rio Grande, he won't make or perceive any clear conceptual distinction between different tribes of people and different species of animals. He will be just as inhibited about killing animals as people and will likely have a lot of trouble grasping why human sacrifice is a categorically bad thing. This, you may recall, is why the historical druids were suppressed by the Roman Empire -- they practiced human sacrifice. In my view, the Wild Shape ability fits really well into this; he will not see a clear distinction between his Thousand Faces ability and his Wild Shape ability. Indeed, the way level progression works, it might lead him to conclude that he has greater affinity and similarity with a leopard than an elf. I currently play a druid and I love doing it. But many people in my group seem surprised that I appear to be doing so little "role playing;" I never talk about my character's theology and seem indifferent to killing "natural" creatures. But, in fact, my character thinking such issues through would, in my view, make him less believable. Finally, just to reinforce what Reynard says, druids should recognize individual places as specially favoured by the gods and treat them as such. Trees that appear to have faces, stones shaped like genitals -- it's those kinds of things that the druid should espcially care about. But this "balance of nature" thing is just modernist nonsense.</blockquote>

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