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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3891982" data-attributes="member: 2067">It's weird, but I've been able to come up with a pretty cool justification IMG.The way I've always seen it is that druids specifically became anti-metal BECAUSE of things like the dwarves and gnomes and metal-masters that run around in full plate. Metal, in my games, is extensively mined by these races, and the mining is very much strip-mining, making use of alchemical explosives (gnomes) and engineering wizardry (dwarves) to blow up mountains and take their stuff. No one who respects icons of nature like mountains, or even ecosystems like a mountain's, would ever willingly take part in that. It's clearly unnatural, clearly destructive, and clearly goes to make weapons and armor for the Adventuring War Machine.Druids "opt out" of the metals mass market. Instead, they are only allowed to wield metal that has been specifically acquired by other druids and worked by other druids in sacred ceremonies (kind of "kosher metal"). The fact that druids are a religious sect in D&D means that this relatively functional task - making something out of metal - becomes imbued with all sorts of ritual requirements. The only things that druids make out of metal are scimitars and sickles, specifically because they have a ritual significance. Nothing on a druid is accidental or incidental: they respect nature too much to take something without it MEANING something, so even the metal they take has significance. It is worked into sacred shapes, ritually.It matches a lot of faith's diet requirements. Muslims and Jews don't eat pork, but they're fine with beef. Hindus can't eat beef, but they're fine with anything else. Christians can't eat meat at all, but only during special periods of fasting, and they can still eat fish.Religions have weird taboos, and I've learned to embrace the druid's unique weird taboos in the same way that the real world has coped with real-world taboos: any city of a good size has a decent "druid community" that manufactures things that adventuring druids need in a way that doesn't compromise their religious dogma. That means making only sacred weapons out of metal, nothing else.It's still weird, but it very much matches the weirdness you actually see in the world, so it's okay in my book (and we'd actually loose something if it wasn't in there).</blockquote>

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