We just finished our Session Zero for my new campaign...it's a homebrew campaign setting based very heavily on
The Seas of Vodari. It's a swashbuckling heroic adventure in the Age of Sail, in a world where Atlantis is real, dinosaurs never went extinct, and pirates rule the seas.
One of my players decided to roll up a druid, but he doesn't want to play "that same old druid everyone else plays." Specifically, he wants to get rid of the druid's Wildshape ability completely, and replace it with something else. When I asked him what he had in mind, he said "literally anything else, I hate Wildshape so much." Direct quote, no exaggeration. So obvs, I suggested one of the subclasses that would let a druid spend wildshape uses to do
other things, like the Circle of Stars and its "Starry Form" ability, or the Circle of Spores and the "Awaken Spores" ability...but neither of them appealed to him. He wants to build a Shannara-style druid--one who is more in tune with the elements, feels more like a nature-based wizard than anything else.
In the moment at Session Zero, the first thing that came to mind (and which I quickly suggested to the player) is the Arcane Recovery feature of the wizard. Lose the ability to turn into animals, gain the ability to restore a handful of spell slots instead. The player shrugged and said something like "I guess that's fine, better than turning into something I'm not," so we tentatively went with that...but it was fairly obvious that nobody was really impressed with it. And for good reason, it's pretty friggin' dull.
So I'm fishing around for ideas that I might suggest to the player instead before the next gaming session. We are a clever bunch here on EN World, and I'd like to pick your brains. Does anyone have any ideas?