sjmiller said:
Tell her she has to wait to play what she likes? Tell her to play something else until she can play what she likes?
The thing to do here is to identify why she likes druids, then model that as best you can. If she likes to be a healer, a cleric or a warlord can model that nicely. You may need to replace one of their traditional class skills with the Nature skill, and you will want to reflavor the fluff, but that can be done with a little work.
If she enjoys the druid's nature based attack spells, a fey pact warlock can be a solid druid, again with some reflavor. Alternately, the cleric has a few more attack spells than its third edition counterpart, and the damage types on those can be changed from radiant to fire or electricity as appropriate for the equivalent druid spell.
If it's the shapeshifting that she likes, we are presented with some more difficulties. However, I notice that 3.5 druids do not aquire wild shape until level five. If you start your new campaign at level 1, you do have some time before shapeshifting would be expected, and can hope for the relevant materials to be released in time. If you are starting at a level where shapeshifting is expected, my thought is to have her create two(or more) characters, each of which represents a different form, and replace one encounter power for each character with a shapeshift power that permits form transformation. Perhaps a cleric for the gnome form, a two-weapon fighting ranger for the badger form(two claws instead of two swords), a two-handed weapon fighter for the wolf form(big, tough, painful bite), rogue for the snake form(with sneak attack damage being flavored into the poisonous bite), and so on.
If she likes druids because of the animal companion, things get really tricky. The difficulty with animal companions is that they essentially provide the player with a second round worth of activity each round of combat. You could go the non-combat companion route, in which the animal companion is present but not a force on the battlefield. A tiny viper, a mouse, or a hawk could be along and not be expected to fight. Alternately, you could find a helpful second party member who has a class but no race picked out and do an animal character as with a shapeshifted form. This would require some good teamwork from the two of them, but could make for memorable play.
sjmiller said:
I forget, are sorcerers still an option? I have two players who love those, and would be disappointed if they can't play one.
Sorcerers are not in the first Player's Handbook for fourth edition. However, the primary mechanical differences between the sorcerer and wizard in third edition were the attribute on which spellcasting was based and the sorcerer's ability to cast spells spontaneously. With the nature of powers in fourth edition, wizards now cast more or less spontaneously. So if you were to take a wizard and swap Int and Cha every time they appear, you'd have a pretty solid sorcerer. (We don't know if the wizard has any powers controlled by Cha, but if he does, those should be turned to Int for the sorcerer, so the sorcerer has the same selection of powers based on the primary attribute.)
Wizards in fourth edition have shown some tendency to prepare spells; the sample wizards we've seen have known two daily spells, and must select one of them for the day at the end of an extended rest(sleeping overnight). For the sorcerers, you could say they only know one daily spell, but may cast it twice a day, not more than once per encounter. Gives a bit of the fewer spells known/more spells per day feel.
