Need Ideas: Balancing a Druid who doesn’t have spells.

[fuindordm]

I am the troublesome player Brother Shatterstone is trying to find a class for. The witch class from Way of the Witch is heavily involved with the philosophy of the Wicca religion and the fey, including good and bad karma, the threefold rule, "do what you will, but harm none," iron susceptibility, and strong frowning on using magic to harm people (though this restriction doesn't hold against demon and whatnot).

Thusly I am trying to make a protector of the green. An Earth Mother type of figure, if you will. Much of her abilities will be protective in nature, and I wanted her to have a lot of utility in terms of scouting or helping people travel or escape. Wildshape would be kind of nice, or a kind of "spider sense" about things that are hurting the land, or things like that. Weather prediction or very minor weather control (just a bit warmer or bit drier where I sleep), talking with plants or animals or the breeze or something.

Is that sufficiently muddled?

Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed has a "Greenbond" class that sounds like just what you're looking for.

You don't even need to buy the book, it's available as a free PDF supplement on his web site:

http://www.montecook.com/arch_stuff43.html

Of course, it assumes a different spell list than the one in D&D--but you should find the class abilities interesting. Greenbonds talk with spirits, have very flexible blessing and healing powers, and are very much protectors of the earth.

--Ben

 

[Kemrain]

No one's bothered to throw in the idea of bumping the Spell-less Druid's Skill points up. Restrict the class skills and give 8 skill points, and you get a skill-based character that's very different than the rogue.

- Kemrain the Skilled

 

[Moorcrys]

You may want to look through the player's handbook and find some druid spells that you feel would complement your character vision and work out a system where you receive those specific spells as special abilities at various levels.

An off the top of my head example -- an animal messenger doesn't need to be a spell at all... at a certain level, say 3rd, your druid character could simply be able to influence a small animal to do a favor for you once or twice a day. Transport via plants would be a higher level ability, but you and the DM could work something out where it took you a minute (or several rounds) to convince the wood-spirits to carry you from one forest realm to another -- perhaps requiring a diplomacy or wild empathy check to do so. As was mentioned earlier I believe, instead of healing and curing spells you could gain the ability to create salves and potions that heal -- since you're giving up spellcasting which is a big 'balance' hit, they could be accomplished by craft checks and knowledge(nature) checks while you were in natural environments providing you had the time and the tools to do so (instead of taking an xp hit every time) with a limited shelf-life before the natural ingredients within began to turn and lose their usefulness.

In other words you can use the spell-list as sort of an idea springboard for the types of abilities you'd like your druid to have, and then work out with the DM how and when they would be introduced into your character's life. It would take a little work but I think it'd be pretty rewarding and give you the sort of druid you'd like to play.

Moorcrys

 

[noeuphoria]

Since you want to get rid of all spellcasting, maybe do something like vow of poverty in the BoeD. Each level, the character gets some kind of benefit from being so closely connected to nature. Maybe it could start out with adding fire, cold, electricity resistance (she spends so much time outside), some natural armor (she's tough), endurance bonus feat, a few spell-like abilities (speak w/animals, speak w/plants, control weather, etc...), higher hd, maybe make the animal companion uber, closer to a cohort, higher cr than normal, maybe even allow some nonstandard animal companions.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

No one's bothered to throw in the idea of bumping the Spell-less Druid's Skill points up. Restrict the class skills and give 8 skill points, and you get a skill-based character that's very different than the rogue.

I was thinking the exact same thing. There are really four different styles of core class: warrior, spellcasting, skill, and combinations of the more pure three. If the player wants to be neither combat expert nor spellcaster then skills is what is left. The Druid already has a strong class skill list that would not require augmentation.

You are getting a Rogue with a restricted skill list and wildshaping instead of sneak attack.

 

[Pax]

Perhaps consider the Shaman form Complete Divine? Yeah, Iknow, it's still spellcasting - sort of. But it's more along the lines of "the Spirits have granted me this ability, today".