Nerfed Wildshape?

[coyote6]

I think it would have made more sense to turn regeneration, fast healing and the like to supernatural abilities.

Or make up a new designation ("Natural" or whatever). Then all the plain-old regular critter abilities would be "Natural", and Regeneration and whatever else designers want critters to keep in Anti-Magic Zones could be Extraordinary.

(Or reverse it, so a wolf's Scent is an Extraordinary ability, and a troll's Regeneration is an Astounding or whatever ability.)

No constraint for future designers*; instead, More Options.

*That bugs me; they're designing 3.5e with hypothetical idiot future designers in mind? That's dumb. I can be a "designer" and build stuff that's still broken (e.g., Super Platinum Foil Chased Hologram Spell Focus, which gives a +11 bonus that stacks with all other bonuses, to save DCs of spells from a particular school).

There's a limit to how much you can design a game to counter "munchkin" players; trying to outguess hypothetical overpowered future designers is pointless and edges on the absurb.

 

[Stalker0]

Good News to Plant Wild Shapers!

"Originally posted by youspoonybard
Andy, two questions on Wild Shape:

Will Wild Shaped Druids get to pick which equipment melds if they can wear it in their new form? Like, if I was wearing a cloak, and my new form allowed it to stay, but I wanted it to meld, can I pick whether it stays/melds?

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The effect doesn't indicate that any choice is available.

Looks like all your equipment still melds though aparantly. not that that's bad, but it would have been a nice touch to get that ability

 

[infax]

For the game design thing, I think what they wanted was to free game designers somewhat of worrying about munchkin players. If I'm a designer and want to create a beast on the molds of say, a giant lizard, that regenerates I have no need to make it a Magical Beast - so that druids can't transform into my new beast and have regenerate. I can make it a plain animal - druids can befriend it, use animal empathy on it or use Invisibility to animals against it, but if they transform into one they don't regenerate.

I agree however that Regenerate could be set into some other category (Astounding, perhahps, as another poster suggested ).

As for the equipment, as noted in a previous post:

Originally posted by youspoonybard
"In 3.5, when a character uses polymorph or any similar effect to change form, his equipment either remains worn or held (if possible) or melds and becomes nonfunctional. Thus, wild shaping druids should be able to "hold on to" many more items than normal.

As a DM, I'd adjudicate this as loosely as possible--if I can even conceive of the possibility that the new form could wear the item in a manner similar to the normal form, I'd let it stick around.
Andy Collins
Senior Designer
Wizards of the Coast Roleplaying R&D".

No, your equipment doesn't all meld. Indeed, most of it will stay worn (specially if you turn into an Ape )

 

[Stalker0]

Good News to Plant Wild Shapers!

"Originally posted by youspoonybard
Andy, two questions on Wild Shape:

Will Wild Shaped Druids get to pick which equipment melds if they can wear it in their new form? Like, if I was wearing a cloak, and my new form allowed it to stay, but I wanted it to meld, can I pick whether it stays/melds?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



The effect doesn't indicate that any choice is available.

Looks like all your equipment still melds though aparantly. not that that's bad, but it would have been a nice touch to get that ability

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For the game design thing, I think what they wanted was to free game designers somewhat of worrying about munchkin players. If I'm a designer and want to create a beast on the molds of say, a giant lizard, that regenerates I have no need to make it a Magical Beast - so that druids can't transform into my new beast and have regenerate. I can make it a plain animal - druids can befriend it, use animal empathy on it or use Invisibility to animals against it, but if they transform into one they don't regenerate.

But do you know any animals that can regenerate? Could this be a natural ability for animals at all? I don`t think so, so the decision of the designer to make it an animal would be wrong, I think.
It is still the same thing as here:

That bugs me; they're designing 3.5e with hypothetical idiot future designers in mind? That's dumb. I can be a "designer" and build stuff that's still broken
(e.g., Super Platinum Foil Chased Hologram Spell Focus, which gives a +11 bonus that stacks with all other bonuses, to save DCs of spells from a particular school).

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[nharwell]

I have to admit that it looks like the 3.5 Druid will be a far more powerful combatant than the 3.0 Druid. Unfortunately, that won't matter too much to me as I plan on retiring my Druid immediately unless I can convince my DM to house-rule some of these changes.

As someone posted above, it's all about "flavor." I don't care if the new Druid is now 5 times more "powerful". I based my character concept around particular ideas (i.e. wildshape) that are no longer supported in the new rules....

 

[Shallown]

I don't think the problem was or is with wildshape or poly I think they need one more category for abilities.
Natural abilities
extraordinary
supernatural and
Spell-like

I thought adding a Natural ability type would solve all these problems it would cover things like scent and ability scores. You could even limit ability scores to a point say str up to 20 for a certain creature is natural and above that it is extra ordinary.

then poly and wild shape could possible progress at say 15th level wild shape includes extraordinary where as before it only included natural abilities.

Heck even some abilities may be natural for one creature and extraordinary for another.

I think that would solve a heck load of problems. And it would have been simple in the revision to do so since most of it would be a common sense sort of thing.

later

 

[Deadguy]

I think the problem with these 'Natural' abilties seems to arise because the designers of monsters don't step back and analyze what they're doing. The distinction between 'Extraordinary' and 'Supernatural' is 'does this effect require magic to manifest itself?' If yes, it's Supernatural, if not it's (generally) Extraordinary. It's the inconsistent application of this approach that causes the problems.

To make the decision easier, they should probably have said: 'effects that exist on Earth are Extraordinary, those that aren't are Supernatural'. That way we can have abilties like Scent classified always as 'Extraordinary' whilst 'Fast Healing' is always 'Supernatural' (siince no organisms actually regenerate as fast as Fast Healing would imply).

Once you've applied principles consistently, and stated the principle clearly, you can then allow the Druid (or other shapechanger) to have access to Extraordinary abilities, safe in the knowledge that they aren't going to get access to the really imbalancing powers.

Of course, all IMHO...

 

[Apok]

I think the problem with these 'Natural' abilties seems to arise because the designers of monsters don't step back and analyze what they're doing. The distinction between 'Extraordinary' and 'Supernatural' is 'does this effect require magic to manifest itself?' If yes, it's Supernatural, if not it's (generally) Extraordinary. It's the inconsistent application of this approach that causes the problems.

To make the decision easier, they should probably have said: 'effects that exist on Earth are Extraordinary, those that aren't are Supernatural'. That way we can have abilties like Scent classified always as 'Extraordinary' whilst 'Fast Healing' is always 'Supernatural' (siince no organisms actually regenerate as fast as Fast Healing would imply).

Once you've applied principles consistently, and stated the principle clearly, you can then allow the Druid (or other shapechanger) to have access to Extraordinary abilities, safe in the knowledge that they aren't going to get access to the really imbalancing powers.

Of course, all IMHO...

Very true. This whole debate could have been avoided if the designers had just applied a little bit of extra forethought into their design. Pity they are only human...

 

[Psion]

I might suggest to my DM that he ignore two changes to wildshaping:

1) Wildshaping will still allow all abilities of the animal; and
2) Very few items will stay "equipped" on a wildshaped animal.

The second, of course, would be far more of a nerf than the first would be a bonus; however, I think it'd lead to better flavor.

I like it. I like it a lot.