D&D 5E Problems with Polymorph, True Polymorph, and Shapechange

[Prebata]

In Shadow of the Demon Lord you have statblocks for animals separated into Small, Medium, Large and Huge Animals. You just add a trait such as swimmer or pack fighting for specific animals. The Transformation tradition spells just references these simple statblocks. It works great.

 

[NotAYakk]

Polymorph(Creature Type) can be a unique spell. With the target creature's stats in it. Like a summon.

Ditto for Shapechange. Shapechange no longer becomes "change shape each round" but rather "keep your mind and change into a new shape".

Sort of sucks.

 

[Xeviat]

@Hawk Diesel , I'd be curious to see your Druid Wildshape work, as I've been working on something similar but I got stuck on a few pieces.

PF2 can probably offer some good advice for the shapechanging spells. They'll probably work like your wild shape. IIRC, they give some temp HP, an AC boost, a base attack, some features, and sometimes a special attack (like a breath weapon for dragon shape). I always thought the Level to CR was a bad conversion since a CR 20 is way more powerful than a level 20 character.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

So I appreciate that not everyone agrees with me regarding the Monster Manual being a player resource. But that's not really the question I'm interested in. The question is how to make these spells so that one does not need the Monster Manual.

AND YES @Xeviat! CR is a REALLY poor measure for balance and standardization, especially for player resources. Monsters are not balanced for single players in mind, and I feel like designers do not (nor should they) keep these spells in mind when designing monsters.

 

[NotAYakk]

So I appreciate that not everyone agrees with me regarding the Monster Manual being a player resource. But that's not really the question I'm interested in. The question is how to make these spells so that one does not need the Monster Manual.

AND YES @Xeviat! CR is a REALLY poor measure for balance and standardization, especially for player resources. Monsters are not balanced for single players in mind, and I feel like designers do not (nor should they) keep these spells in mind when designing monsters.

For Polymorph, restricting it to Beasts is more than just flavor. Beasts tend to be brutes or skirmishers (to use 4e parlance).

For a brute or a skirmisher, deadliness is a pretty simple (DPR * Soak) calculation.

---

Rather than restricting ShapeChange and True Polymorph to one creature per spell, instead you could require that you know the true name of the species in question in order to take its form, and by default you can only do either into some fixed list of creatures.

Then the DM can hand out true names with stat blocks attached.

 

[MarkB]

So I appreciate that not everyone agrees with me regarding the Monster Manual being a player resource. But that's not really the question I'm interested in. The question is how to make these spells so that one does not need the Monster Manual.

AND YES @Xeviat! CR is a REALLY poor measure for balance and standardization, especially for player resources. Monsters are not balanced for single players in mind, and I feel like designers do not (nor should they) keep these spells in mind when designing monsters.

The issue with doing so is that these spells aren't just used in order to gain a bunch of hit points and some cool attacks. They're a swiss army knife of choosing forms with specific utility to deal with the situation at hand.

So, in order to retain their theme and utility, you still need to give the players access to a wide variety of forms with very specific properties and capabilities.

Now, there are ways to do that - you could, essentially, go through the MM looking at every single beast and coming up with everything useful about it that a player might want to utilise, and come up with a table of traits from which players could pull options to suit them.

But I'm not sure that any of those ways are more efficient or practical than just keeping a copy of the Monster Manual handy at the table.

 

[Mistwell]

In my experience, more than 50% of the uses of polymorph on your own party member is to make them a Giant Ape. Just give your players those stats for friendly changes, and you don't need stats to change someone to an ant if they are a foe

 

[Weiley31]

Your a Moth.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

In my experience, more than 50% of the uses of polymorph on your own party member is to make them a Giant Ape. Just give your players those stats for friendly changes, and you don't need stats to change someone to an ant if they are a foe

That's actually not a bad idea. Particularly with Polymorph, there seems to be an "optimal form" that is most commonly chosen. Perhaps starting from there is the best way to handle it. I also typically like for mechanics to be set, and let the player skin the mechanics how they want in a way that makes sense to them and the mechanical boundaries.

That is more difficult for spells like True Polymorph or Shapechange, but should be doable with Polymorph.

 

[Mistwell]

That's actually not a bad idea. Particularly with Polymorph, there seems to be an "optimal form" that is most commonly chosen. Perhaps starting from there is the best way to handle it. I also typically like for mechanics to be set, and let the player skin the mechanics how they want in a way that makes sense to them and the mechanical boundaries.

That is more difficult for spells like True Polymorph or Shapechange, but should be doable with Polymorph.

As a player, because I don't want to be lugging around an additional book with me, all I did was print I think three forms for use with Polymorph. That covered 90%+ of friendly uses.