D&D General what are druids?

[Mind of tempest]

serously what are they supposed to be?

how are you supposed to role-play something which is so vague as to what it even is?
how do you build them into a setting if they are so little descriptive?

I get they are to do with nature and turn into animals but it seems lacking in function?
how do they even come about who are they different from nature clerics' past abilities.
and why do the subclasses feel so uninspired.

they feel like they are missing something?

 

[aco175]

It seems like they are in the same boat that rangers and paladins are in with the other classes being more samey with all the options we have today. A nature cleric can just as easy be a druid and stop trying to make a hole for them to fill. On the other hand, they seem to have found a hole to fill and seem to straddle the divine aspect of nature while being powerful enough to fight for it.

It seems shapeshifting is one of their signature moves so we look for ways to make it more usable, more times, more fun, more catchall. Otherwise they have spells like a cleric and less armor. They have a slightly different spell list but that could just be given to a nature cleric.

 

[jgsugden]

serously what are they supposed to be?

how are you supposed to role-play something which is so vague as to what it even is?
how do you build them into a setting if they are so little descriptive?

I get they are to do with nature and turn into animals but it seems lacking in function?
how do they even come about who are they different from nature clerics' past abilities.
and why do the subclasses feel so uninspired.

they feel like they are missing something?

I feel the PHB addresses the role well. What would fill the gap in your opinion?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Whether Druids or Nature Domain Clerics are similar or distinct really comes down to individual DM needs and function. If the DM wants to make a distinction between the priests that perform ceremonies and rites for the general public and work at temples and shrines that the general public visits and attend... and those hermetic members of a loose collective who actually live out in the wilderness looking over important natural landmarks... the Nature Cleric and the Druid are how the DM can represent that mechanically.

But if they don't want that, they don't have to use it. I mean part of the whole point of having all these classes for which there is thematic overlap is so that DMs can pick and choose which things they want to include in their game. There are plenty of people out there who are perfectly happy to just use the Core Four-- Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard-- and through the use of backgrounds and subclasses allow for the theming of characters that can represent the other classes in the game. Scout Rogue is that DM's Ranger. Nature Cleric is that DM's Druid. Champion Fighter with the Outlander Background is that DM's Barbarian. And so on.

It's the same reason why quite a number of subclasses are essentially "thematic multiclassing"-- it allows DMs who don't like actual multiclassing to let their players essentially multiclass via their subclass choice. The Zealot Barbarian is the Barb/Cleric analog. The College of Swords is the Bard/Fighter analog etc.

They are all just different ways for a DM to skin a cat and decide how they wish to have their game be.

 

[jgsugden]

I will say that Druid is the class I tailor most for my campaign world ... and I do so to give it a more defined role.

In my setting, Divine, Arcane and Nature magic are all delivered through the Weave. The Arcane is taken, the Divine is sent, but Nature is accepted as if drinking directly from the stream rather than grabbing it in a bucket or having someone deliver it.

the weave begins at the heart of the Positive Energy Plane and flows through everything and into the Heart of the Negative Energy Plane. It is life and death as a continuity. As the spellcasters most in touch with this conduit, druids in my setting are devoted to maintaining the conduit through balance, and also capitalize on both ends of the spectrum. To that end, I have a few homebrew subclasses for druid that tie into death, reaping and even undeath (in an anti-paladin sort of way). I also added a number of death and necrotic energy related spells to their list.

My druid organizations are mostly devoted to using the natural flow of magic to preserve the Weave. That generally means ending things like undead that disrupt the weave. That means preserving life forces within regions by keeping nature healthy. Some are founded in dark times and exist only to support the Light ... while others originate during positive times and seek to dampen the light to maintain balance. Other druids are not beholden to any organization or creed - they just figure out how to tap into the magic and use it for their own ends. They generally damage the weave and become foes of the druid organizations that support the balance.

I find that does a lot to balance the class and give PCs specific ideas of how their PCs might fit into the world.

 

[the Jester]

In my campaign, the key difference between druids and clerics is that all clerics gain their powers from a divine source- typically from worshiping a god but rarely a philosophy with enough followers to invest true believers as clerics. Druids, on the other hand, gain their powers from Nature itself.

A Nature cleric worships a god of nature, or sometimes something like the Sun. A druid gains their powers by channeling the immanent divinity in nature itself rather than through an entity or a thing that is a part of nature. Druids are almost more like warlocks without a pact than they are like clerics.

Again, all of this is in my campaign.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I think two things are at play.

In my mind, there are some unintentional gaps the authors “see through” due to their long history with the game. If you ask any of my pals what a Druid is, they will give some explanation that applied well for 1e which we have not played in almost 25 years!

The second thing is the authors leave some space to fill in—-some are x, some are y some are undefined. There is your design space!

There are many descriptions in phb and beyond which may seem contradictory at first but I see it as a feature and not a bug.

If I play a Druid, it will be a nature magic wielding person who haunts the wilds and gathers with like minded folk to worship nature and protect it.

Add what you want for taste! I like that the villain in sunless citadel is what he is…

 

[Corinnguard]

If 5e kept 4e's sources of power (Arcane, Divine, Primal, Psionic, etc.), the Druid would be the Primal equivalent of a Wizard who focused on nature, spirits and transformation.

 

[Voadam]

Druids are fairly undefined but generally part of a nature oriented cult/spellcasting tradition so there is a lot to allow specifics to be defined by a player or DM in a specific campaign.

In FR they are cultists of individual nature gods with overlap of nature domain clerics of the same nature gods.

In Eberron they have the specific traditions of that setting, the spellcasting tradition and organization being founded by a dragon to safeguard the world against extraplanar threats, the splitting of cults into Gatekeepers, Children of Winter, Asbound, the fey one, etc. with different focuses.

In Greyhawk they are the Old Faith separate from the God worshippers.

In the 4e cosmology they are tied to the Primal Spirits of the World separate from the Gods and the Primordials.

In the Scarred Lands they are titan worshipers with a different divine power source than the clerical god worshippers.

In core D&D they are vaguely Celtic nature cultists with nature oriented spells, shapeshifting, scimitars as stand ins for sickle swords as thematically sickle iconography. This sometimes means they are just generic shaman types, sometimes Merlin based, sometimes witchy, sometimes vaguely Shub Niggurath Call of Cthulhu cultist, or whatever.

I have thought of using the class as an Ars Magica Bjornaer Magus stand in, as a Norse Vanir magic tradition, as the sea witch tradition in Freeport, and other thematic roles. A player in one of my 5e games used the class to mechanically represent a Werewolf the Apocalypse werewolf PC concept with their nature magic rites and shapeshifting.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Shapeshifters who get spellcasting as a consolation for the fact that no one will ever add good shapeshifting mechanics to D&D.

At this point.

They used to be nature priests seemingly in acknowledgement that D&D gods don't actually work for certain (then) popular conceptions of nature priests.