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what are druids?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9255379" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>So Druids are derived from animistic priests who worship "small gods" and spirits of nature. The class should be deprecated as it's derived entirely from and tied to much to Northern European romantic myths and legends of pre-historical Northern European priests about which we know almost nothing about historically and which does not reflect the worldwide practice of animism as it is observed historically (and probably doesn't reflect the beliefs of people about druids at the time the druids existed either).</p><p></p><p>In my own game, "Druid" was entirely removed from the rules and their spell list reimagined in a broader "Shaman" class of which Druid was merely one possible flavor or concept you could make with that class.</p><p></p><p>That's a pretty extreme solution, but if you want to understand what a "Druid" is you need to think of them as clerics as they existed in early polytheistic practice before the development of cults and formalized written ritual practices. They exist in a nebulous space between what we as D&D players think of as clerics and what we think of as wizards. Note that what we think of as wizards has no historical analog and is itself the wizard of modern fiction and what we think of as clerics is not in fact how D&D clerics work (ei, D&D clerics don't have "faith" and don't pray for "miracles" and they certainly don't belong to a "church"). The way that Druids work is that they are essentially spiritual diplomancers whose spells are powered by bargaining with or intimidating the spirits of the natural world - the small gods like the god of a rock, the god of a tree, the god of a pool of water.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9255379, member: 4937"] So Druids are derived from animistic priests who worship "small gods" and spirits of nature. The class should be deprecated as it's derived entirely from and tied to much to Northern European romantic myths and legends of pre-historical Northern European priests about which we know almost nothing about historically and which does not reflect the worldwide practice of animism as it is observed historically (and probably doesn't reflect the beliefs of people about druids at the time the druids existed either). In my own game, "Druid" was entirely removed from the rules and their spell list reimagined in a broader "Shaman" class of which Druid was merely one possible flavor or concept you could make with that class. That's a pretty extreme solution, but if you want to understand what a "Druid" is you need to think of them as clerics as they existed in early polytheistic practice before the development of cults and formalized written ritual practices. They exist in a nebulous space between what we as D&D players think of as clerics and what we think of as wizards. Note that what we think of as wizards has no historical analog and is itself the wizard of modern fiction and what we think of as clerics is not in fact how D&D clerics work (ei, D&D clerics don't have "faith" and don't pray for "miracles" and they certainly don't belong to a "church"). The way that Druids work is that they are essentially spiritual diplomancers whose spells are powered by bargaining with or intimidating the spirits of the natural world - the small gods like the god of a rock, the god of a tree, the god of a pool of water. [/QUOTE]
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