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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7559758" data-attributes="member: 1465">Yeah but is a Wizard? What is a Sorcerer? What are cows?From an individual player's perspective, to help the player understand what is a Druid, I would suggest to look at her spells. Sure the wildshape is a unique and defining ability, but unless you go the Circle of the Moon route and routinely wildshape for combat, wildshaping for scouting/disguise won't feel fundamentally different from using spells for the similar purposes. In general tho, a Druid's spells give her a lot of identity, both narratively (if you don't ignore the fluff in the spell descriptions) and tactically (making the Druid IMHO closer to the Wizard).From a worldbuilding point of view, Druids are traditionally represented as a cult network, but IMHO the divine aspect kinda gets in the way, and creates confusion like the often mentioned &quot;why do we have both Nature Clerics and Druids?&quot; As a matter of fact I do not see any particular reason why Druid's &quot;religion&quot; couldn't be just a light mix of theories on the world, superstitious beliefs, traditional rites, but not necessarily a strong &quot;faith&quot;. I'd rather focus on the strength of her connection with nature represented by what she can do (spells) rather than why (religion).It should also be noted that there is quite a room for differentiation. In the 3e era, we were playing in our own semi-homebrew fantasy world where there were 3 different world-spanning druidic groups or &quot;societies&quot;: the Druids of the Moss (the most loose and generic of the group, essentially peaceful nature-lovers focused on promoting a good relation with animals and plants), the Druids of the Standing Stones (the mystic/scholarly type who presumably knew a lot of ancient secrets), and the Druids of the Crescent (evil-bent and driven by hatred of civilization). Perhaps it was a precursor thought to today's archetypes, which can definitely be used as world-building tools.At the moment in our family game campaign we have a Druid PC, but we're still at low level and kind of playing the campaign in a sort of &quot;BECMI&quot; style... in other words, &quot;we haven't left the dungeon (tier) yet&quot; so we haven't given much thoughts about the world outside <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 7559758, member: 1465"] Yeah but is a Wizard? What is a Sorcerer? What are [I]cows[/I]? From an individual player's perspective, to help the player understand what is a Druid, I would suggest to look at her [B]spells[/B]. Sure the wildshape is a unique and defining ability, but unless you go the Circle of the Moon route and routinely wildshape for combat, wildshaping for scouting/disguise won't feel fundamentally different from using spells for the similar purposes. In general tho, a Druid's spells give her a lot of identity, both narratively (if you don't ignore the fluff in the spell descriptions) and tactically (making the Druid IMHO closer to the Wizard). From a worldbuilding point of view, Druids are traditionally represented as a cult network, but IMHO the divine aspect kinda gets in the way, and creates confusion like the often mentioned "why do we have both Nature Clerics and Druids?" As a matter of fact I do not see any particular reason why Druid's "religion" couldn't be just a light mix of theories on the world, superstitious beliefs, traditional rites, but not necessarily a strong "faith". I'd rather focus on the strength of her connection with nature represented by what she can do (spells) rather than why (religion). It should also be noted that there is quite a room for differentiation. In the 3e era, we were playing in our own semi-homebrew fantasy world where there were 3 different world-spanning druidic groups or "societies": the Druids of the Moss (the most loose and generic of the group, essentially peaceful nature-lovers focused on promoting a good relation with animals and plants), the Druids of the Standing Stones (the mystic/scholarly type who presumably knew a lot of ancient secrets), and the Druids of the Crescent (evil-bent and driven by hatred of civilization). Perhaps it was a precursor thought to today's archetypes, which can definitely be used as world-building tools. At the moment in our family game campaign we have a Druid PC, but we're still at low level and kind of playing the campaign in a sort of "BECMI" style... in other words, "we haven't left the dungeon (tier) yet" so we haven't given much thoughts about the world outside :) [/QUOTE]

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