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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9771478" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Very, very much too late, yes. The concept has taken on a life of its own beyond D&D, and that now feeds back into D&D. Folks expect a "Druid" to be someone who can shapeshift. That this is a pigeonholing of those abilities, when they could otherwise have fit into a bigger and more thematically diverse package, is not of particular concern.You can mostly blame Warcraft for turning this into a phenomenon. D&D Druids caused the Warcraft games to make their Druids work that way. E.g. Everquest Druids are still functionally priests, who get animal taming abilities, not the ability to take on animal forms. But Warcraft? It followed D&D, and thus made Druids a magical tradition specialized in shapeshifting. Technically WoW isn't the game to do this, but rather Warcraft 3, since that's the game that introduced Night Elves and their "Druid" traditions. But WoW's enormous popularity and cultural impact is what has permanently cemented "Druid = Shapeshifting spellcaster" in the fantasy zeitgeist.Much the way that a couple pieces of fantasy literature, such as Three Hearts and Three Lions, are almost totally responsible for the word "Paladin" coming to mean "a divinely-ordained knight who fights for good and right on the basis of a sacred oath". Because prior to that....as far as I can tell it was only used for its original meaning, namely, the retinue of Big Chuck himself, Charlemagne, being his palace knights (the Knights of the Palatine.)</blockquote>

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