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<blockquote data-quote="pedr" data-source="post: 3592703" data-attributes="member: 33464">The Alter Self chain of spells is indeed not used in Living Greyhawk and Xen'drik Expeditions.Wizards seems to be recommending/suggesting to home GMs that they do not allow the use of the spells in their campaigns - hence some of the new spells which do 'transmute into a specific creature and get these abilities'. I think the main problem was this: monster designers are trying to create balanced monsters - and ones which are interesting to fight. They don't want to add another stage to the design process, namely: would this be broken if a PC (or NPC) could polymorph into it? The rules as written benefited the player who could spend the money - and time - collecting Monster Manuals and the like and thumbing through looking for the most powerful form into which to polymorph. This was exacerbated by the confusion over whether a change in Con from base form to new form led to a change in hit points. The Con 8 druid which spent the first five levels hiding and trying not to die, then spent the mid-high levels continually in wild-shaped form was not uncommon. Now Living Greyhawk tried to limit this by only allowing polymorph into Monster Manual (1) forms and others which were discovered as adventure rewards. This was reasonably balanced but the new system for wild shape, alternate form etc was becoming pervasive in newer products so the campaign fell into line and banned polymorph completely.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pedr, post: 3592703, member: 33464"] The Alter Self chain of spells is indeed not used in Living Greyhawk and Xen'drik Expeditions. Wizards seems to be recommending/suggesting to home GMs that they do not allow the use of the spells in their campaigns - hence some of the new spells which do 'transmute into a specific creature and get these abilities'. I think the main problem was this: monster designers are trying to create balanced [i]monsters[/i] - and ones which are interesting to fight. They don't want to add another stage to the design process, namely: would this be broken if a PC (or NPC) could polymorph into it? The rules as written benefited the player who could spend the money - and time - collecting Monster Manuals and the like and thumbing through looking for the most powerful form into which to polymorph. This was exacerbated by the confusion over whether a change in Con from base form to new form led to a change in hit points. The Con 8 druid which spent the first five levels hiding and trying not to die, then spent the mid-high levels continually in wild-shaped form was not uncommon. Now Living Greyhawk tried to limit this by only allowing polymorph into Monster Manual (1) forms and others which were discovered as adventure rewards. This was reasonably balanced but the new system for wild shape, alternate form etc was becoming pervasive in newer products so the campaign fell into line and banned polymorph completely. [/QUOTE]

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