Wild Shape: no vermin.

[Sejs]

Something that struck me as odd while talking to my wife about wild shape for a druid she's working on for an upcoming game. A druid can change into an animal, and later on a plant. Mammal, piscean, avian, reptilian, mollusk, you name it - but no bugs. A druid can pull off a redwood, but a spider is just beyond them.

Seems kinda odd, really.

As a point of curiosity, is there any reason... balance reason, I guess... for why a druid cannot use wild shape to turn into a vermin that would fall into their size range?

 

[drunkmoogle]

By WotC's logic, vermin have no intelligence. Even though you retain your INT, it may just be weird to be something that reacts entirely on instinct (assuming you trust WotC's logic).

If you want an in game reasoning, you could argue that druids are species-ist like most of the world's conservationalists. "Save the panda; he looks so cute!" is heard more often than "Save the red-eyed cricket, an essential part of the food chain in Maldavia*".

Or druids could think bugs are icky.

*Completely made up, don't bother to look up

 

[milotha]

I don't think it's an int thing, since plants are pretty intless. I think it's just an oversight by WotC. I think it might also have to do with the fact that most people view animals as cute, whereas insects are viewed as scary. So, it's probably an anthropomorphic thing.

 

[SJGiant]

By WotC's logic, vermin have no intelligence. Even though you retain your INT, it may just be weird to be something that reacts entirely on instinct (assuming you trust WotC's logic).

If you want an in game reasoning, you could argue that druids are species-ist like most of the world's conservationalists. "Save the panda; he looks so cute!" is heard more often than "Save the red-eyed cricket, an essential part of the food chain in Maldavia*".

Or druids could think bugs are icky.

*Completely made up, don't bother to look up

None of that really holds water though because plants have no intelligence either, and some animals feed only on base emotion. I think a better logic/reasoning would be that no natural insect found in the world is as large as a Small/medium creature. At least, thats what i'd tell my players if I had to bs off the top of my head. I'm sure someone will swoop in and correct me on the world's largest half cricket/psuedo spider from Kerplakistan

J~

 

[drunkmoogle]

D'oh. Plants. M'eh. I tried. BSing is an art I've yet to perfect.

Maybe wild shape is extremly painful when you turn your endoskeleton into an exoskeleton?

shudders

Ummm... while we're talking about wild shape anyways, is sustenance for a druid relative? Can he WS into an ant and eat a crumb of bread for a meal each day? Kind of pointless, especially since any good druid has a ready supply of Goodberries, but it's just something odd that's been bothering me for the past five minutes.

Cheap-arse druid.

 

[Umbran]

As a point of curiosity, is there any reason... balance reason, I guess... for why a druid cannot use wild shape to turn into a vermin that would fall into their size range?

Poison. Wild Shape works like Polymorph. Polymorph includes extraordinary powers, like poison. Allowing a shift to the appropriate-sized vermin might well grant the druid access to an attack form that turned out to be unbalancing....

 

[I'm A Banana]

But they can still turn into Vipers, ne?

There are attempts to patch this. The FR Underdark book, for instance, has a vermin-shifter, as does Savage Species.

I just allow 'em outright. But then I also have weird polymorph/shapechange house rules, so certainly it's not typical.

 

[Umbran]

But they can still turn into Vipers, ne?

True. But the vipers tend to move more slowly, do less damage with the bite, have lower poison DCs, and don't do things like throw webbing (which is arguably an attack form, and covered by Wild Shape). Though a medium viper and a medium spider have the same CR, when backed by a PC's intelligence, the spider is somewhat nastier.

 

[Ferret]

Arthopods are 'unnatural' to most pre-modern people, and as said above a lot more people are scarred of harmless spiders then of tigers or hippos, which kill more people/more dangerous*.

*This is not completly fact

 

[Liquidsabre]

We don't need no stinking vermin.