Ex-Druids

>Ex-Druids
>A druid who ceases to revere nature, changes to a prohibited alignment, or teaches the Druidic language to a nondruid loses all spells and druid abilities (including her animal companion, but not including weapon, armor, and shield proficiencies).
>She cannot thereafter gain levels as a druid until she atones (see the atonement spell description).

There's so many stories out there where a bad GM contrives some ridiculous moral dilemma in order to make a paladin player fall, but honestly it seems a lot easier to bullshit some rationale for why a druid PC has failed to "revere nature" and needs to attone.

Why do you never hear stories about GMs fucking over the druid's player in some way? They seem to be just as liable a target to passive-agvressive GMs stripping their class powers, but historically that seems to be a treatment only reserved for paladins.

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It's not a meme. Everyone complains about "moralfags" but no one gives a shit about ex-hippies.

That sounds as stupid as alignment sign language.

>That sounds as stupid as alignment sign language.
But alignment languages are actually great

A class that "reveres nature" is a dumb concept to begin with.
>I refuse to cure you of this Ebola virus because it is a part of nature and you are dying of perfectly natural causes that cannot naturally be cured.
Weren't historical druids just a misinterpreted mishmash of pre-Christian European religions anyway? Why do we even need a separate class for essentially a cleric with nature-related domains? There's no obvious reason why Wild Shape couldn't be the special ability for Animal domain.

Because it's cool you whiner.

>I'm gonna have a conversation with my horse because we're both Neutral!


No, they're retarded.

>not being best friends with your neutral horse

>"Why do people give to beggars," he was asked, "but not to philosophers?'
>"Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy."

>misinterpreted mishmash of pre-Christian European religions
>mishmash
>religion"s"
Nah.

It was one specific one that we know nothing about.
>Why do we even need a separate class for essentially a cleric with nature-related domains?
Back in TSR D&D the Druid was an example Cleric subclass.

It's for people who want to scream at squirrels, but the Ranger is already in the party.

Because a fallen paladin is still a fighter but a fallen druid can't do anything

>Druid has to do a shitty atonement quest each time they teach a new druid

That sounds less like falling and more like some sort of elaborate chore. "Oh no, I've lost my druid powers, guess we're gonna have to put the plot ON HOLD until I get them back!"

>It was one specific one that we know nothing about.
>one
>just one


retardo, while the pantheon might have been similar the single tribes were way too spread and isolated to keep on coherent religion and the differences were pretty big

If you're gonna nitpick at least not be a retard about it

>Sir I wanted a NETURAL GOOD horse and this is clearly a TRUE NEUTRAL horse. I want my money back.

>tribes were way too spread and isolated
I was going to tell you off for saying the British Isles were isolated from themselves,
but then I remembered that the Northerners used to think the Southerners spoke french.

In darksun campaigns a druid has to spend half of the year hanging out in his grotto, grottoing around it - one of the things that makes this more sensible is that players are supposed to have a stable of PCs they swap in and out of during the course of the campaign, and they can level up one of those spares as the campaign progresses to ready a particular PC for being needed in the near future, and at the same time leave a druid to fuck off to do an atonement quest or grotto himself into a coma if needed.

>achshully is neutral evil, not true neutral. My apologies sir.
>how can you tell just by looking at it?
>Iz a camel, sir. Very embarassing, will have to tell hassan to stop doing this to passers by.

The trouble is that druidic circles tend to indicate there was a fairly robust trade network across the british isles - one capalbe of transporting fairly large quantities of stone from the north of scotland down to the tip of cockney.

bump for interest

Why do druids have a secret druid language?

What force is revoking their powers for teaching it? I don't understand

>Why do druids have a secret druid language?
It's a holdover from TSR.

Back in TSR everyone and everything had it's own language.
Lawfuls had own language, Neutrals had their own language, Chaotics had their own language, roughly 7 in 10 monster writeups mentions another language (I think Dragons had *another* language for each alignment?)... hell, even Thieves got their own language.
At some point Druids had the ability to talk to plants and animals added to their language (where they originally had the opportunity to learn various plant, animal, and woodland monster languages separately) and that make it "special" enough for WotC to leave it in when they made d20.

Because DMs from the 3.X era only hate Martials because they remind them of the bullies in school. Druids are hippy-nerds, like them, and deserve all the power that they get for no effort except being special.

>hell, even Thieves got their own language.

they still do, at least in 5e.

Why do the bible thumpers also get free power far beyond warriors? I wouldn't think they would overlap much with the geeks.

The new druid is initiated before learning the language, side-stepping that problem.

They become, essentially, a level 0 druid (all the restrictions, none of the abilities), then get taught the language, then get taught all the level 1 druid class features.

Still spellcasters, thus smarter, thus nerds.

Alternatively, it's a means of keeping their parents whose basements they live in happy that they're not into Satanism.

Druids were a secretive bunch and made use of an indecipherable writing system known as "oggham", and are sort of known for secret societies and rituals, they're also the most "defensive" in terms of fluff - they often get a special "place" they have to protect (which of course doesn't translate into getting more defensive spells or anything becaues D&D always has to be a little retarded and bereft of joined up thinking on these things) so it makes sense that they'd have something to seperate themselves from "outsiders" like that.

Honestly

> Honestly
No, uh... no punctuation there. Versus the rest of your post.
You forget to finish your thought? Or fail to remove part of an expunged tangent?

But... the nobles did speak French. They were Normans. Because William.

By the time William arrived, all the druids were already extinct.

Isn't thief language just ebonics?

If the ex-druid has innate nature-based abilities due to fey-blood or something similar, and becomes fully aware of what she had just lost...

...and becomes a little bit emotionally unstable...

...

...

He's talking about stonehenge

Its real world historical equivalent was an Elizabethan-era European thing, it seems, so probably not.

If fallen paladins can turn evil, what do fallen druids do? Cut down forests and replace them with sprawling suburbs with no sidewalks?

Why do we need fighters and wizards when we can just have clerics with War and Arcana domains?

They can, but the weak-willed ones are more likely to take up alcoholism, while the intelligent ones start casinos.

She doesn't seem to have lost much.

4e actually does a pretty good job of separating 'Primal' from 'Gods of nature' with it's druid/shaman classes.

I'd say that it is a combination of cockney-level slang (to keep outsiders unaware and to confuse them) and handsigns (so as to be able to talk when needing to be quiet. Could also be used to make the vocal component tonal, in that what ones hands are doing changes the meaning of the vocal component)

I'd say that if a rogue teaches a non-rogue who is not a prospect of the guild Thieves Cant, they literally get kicked out of the guild, if not have contracts put out on them.

Study the forbidden art of Defiling

She's a darling girl who mainly uses healing magic, and also happens to be a half-dryad and under some perfidious epic spell that turns benevolent people into bloodthirsty yandere.

I was asking about the trade network.

The same as pic related. We know there must have been a trade network, because the standing stones come from a different geographic region, but we don't know the details.

>weren't historical druids just a misinterpreted mishmash of pre-Christian European religions anyway?

No, it' modern modern hippy bs cosplaying as gandalf

We don't even know how exactly were the druidic ways since pretty much all lore that survived to this day was provided by Romans. Most people play them as retarded tree-hugger Planeteers but chances are that their rituals and practices could have been a lot more similar to those of Verbena sorcerers, if you know what I mean.

Sorry I meant the DND class, not actual druids.

Which of the following is you party more likely to do on a given quest, even with good intentions and results:

>Steal from a someone
>Grave Rob
>Deface a holy symbol or site
>Commit murder
>Torture someone
>Knowingly deceive others
>extortion
>Kidnapping
>Burn down someone's home or business
>Senselessly destroy every tree and slaughter every animal you see

A druid will only stop you from doing one of those things.

Do different guilds have different slang or hand-signs? Is it possible to know where a thief is from by his language?

Okay, this is now my #1 happy dystopia, replacing American suburbs.
How stupid is their government? Haven't they seen what it leads to?

All thieves can communicate with all other thieves.
>Is it possible to know where a thief is from by his language?
Whether or not they have (cosmetic) dialects is unspecified.

You have piqued my considerable interest. Could you perhaps provide a clue as to what I should search for, since the IQDB search set isn't useful in this instance (it rarely is for pages from manga, sadly).

Not so.
>Grave Rob
Why do you think only civilized folk make graves? What about faerie rades, sacred burial places left to themselves which have become rich places of life and secret life? Dragons graveyards and elephant graveyards are not places of civilization.
>Deface a holy symbol or site
Because all holy sites are based in civilization, right? You'll commit more acts of desecration through ignorance than willfully.
>Burn down someone's home or business
Because no one of importance lives in forests or plains.

Pathetic and unimaginative.

I've also seen this done to clerics.

"My cleric is gonna fight the bad guys using all his self buff spells and outclass the fighter!"
"Aren't you playing a cleric of the god of mercy and compassion?"
"...yeah, so?"
"Uh huh."

Read some Celtic Mythology.
the types of magic involved that became associated with bards and druids were nothing at all like clerics.

Why do Catholic Priests use Latin?

Sacred prayers in a different language isn't exclusive to Druids.

comicvine.gamespot.com/holy-avenger/4050-49014/

Found it myself with Google search.

Not sure there's any English version available but there you go.

Druids tend to do things such as trade animals and manipulate nature, so it isn't like there aren't similarities in education with some arcane caster just a difference in interests.

Because it requires very specific conscious decisions to be made first - you don't accidentally or teach someone the language, for example. Nor can you really do it in the heat of the moment like paladins can get too smitey in comparison. Also because they're not based on zealous belief in something like paladins are. They're more on the understanding and chill side by default and you generally need a massive wake-up call to change from that.

Yeah, but clerics are not priests. They're still martial warriors of their god.

Unexpunged tangent, sorry.

Yeah but that was more to distinguish the catholic church from the orthodox church that did all their services in greek - which makes sense given that it began in greece and historically had large congregations who also spoke greek.

It took several centuries of catholic bullshit before the church decided to start holding mass in a language the congregation could actually understand again.

Thief Cant is always a bit of a clusterstuck because it should be limited to cities or regions the thief did the bulk of their thieving in, but if you held that rule it'd make any thief who stepped outside their region less useful as basically "urban rangers" who can "talk to scum" using Cant. Another "game/fluff" imbalance.

>not buffing yourself up so that when you must kill in defense of the innocent at least the villian's death will be mercifuly quick and painless rather than a long and drawn out painful struggle

No, Latin rite Chalcedonians held church in Latin because it was the language of the liturgy in the Latin-speaking parts of Rome, while the Greek rite Chalcedonians held church in Greek where people spoke Greek. They didn't split into the Orthodox and Catholic churches until well after church services were mutually unintelligible.

Why can a druid not be of the type who raced through Africa? A Theodore Roosevelt or Cecil Rhodes or Livingston, they were the strongest voice for the conservation of the world but hunted elephants, took the comforts of home in to the wild. They protected the wild but took it to serve man, not man serve nature.

>...serve man, not man serve nature

That's kind of why. Roosevelt etc would probably have been Rangers, not Druids.

Is the Druid not more concerned with nature surviving and the Ranger more concerned with operating in nature?

My feel of D&D Druids is that they're more concerned with nature taking its course without being unbalanced by sentient races. If a local baron were to clear-cut local forests, they'd be against it (and him) regardless of whether or not that forest was declining due to, say, a nearby river changing its flow.

>comicvine.gamespot.com/holy-avenger/4050-49014/

Thank you kindly. I don't get results for manga on google search, I don't use it often enough.

>it should be limited to cities or regions the thief did the bulk of their thieving in
Pretty sure campaigns were expected to stay in a general region back in the day (planar travel notwithstanding).

I find pretty good image search results on yandex.

Because a paladin falling is an actual mechanic, where with other classes such things are barely brought up.

If a Barbarian or Bard are too Lawful, they technically shouldn't be a Barbarian or Bard anymore, but no one takes advantage of that. Because there hasn't been a history of it, and to a player getting punished like that would be a dick move - and probably cause all sorts of bad behavior from a player trying too hard to prove they're Chaotic, where if a paladin tries to prove themselves Lawful Good, at worst you get Lawful Stupid, and that can be more easily corrected.