So I started playing Dialo II yesterday and it got me thinking...

So I started playing Dialo II yesterday and it got me thinking. How do we bring Druids back to being scary woodland wizard from the current trend of generic boring nature girl healers?

By playing something other than D&D.

nothing about the druid itself has really changed, they can be played either way. is it a problem if people interpret the class in different ways?

Make content with spooky druids.

Warmachine is already on top of that one.

By just doing it. Put a cult of druids in your next game who are feral cannibals. They are seeking to reclaim wild spaces by burning down farms and villages. They plant a human heart beside every tree. And maybe they're a tad bit inbred and deformed. Basically fantasy-druids who are redneck-murder-cult families from bad horror movies.

kindly fuck off to and 15 years back in time

I forgot to add without just making them evil.

Then you don't. Because anyone playing the "I'm the spooky bad guy character who is actually a good guy, though, but please remember my spooky badness!" always just comes off as "oh look, it's the guy who 'roleplays' by acting like a douche."

Make an enclave that lives in the woods near a town or series of towns where they are completely withdrawn from all other societies, but they allow people who travel to see them to make requests of them so long as they provide offerings. Need healing magics? Sure. They will provide a ritual complete with masks and crazy chanting and bloodletting and the works. It's fucking horrifying and has a total black magic feel. They'll help your wife through her difficult pregnancy but they demand the placenta. They don't talk to you while they are working and when they are done your baby doesn't cry for weeks. It just sits there, passive. And before you leave their circle, you swear you see them cutting the placenta open and putting something... squirming inside.

They can be benevolent neutral while still being primally terrifying. Maybe they have a 'speaker' that's kind and all smiles, but the rest are somber and mute. They dress in scant skins, and smear themselves in woad and blood. They are unkept but do not smell badly for some reason. Men are uncomfortable around the druid females and can't stop thinking of fucking them. Same for women around the male druids. It makes for an uncomfortable encounter.

Play them a little off, especially when they talk to animals. If you need to gather information, they speak with the city rats instead of the town guard, and then casually mention that the flea populations are up this winter and everybody should stay away from town come spring.

Maybe they see a fishmonger down by the docks and they muse aloud if mermaid stories were really just clever fish who took the cue from fisherman and began using chopped up human body parts as bait for bigger humans.

Have her pet a house cat on a doorstep that tells her that it's owners just shoved all of her babies under the wash until they stopped moving. This alarms her, but her owners have always provided and kept her safe, so she expects her babies will be coming back any day now fresh and clean.

>that last bit
And suddenly my psion becomes a murderer.

Those are some pretty sick ideas, user. I'll be sure to steal some of those when next I'm called upon to play a druid.

Same way you make your wizards not bumbling comic relief old men. Just make them imposing and noble if you don't want to go down the creepy route. You know how small you feel when you see the nice day rolled over by enormous black clouds? Or you turn on the news and the earth swallowed up someone's house? Make the druids imposing like that, they live and breath nature's power and wrath. They don't have to be evil, but they have a sacred duty and the means to perform it.

But how do you go about that when all the normie girls just go "AH I'M GOING TO BE A HIPPY AND TURN INTO A BEAR!"?

By not being such a raging faggot and playing games with people who have similar tastes instead of normalfags

By role-playing your character. Pick spells that deal phat damage instead of mending you one-dimensional fuck.

Veeky Forums isn't 15 years old tho

A better title for the thread would be "How do I make druids scary?" and I for one would also like to know how.

the forsworn in skyrim are straight up druidic clans with barbarians mixed in. they work well together.

Druids weren't nature wizards. Druidism is much like a type of religion that revolves around druidic rites and orders (druid circle) rather than anything else.

You might actually be thinking of shamanism or animism, the later of which is tangentially related to druidism. What modern druids lack are ritual requirements and ties to druid circles, which I don't see how Diablo rectifies.

Yeah I play my druid as a little off. Lot's of paganism stuff. Lot's of weird ritual's. Into eating enemies when in animal form and all that.

By giving Scotland independance so that we can facilitate the formation of a celtic fringe and thus trigger a revival of national Druidic folk religion.

It's a Mystery

Ever seen a man mauled to death by a moose?

Now imagine its a dire moose.

I would fuck that slutty Druid bitch in a ritual showing how animals dominate their bitches in nature as a way to worship nature's fury until she lies there knocked-up and senseless.

The primary issue isn't the druids themselves but how we see nature. We've basically 'won' at nature aside from a few times a year she throws hurricanes and natural disasters at us. These days nature lives more in fear of man than the other way around. As a result, we no longer see nature as primal, dangerous, to be appeased. We see it as nurturing and muh apsects of life.

If you want people to be scared of druids you have to make people scared of nature first.

We haven't 'won' anything about nature short of throwing nukes at everything. And even then it'll keep going on. This planet has been spinning for eons, and it'll keep spinning for eons more until the sun eventually destroys it.

>confusing animals living in nature with nature itself

R e t a r d e d

>man disemboweled and castrated by ritual knife, authorities puzzled

What I mean is we're at the top of our food chains and have for the most part surmounted the day to day challenges the natural world can offer us. We have air conditioned houses and refrigerators full of food. People aren't afraid of a bad harvest this year because it doesn't mean they'll starve. People don't need to leave offerings to keep the animals away because they have fucking guns. People have conquered nature, at least in the first world, where I am going to guess everyone lives because they're on a Bangladeshi picture-book forum

>check Wikipedia
>it's 13 years old
>remember 2nd birthday
Fuck

I think he just means unsettling in appearance, alien in mindset, and perhaps a bit disgusting, without being evil murderers.

This is Veeky Forums, all girls are inherently scary.

/thread within a single post as always

Have you tried the Diablo 2 RPG?

Nothing about that sentence is inspiring confidence, especially when the Drow already fulfill all those qualities yet are also incredible evil as well.

Don't forget, you're here forever.

>People think that D&D has ruined Druids into ''boring nature girl healers''
>Not MMOs
>Not Warcraft

Its like you people are dumb on purpose so someone can point and laugh at you.

Nice abs

It's what got me into D&D way back when.

That last bit sounds dark.
But then I remember that they didn't really have the tech to spay and neuter pets.

If you're a poor peasant family, it's either that, or watch all the kittens starve to death.

Remove healing spells, give them more real nature stuff. Fucking pulling earth out of a wall and throwing it, summoning lightning. Only druids should be able to do these. Give them just enough to be a bit nasty with a spear or something as well.

It's hard, because druids have a recent cultural and near history bad rap.

After all, it's not easy to be personable to a good degree if you are a 'true' druid. Urban druids, on the other hand...

Agreed, this is a human problem, writing rules to curtail people into a scary druid is stupid. You can have NPCs be creepy tree cults but most people see them as ye old Greenpeace.

>How do we bring Druids back to being scary woodland wizard from the current trend of generic boring nature girl healers?
By doing that? It's a fucking game of pretend, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Stop making threads with this retarded question.

>druids have a recent cultural and near history bad rap
Hmm?

Personally I always add druids in with barbarians as outlanders with little to no contact with the outside world. They aren't good guy hippies they're just trying to make it in the woods, and use the tools available to them. They can be as malevolent or coldly neutral as you want them to be.

My players tend to do things just like this. One of my players' last Druids was an Elderly Tiefling. Very much played like spooky forest dwelling nature-yoda.

This is how I druid

A shame that while he is in prison his sacred glade will (((mysteriously))) burn down.

>WoW druids weren't the shit
>Shapeshifting, plant controlling, astrologically empowered wizards aren't the shit.
>Thinking this and that WoW druids were the sole cause of druid pussification.

U dumb

>through the first two expansions they were only good as Healbots.
WOW THATS SO COOL ONIICHAN SEMPAI, REALLY MAKES THEM MYSTERIOUS AND INTIMIDATING!

>Anything about boomkins
>good
You are as retarded as your opinions are terrible.