Druid Thread

Problem is when I'm a player instead of DM and another player is dead-set on the stereotype. Which is unfortunately heavily encouraged by the lore.

Thankfully, I've never met a player that went full retard and demanded that the group bury wolves they had killed instead of skinning them, and turn to pvp when things went sour.

Are druids vegetarians? "Animals are just as intelligent as people."

Or omnivores? "Everything lives, everything dies."

Or super vegans? "Plants think and feel as we do." And so eat just bread and honey.

When I was an edgy teenager, I played a hermit druid once. He was a dwarf, and really into the concept of survival of the fittest and the cruel cycles of nature.

I think it's a more sensible way to play a druid. The modern day hippy shit has got to do with feelings of 1st world city dwellers who have never seen meat outside of a supermarket, it's the very opposite of the druid's generic fantasy concept.

Animals eat each other in nature, so I don't see why a druid would have any problem with eating meat. I could definitely see a druid opposing industrialization of agriculture and farming, wanton slaughter of anything, really, and destruction of existing ecosystems.

>Druids
>Vegans
All the mental capacity of a sentient being, and you waste it trying to justify a lifestyle your jawbone makes a lie out of.
Excuse me while I laugh derisively at you in twenty different beast forms, starting with the magical apex predator lizard and working my way to smug catgirl.

Everything's on the menu when you're druid.

Shit, son, I'm so in tune with nature and the elements, I eat whole coastlines.

When I think of an Academic Druid I imagine someone who has a PH.D in farmer and other such academic specialties but can do magic so you basically have druids who run the EPA and regulate hunting and what not.

One thing that pisses me off about druids is people tending to forget that real humans practised druidism and every settings humans are always !not medieval European or !not Arabic.

Warcraft is the biggest perpetrator of this bullshit, making druids all elves and Tauren, even warhammer has wood elves mirroring a fantasy Celt race instead of just normal humans doing it.

I think the human mage trope should be put to rest and replaced by spiritualism more often. Basically imagine our own ancient cultures in a fantasy setting where the magic really does exist. Anyways I've simply seen enough wood elves for a lifetime

and? warfare is natural. just because you respect nature doesnt mean you cant go out and raid other tribes. its the same with the germanic and celtic tribes.

Fuck don't bring that up again please

Unironically depends on the Druid because the actual strictures of the faith itself (because they are priests of a sort, remember) put no emphasis on it one way or another.
Some will see nothing wrong with eating animals because nature is FILLED with animals eating animals, some will be creeped out by eating animals after they can understand them with a spell (though given that most animals have and Int of 1 or 2 they can’t be very good conversationalists), and some will be nihilistic psychos who think that the mass-culling of the human race is the only logical thing to do in all circumstances, except for of course themselves because that sort of crazy lends itself nicely to hipocracy.
Basically, try not to fall into the trap of “everyone of this same class and archetype acts exactly the same”.

My current Druid PC really enjoys spending time in cities and whoring and drinking for instance, he just also happens to be a priest of a faith that venerates nature itself.

>Which is unfortunately heavily encouraged by the lore.
Amusingly, this must be a house setting problem because even a setting as vanilla bland as Forgotten Realms actually has shown some significant variation between types of Druids.

Druids carry out animal sacrifices according to most settings that involve them. I doubt they have any qualms about consuming meat or animal flesh within reason that they don't over-consume or otherwise threaten some sort of natural balance.

But I'm sure you could make an argument for druids as vegetarians / vegans in your campaign. Why go as far as vegan, though? I would think your druids could adopt a reasonable attitude about the practice of farming animals without laboring or slaughtering them.

This is how I druid

> I would think your druids could adopt a reasonable attitude about the practice of farming animals without laboring or slaughtering them.

What's the point of a farm animal if you don't make it work or eat it?

Hair for clothing and ropes, milk for a lot of mammals. Eggs (not really slaughter), feathers for birds.

What do human practices on earth have to do with human practices on Azeroth? They don't have the same history.

There are Celt-like humans in Warhammer, just not in the Empire. The Empire has new gods of ideas (Sigmar, Shallya, Myrmidia) and old gods of more natural stuff (Ulric, Taal, Rhya) as well.

In the end though old Celt druids had as much to do with our D&D Bards as D&D Druids, so the argument is kind of undermined from the beginning.

Wanting to bury wolves is some kind of religious mixed-metaphor

Deriving products from their natural lifespan.
Like wool, or milk, or glue

>implying there aren't types of plants that can cause you endless misery or kill you

>implying things that live in nature won't kill, rape and/or eat you in some fashion

Nature is scary. Druids should be seen as lunatics or horrible witches innawoods to your average pleb communing with a force of absolute terror and chaos.

>not using the wolf carcasses

>not leaving the wolf carcassess behind to be eaten and re purposed by the land itself

Shit tier players.

NATURE IS A VICIOUS CYCLE OF FIGHTING, FUCKING, EATING AND DYING.

THERE IS NO GRANDEUR TO IT. NO GENTLENESS. ITS A VARIETY OF OPPORTUNISTIC BEAST-CREATURES AND PLANTS TRYING THEIR DAMNEDEST TO SURVIVE AND EXPLOIT EACH OTHER FOR RESOURCES.

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BEAST AND MAN IS THAT THE BEAST IS HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT IS.

Ancient cultures had a healthy dose of respect for nature because it was born out of (very reasonable) fear of it and the creatures residing in it. Combine that with various cultures world-wide associating various bestial attributes as desirable (virility, courage, etc.) and you can get why they both respected beasts and regularly made sacrifices of them or ate parts of them.

You didn't get factory farming back then like you do today. So no, you wouldn't be slaughtering animals on the regular if they could still produce milk, eggs, wool, etc. You'd do it if they injured themselves beyond recovery or got too old. You need them to survive and do heavy lifting.

>I hate that noble savage stuff. Natives committed genocide and practiced slavery. Not saying any primitive culture is much better, but tribal societies from anywhere in the world tend to be a bit horrible, and they're largely romanticized.

Fantasy is pretty romantic in general, that's not a bad thing. It would only be a problem if you mixed the noble savage into a setting otherwise intended to be gritty and realistic.

agreed

vegans are paladins

>What's the point of a farm animal if you don't make it work or eat it?

They produce byproducts like dairy, eggs and wool. From a druid's perspective, it would be a mutually beneficial relationship - the animals are given food, shelter and protection by the druids, and in return the animals provide yields of food and wool.

>It is still a cool thing that can feel both alien and familiar
Any examples?
Do you have any good resources for learning this stuff?

"There is grandeur in this view of life.
Evolution, the greatest show on earth."

youtube.com/watch?v=wxDOpAM2FrQ

>Human world getting wrecked in a planeshift.
>Survivors go try to colonize next world over, planeshifted into one that sucks less.
>Shift fucks up their ships, majority crash land.
>Ship that lands in the middle of a tropical territory ruled by kobolds and their allies (Couple dragons, sahuagin off shore, handful of smaller tribes).
>Bring the humans into the fold as refugees and adopt them into their newly forming empire.
>Humans bring in bio-chem know-how, botany, geneoogy, etc.
>Work with local shamans to mix and match styles, philosophies, understandings.

>Few centuries pass.
>Empire moving into the shallows and shadows, fading into the background as humans and their hybrid generations start to take the forefront.
>Elves, Goliaths, Elemental Planetouched, Halflings, Half-orcs, handful of half-dragons and others along with a number of humans that remained.
>Druidic community has the affectations and appearances of tribal lifestyle, traditions, and the like, but use biological magi-tech and spellcraft to continue their research, create arboreal archives and develop organic post-scarcity.
>Understanding the principles of nature and being able to speak with its spirits and greater beings/manifestations lets them live in a garden-grown science fiction bio-dome.

>don't eat plants
What is their bread made of?

My QM just made normal plants and animals really dumb to compensate. They can answer questions/help you but they don't really volunteer anything so you have to be very specific with your request and hope you didn't confuse them. Although stuff like elephants and animals that you have developed a symbiotic relationship with may be more helpful, and then there's 1% of the population that may be an awakened animal. Also animals are very aware of their place in the food chain and are super leery of anything with binocular vision.
For "domesticated" animals we just make a simple agreement. "We're your new pack/herd. We'll feed and protect you within our territory if you help us do stuff. If you leave this area without an escort we might accidentally kill you tho."

This, in my tribe literally the first thing anyone remembers is waking up surrounded by giant trees. They are also slowly building a pantheon of creatures that have tried to kill them.

dead skin cells and nail clippings?

Shrooms.

I think nature (and by relation, druids and dryads and some elves) should be treated as more than one thing. It's not just peaceful hippie plants, and it's not just scary fae shit. There's both, variations on each, and all sorts of stuff.

Lots of people only treat it as civilization vs. nature, or treating nature as an extension of something unknown and hostile, and that bothers me. If nature is magical and that's just a part of how this world works, you'd think the various races and civilizations would learn to work with it or alongside it, admittedly also working against it being an option as well. Treating it as a one-note thing feels as bad as the noble savage trope to me - respecting the varation, good or bad, is critical towards getting closer to something real.

This is what I’ve been saying.

This guy gets it. Noble Savage isn't any MORE romanticized than the knight in shining armor... not any less romanticized either. The problem is when one is portrayed as noble, and the other as a group of thugs.... they were both thugs IRL, and they are both often romanticized as heroes in our escapist fantasy.

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I'm so disappointed that 5e got rid of [most] ability score lowering abilities and spells. I love the idea of a pestilence druid.

This honestly looks more like a sorcerer, but I suppose you could work a concept like this to be druid.

...

Sci-fi druids.

A bio-mechanical AI construct in the form of a tree spreads it's roots into a planet sends them out to various parts of the world where it has Node Trees that release nano-machines to slowly terraform the environment.

Certain flora and fauna within that given environement creating drones that help in the process (dub fairies so dead bees who are converted into semi humaniod shaped drones).

Druids are humans who have been altered by the nano machines and thus have a sort of admin type access to control said system as well as transforming their bodies.

Upon death their conciousness is joined to the system and they can be reborn into various drone bodies.

Antisocial Druids for the win.

Druids should tend toward the eco-terrorist side of the spectrum. Flooding dungeons to turn them back into swamps, casting plant growth all over ruins, calling in plagues of insects whenever the farmland encroaches too far.

Pentti Linkola and Edward Abbey are Druid inspiration.

BORING. LOW HANGING FRUIT OPTION.

Seriously, you know that people and other sentient races are part of nature, that ants build, people build.

Is anyone else super bummed out that Druids in 5e No longer get an animal companion.

All druids are not the same, some druidic circles may be tolerant of civilization, others may purge any sign of it. druids should be just as fractured as clerics and paladins when it comes to morality and the relationship between order and chaos

A bear, a bear!

Still the single most low hanging fruit.

I played mine essentially as an ecologist, that also say the thinking races have a place within the natural order and they tend to make cities, as is their nature. More about balance than "civilization bad! wild nature good!"

On a related note, I played a Druid who took your care for civilization, not nature part and turned it up to twenty. After a lifetime of being a druid and seeing dolphins raping fish, mantis eating fly faces alive and chimpanzee infanticide, he came to the conclusion that nature is crueler than civilization, and that those who can understand and interact with nature should mold it to be more like civilization.
As a Shepherd Druid (an animal/summons based druid that can always speak with animals for those that don't play D&D). He still felt an obligation to manage and protect nature and its animals from civilization, but he also strongly opposed most other druids as well as somebody who loved animals but hated nature.

I am as well. If your table allows UAs, though, the Animal Handler skill feat and Animal Friendship allows you to make a combat-capable animal companion out of practically any animal.

Which UA?

media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-SkillFeats.pdf

Neat.

How about an asshole druid that steals livestock and creates pest problems for financial gain?
Like he summons locusts and then presents himself to the farmers as a kindly old fella that will solve their problems for a modest fee.

In the real world, at least in my area, there's a concern with invasive species in the rivers and wetlands. How would you translate that into a fantastical world? How do you think druids should deal with such things - are they something to be moved, removed?

I imagine the responses would be much more varied than they would in normal society.
The true neutral druid might see this as a natural part of life. Animal migrations and species introductions are nothing new. They might, however, take revenge on civilization if civilization was responsible for introducing them.
More proactive druids might actively remove them or might empower local wildlife to destroy or prey on them. Others might attempt to mold a niche for the invasive species, magically changing local wildlife to prey and compete with them.
With such variation in how a druid might see his or her relationship with nature and society, it's hard to give one straight answer.

...

I've been playing various d&d edition games for a long long time and druid has been by far the least-popular class. It was never a complaint about ability really, more theme and fit.

The one druid that had been made and stuck around was a real gem though. She took a philosophy that you might normally see as at least amoral, but played it pretty straight without pushing into edgelord territory. Basically might makes right, no matter the stakes or consequences involved. Cunning and power to do as you willed justified your authority to do so. Bandits weren't evil - they were preying on people who were weak, and so on. It worked that way in nature after all, and people aren't as removed from the cycle as they cared to think they were. She softened it some by making her character friendly and agreeable in most circumstances, she just had no sympathy for victims.

To me, that struck me as very neutral. The old school neutral where the druid is detached from events. The druid in this case motivated herself with curiosity of the world and a seething hatred of anything unnatural (undead, demons, etc).

It's the contrary to me. Society is constant and dramatic evolution, unpredictableness, crises without apparent rhime or reason, and at the same time striving for bettering itself. Nature is orderly (if not necesseraly apparent as that), slow, shit makes sense.

Doesn't mean that nature is "nice", of course. Decent druids understand perfectly fine the "red in tooth and claw" thing. They might not understand readily enough humans's war I guess, but that's another thing altogether.

Anyway two things.

1) as druids per se are oddly enough the most "fantastic" (without RL equivalent of any sort) class I don't think you need to stick with the "savage" angle. I get that the druid is KINDA a distant cousin to the pagan priests in the middle ages thematically, but I like the idea of them being perfectly informed individuals; per se they shouldn't be more "savage" than, say, clerics. In fact I introduced druids with a long tradition as what in the pre-industrial world would be called naturalists, working out now some sort of Darwinian theory (in contrast with religions in which the gods made the world etcetera. Kinda of a thorny subjects, cause in the setting gods DO undoutly exists and even directly intervene in the world, but the evidence for evolution is there. Heretical theories as "gods are mankind/dwarfkind/whatever's projections made raw magicl power" are starting to make roots in certain circles - religious wars are probably on the horizon)

2)There is a real "philosophical" problem, to me, for druids in that there is not a real definition of what "natural" is in DND. Or at least it doesn't make much sense in game: I can see why druids would give a fuck about alchemical creations, but why are angels? For that matter, what is wrong with aberrations or as a whole, as the majority of them apperantly are pretty natural and no crazed wizard set out to make them?

Depends if your druids are basically a reflection on our society view on the matter. In that case, yes, they certainly are about conservation, they think mankind (elfkind, dragonkind, whatever) has a mission to protect nature as it is...

... but this is very debatable. Who told them so? I always felt that in a sense our conservation effort are surprinsigly biblical, believe it or not. It's not "be lords over the beasts of the land" but "be the guardians over them ('cause your the only ones with the blessing and the burden of rationality)". Really two sides of the same coin - we still like to think we're superior to "them" and are on a mission for that.

Would that make sense in the setting? Is there some sort of druid genesis that says that we were cast from the Garden of Eden because we didn't protect them from whaterver? Some sort of beliveing in reincarnation in which the beasts and plants are all part of the same cycle? Is nature supposed to be our spiritual strenght? Or that we need to accept nature, not fight it, to not destroy a delicate balance, and aliens species are balance-destroying?
>would clerics share those beliefs and so basically everyone? Hell, do GODS accept them?

Maybe it's the contrary: druids think that in such a tough multiverse invasive species are actually a good thing: survival of the fittest, so that not even demons would be a match (so yeah, maybe druids actually think making more badass animals or crop infestations is a good thing - I guess that wouldn't make the rural population very friendly). So would probably be overpopulation, tough it would be a great difference from druids as we see it.

Noble savage AND beastly savage are nastier ideas, tough. They basically take agency out of people, which is literally dehumanizing them.