Druid - How to RP Classes in 5e Dungeons & Dragons - Web DM

hey there YouTube its Pruitt and Jim Davis and of today's web DM we're gonna teach you how to clean the ashes out of that wicker man the poop out of your beard and polish up that shillelagh we're talking druids and role-playing on web DM let's trace through the force a little bit Oh dead roommates druids are we allowed to make that joke again I think this is like the third time we've made that joke yeah role-playing druids not everybody wants to be radagast you know I'm sure not everybody wants to be radagast although radagast is a great inspiration for georgia sling yes the nature wizard the beast wizard the what are they in Warhammer the amber I think they're either amber Jade something like one of the colors magic and Warhammer anyway we're talking about judges of dragons today on web DM not not warring druids are one of those classes that they are easy to sort of stereotype as like hippy tree huggers and and animal lovers and things like that and yet there are also sort of like nature wizards at the same time like how they play kind of at the table I really have a soft spot for droids I played one instant for a while in second edition played one for a long time and third edition I liked the concept of them I like the idea of of someone who's in touch with the natural world of someone just in tune with the forces and the flow of everything and like they can feel the elements seeping into the prime Material Plane they're yeah they're an ambassador between the the world of mortals and the world of the faeries and there's a weird relationship between civilization and the druid like are they are they there to stop the encroachment of civilization on the natural world are they there to keep the peace between the two like there's a lot of different ways you can think about the druid beyond like I hang out in a grove of oak trees and talk to my pet animals and eat mushrooms are they any mushrooms all day in that kind a druid is the class that's like they're in tune with this natural world in the natural forces of the world so when you're thinking about when Dungeon Master's are sort of setting up their campaigns and they know they've got a druid player it's worth thinking about for a minute how you want the natural forces in your world to work do they follow physics do they follow real world forces of nature that that we have to deal with or is it magical is it like it rains because a God or spirit or something of rain made it rain or is it just is it raining because it's a natural consequence of the climate and weather and everything else enough moisture has evaporated up and they become saturated in that yes and that's something we're thinking about and telling the druid player it's like the natural world works like the natural world in ours as much as it can right you're gonna have to make compromises you're gonna have to cut corners someplace and and hand-wave some stuff yeah or do you go full-on like this is a magical world and if you're watching some of the the stuff paying attention to some stuff from the D&D creative team you know that they talked a lot about the background magic of Dungeons and Dragons not spells not magic items not whatever but just the fact that magic suffuses everything in D&D and if you're going that route then it's like well what's to prevent you setting up a world in which there are no natural forces as we would understand them and that river flows because a river spirit lives there that mountain exists because the mountain spirits that are there maintain the mountain and that applies to the Sun and stars and the moon and if all of these things have a spirit and a magical force behind them then that really kind of makes the druid puts them in a special position if they're the ones that are the intercessors between that world that magical world of nature and civilization and I I kind of like that about the druid well yeah I mean at that point they are just kind of like nature clerics right whether they're worshipping and caretaking the these these these spiritual entities as they were and deriving power from them there's the nature domain for the choleric and obviously there's some overlap conceptually between nature domain and and druids just as there's overlap between how you play your druid and say certain types of wizards depending on what type of druid you are and how you're playing your wizard there could be significant thematic overlap it's kind of one of those things where if you are thinking of playing where the natural world is has a divine quality to it cuz of the spirits that inhabit it to keep the whole thing running then you might want to look and see like well really what is the difference between a major cleric and drew and answer that question for for potential player I kind of think that they're just two sides of the same coin and you really wouldn't make too much of a distinction between them but it does start to lead me to sort of question like what is the nature of druidic magic in general Yeah right like is it divine is it divine right and I know that in in most I think pretty much every Edition beforethe dition in sort of the earlier editions of D&D druids are kind of a subclass of cleric third edition they are their own thing but they're still sort of lumped in with the divine classes and that just sort of like lets me think like if the Druids a divine class then what is it exactly that they're drawing their divine power from that's what leads me to believe that there's spirits in the D&D world that the druid is invested in and they have been turn invested in the druid yeah but you could go the fourth edition round and say no this is a different power source than the cleric that the druid draws upon the primal magic of the natural world and maybe in that respect you you get rid of the spirits and other sort of intelligences though they're gonna word Jim good grief intelligence intelligence ease whatever whatever you have just like the natural world that has magic in it and that has a magic force behind it and the druid then learns to channel and harness that power through primal magic but there's not so much like beseeching spirits to perform some task on your behalf yeah which is how I would interpret spells being cast is the spell is cast here beseeching the spirit to perform a task for you sounds to me that Jedi are just druids when you hear about the background magic of Dungeons and Dragons it my first thought is like oh it's like the force yeah it's a fuses everything uses of bonds everything together for you and me and Rock and the tree and maybe you druid that's how they see themselves and they and a lot of druidic training is just quiet meditation to sense the connection between the rock the tree me you there was guy over here the river yeah the tree are there the tree across the planet the the moon in the sky like those are the kinds of things that druids can start to sense and start to feel and maybe the difference between a druid and a nature cleric is that the nature cleric worships the god of the harvest the god of the forest but the druid is just like i cut that out i just worship the forest don't even worship the forest i am tapped into its primal power we are the same we are the same and and the difference then between clerics and druids is that druids have sort of a faith based magic that they use to perform their miracles and the druid is just like no the natural world has its own magic and i'm in tune with it yeah I am the window or the door from which it escapes right I am the storm I can summon it I can control it the Druids are in nature there's always civilization around right right and then you have your your Fae and other other aspects of the world and so the druid is kind of in the middle of all that right as a role player like what where you find yourself in that like are you the arbiter between the two are you the protector of nature are you you seek out justice on its behalf against the encroachment of civilization of progress there's so many there's so many interesting things and depending what the druid player picks they're starting to create the world along with the dungeon master and giving the dungeon master points of conflict they can use later on so if you adopt the attitude that the druid opposes civilization and it seems like for a long time in Dungeons and Dragons that's that was the kind of mo don't use metal they don't they eschew that even though metal is found in the earth it's you know that just reworked it yeah it seems like an odd sort of thing to draw the line on given the fact that they used civet ARS and Spears and things like that yeah I don't use metal except for those except for those sickles and scimitars and what up those have symbolic meaning for the druid right but you can say like alright is the druid opposed to civilization are the are the Druids read and tooth and claw a out and out in the wilderness where where life is nasty brutish and short like you don't leave the road because there are druids out there right and you won't know them because they all just look like a pack of wolves right but those are people who fight against the encroachment the trapping they hunt down poachers and other trappers they hunt down loggers and people who would pollute the natural world they they oppose agriculture and and in that sense they kind of become like eco primitive kind of people I think that's kind of an extreme end and it would be difficult to fit a character like that in a traditional D&D party but you could still have one where they're skeptical of civilization yeah where they see civilization is making people soft making them unfit to survive in the world their goal is really to be like well you need to leave the city you need to return to the land you need to return to your roots and and that can be sort of a way to play off against that could also say that the Druids are there to keep the balance between civilization in the natural world they're there to negotiate with that town like hey don't mind if you take these trees here right but plant some new ones right rotate what you do and don't don't just poach nature for all of its resources right and so then the druid becomes someone who's there to lead communities in in making sure that the place that they live isn't harmful to the natural world and you can kind of have this sort of you drop this whole obviously in our own world there's a whole body of literature and inspiration for like sustainable living and things like that well what if your druids just an advocate for that in a medieval ish sort of setting and they're the ones going around village to village teaching on say crop rotation the importance of letting fields lie fallow to recharge their nutrients of saying like well this portion of the forest here is fit for you know felling trees and and harvesting the lumber there but when you're done we're also going to plant new trees there maintains the balance between these two things so that there isn't as much conflict so that there's not this sort of war between the natural world with all the Fae and the elementals and the intelligent beasts and everything else versus the civilized world to keep the peace between those things I kind of like that that's sort of where I I like them I think that's how the Emerald order is presented and Forgotten Realms is sort of maintaining that balance there but like you said there's others right there's fairies that druids seem to be somewhat connected to because of the fairies connection to the natural world right right that town next door pisses off a fairy Ryan starts taking children right so they got to hire the druid be like hey we don't know exactly what we did it's something you got to call a druid and the druid comes in and they reach out to the Fae community and and make the proper atonements and I like the druid as someone who navigates between these worlds and it's constantly on the move and it's just like well everyone knows in the winter the Druids in the city but then in the springtime the druid travels between the villages using that little byways and footpaths and hunting trails that exist there and in between each one he's also visiting the different faerie read courts and and power centers of power and at the same time as making sure that the elemental spirits that inhabit the world are kept at peace kept at rest right and that they're not raging or or you know angered by something well you know you haven't druid who who spends their time partially in the Fae wild and partially in the prime material as an ambassador of the material world into the fairy fairy realm or you have a druids you have druids who make annual pilgrimages to different different inner plains of the elements to make sure that everything's fine is the water that's gonna that's flowing going to continue to be pure and drinkable and that's like a world where you do have a world that's like the animated by spirits of nature yes like that yeah what happens is that water spirit just starts pissing down streams it's gonna pollute everything or what happens when a group of people move in and start polluting that river and the spirit you know takes revenge and starts retaliating or just need somebody you know there's an episode of Avatar that's like that right has the factory that's polluting the river and other spirit can't help out the village and it's dying yeah and while Katara is not a druid certainly practices water magic right could be kind of drew it yeah I mean like it's a good at least a good example like Halla druid can interact and be the inner the go-between between nature and the people in your world right and you could do worse than selecting like a you know a druid to represent a bender from from The Last Airbender right like there's there's worse ways now whether or not there's space in the in the D&D design world for some sort of Monk druid combo you know I know there's the way the four elements for monk but you know you really like lean into it and the druid with depending on smell selection has a wide variety of elemental spells that they can call and now I can't stop thinking about a druid monk wild shaped and doing all their month things while in wild shape form right right anyway now it's a whole we'll save that for the monk show yeah oh my god you mentioned like what would it look like for them to be wild shaped into a crane practicing like crane style that just sort of leads me in general to think about like what is wild shape we know mechanically what it is they get the players get to go shopping in the monster manual for a beast that they want to turn into I really like the learning wild shaped form rules from zan thar's guide I'm sorry but you should have to study something you can't just like you know a brief description of what a whatever looks like right and yeah I'm gonna switch into that you're gonna looking like some kind of like mutant amalgamation maybe that works for wizards right like maybe wizards can read about an animal in a book and go visit one of the zoo somewhere and study it and look at it but a druid needs to go into the natural world this is gonna sound weird and corny but you don't know if you guys remember the Lion King when it first came out and was like oh all the animation and like all the Disney animators had to go to these zoos and watch the animals and spend time drawing them and spend time studying them how they move how they move and that's what I think that a druid has to do that a druid has to go and live amongst the animals has to be accepted by a pack of wolves has to run and hunt with that pack of wolves has to live with that pack of wolves and then they can become a wolf yeah a druid has to go hibernate with a bear they have to go and they have to do to it through either animal friendship and food and just animal handling and whatever it is that the DM wants to work out how it looks that's an adventure right like that it learning your wild shaped forms going in the natural world and seeing what they look like what does it look like when a cougar stalks its prey what does it look like when when an eagle swoops down from the sky to pluck a rabbit out of a field right and having to have to do that and have to spin that time there it is something I think Lynne's depth and complexity and and and something that's different to a game what that features our druid as opposed to just like oh well I'll look at this I can finally some wild shape into things that swim because if what have you been doing in the meantime that gives you that ability how often have you been going in the water and just like letting fish swim around you and nibble on you how long have you been watching those otters as they play and swim in the river those are the kinds of things that drew is can do on their downtime and then occasionally can be the centerpiece of a side quest or something like that oh yeah if they want to learn something a little bit more exotic yeah like I don't know dinosaurs dinosaurs are another one right like yeah if dinosaurs are natural beasts then then they qualify for wall shape obviously by the rules they qualify for a wild [ __ ] right no I'm not gonna let someone that lives up in the spine of the world suddenly turn into a dinosaur cuz they got wild shape they're gonna have to go find a dinosaur and study it you're gonna need you go ahead head south to chill right but once they do and once they study those dice then it's like yeah of course dinosaurs are fair game number one and to briefly discuss the rules for a minute they are also the only beasts that have higher CRS that are sort of worth a damn and so unless you want to go to DM skilled and pick up a rules expansion for higher-level beasts which if I was playing a drew and I certainly would then you're kind of limited to two dinosaurs for like two you know for CR six seven and eight monsters it's one of those things where I think it's perfectly within the deems rights to say yeah you have to study the animals you don't just gain infinite knowledge about all the animals as soon as you can wild shape you're gonna have to sort of study them and look at them but then it leads me to think of like what is turning into the beast but is there are there other ways to sort of think about wild shape other than I turn in this animal like maybe it's one of those things where it's like Game of Thrones right where you possess an animal and that's sort of what the wild ship represents right could be inconvenient for the players to have to like find the animal and possess it and then their body is sort of vulnerable at the time but if a player came to me I was like yeah I kind of want to be a warg I don't necessarily want a wild shape I want to like take over an animal with my mind then we could there's million different ways that you could work that out for the for the player definitely want to climb a tree first sure make sure you're off the ground and safe you just get your half o ger to strap you on its back yeah you pass out no I'm a nerd you're into three half ogre what if it's like instead of a physical form it's a spiritual form and when the druid turns into a t-rex or a giant ape or whatever it is it looks more like what's the guy's name from Teen Titans animal boy or whatever it is forget what his name well I was gonna bring up vixen from the CW show oh yeah yeah she's got that she got the amulet amulet and it's still her but then like an animal banner of like a gorilla yes whatever that's what I miss is the strength and the everything you know first off it's damn convenient because you're still a medium-sized creature but you have the stats of this animal that you're channeling what it really just looks like is yeah our druid goes crazy and they don't actually grow claws but their regular fingers are as powerful as claws mentions anethe ours they they have some interesting tables for for the backgrounds on little background info on druids yes let's go through that because I think it offers some interesting role-playing possibilities the three tables that are their treasured item guiding aspect and mentor each of them kind of they do offer something and they what I love about these tables for like all the classes is that these are things that are player oriented you're gonna you're gonna choose or roll on one of these tables or use them to inspire you for something that's not in one of the six entries and then like now you've given the dungeon master something to play with you've introduced an element of your class or your background that's like oh the dungeon master can take advantage of this more information you're giving them the more game Abul information you're giving them well I mean that's working for ya I mean you can write a page backstory but if you don't like offer in contact if it's just a list of things you did it's like yeah yeah yeah I heard of you yeah we've heard of yeah yeah so your folk hero right when I say gheymeh Balai Diaz Gama Belen firm ation game above points we're looking for things that the dungeon master can turn into NPCs that they can use that are related to your background they're looking for ways to build encounters off of what you've included or to find ways to poke at and antagonize your player in ways that will help them grow and help them overcome challenges and adversity so like the treasured item is sort of a keepsake with spiritual significance what if that's stolen what if I mean that's a great fodder for like a low-level adventure like oh yeah my Druids keepsake was stolen by imps or brownies or whatever it a green ones and now we've got to go get it back and if particularly if it's like something that the druid is normally connected with maybe it's an enemy trying to provoke a fight with the druid and they're saying like what we're gonna frame the fairies for for stealing this druids keepsake but it's actually you know another entity trying to spark beef with between the Druids and the fairies right through nature out of balance in their thro nature out of balance in that area through through minor misunderstandings and things like that guiding aspect is sort of a nature spirit that the druid embodies this is an area for you to take your druid and go like well what part of the natural world do I want this druid to be to symbolize do I want the raw power of a storm and and just the the lashing rain and the lightning and the wind or is it or as my druid an ocean druid and it's just like sometimes calm and serene and beautiful and at other times terrible and and mighty in their power do they embody them wild animals or something that's what like Shepherd drew it's great for their more like animal focused druids it's like what sort of animal does your desert ruin most embody that's what you can sort of learn from your guiding aspect and then finally with the the mentor this is the one I like the most because it offers the possibility of introducing like magical and monstrous creatures for your druid to have learned things from okay like what if in order to learn all of this water magic a druid has to study with a water elemental of some kind to spend time with the water weirds and the naren's and all the other stuff that that that commands and controls water in order to understand like ah yes this is how I do it obviously taking inspiration from last airbender with that yeah you got to learn from the badger-moles you gotta learn from the badger-moles and the Dragons and then the DM can create those things within their world they could say yeah here are the ways in which a druid reaches out to creatures in the natural world and learns from them and learns how to command the magic that comes to them naturally and it also creates points of conflict because someone might go oh wait a second your mentor was this thing what this thing that destroyed our village for the last three seasons right you know that your thing was a living bonfire that travels across the land and a giant tornado of fire and ash and yeah well it's am I gonna learn how to cast flame blade and it burns all of her fields right yeah you need to do that every no to do that every now and that's how you keep rotate the nutrients and thus the druid comes in and gets rid of a misunderstanding between nature and man absolutely absolutely what's some different ways to play it a kind of off type if you want to do a little bit different of a role-playing experience one of the things that I see crop up a lot and that we add in saber dice season one is the urban druid and you see that a lot it seems to be a fairly popular kind of take on the druid is a druid who doesn't see an urban environment as unnatural right but instead recognizes the ecology and the natural world that is a part of an urban environment and particularly when we're talking like medieval ish cities first if they're not nearly as big as we might have think they are they're fairly small in both terms of population and an actual area because they're still so closely tied with the natural world they're tied with farming communities that are sort of in their hinterland that provide them food they're not these sort of sterile urban environments like we might imagine they're ones where the natural world is very much still a part of the urban experience in a lot of Dungeons & Dragons world oh yes I mean as a great man once said life finds a way life will find a way not to mention the fact that there are those dark corners of the urban environment where the natural world still holds sway there's that abandoned house covered in kudzu vines that that slowly crumbling there's the pockets of ooze and and slimes and things and underneath the Wizards quarter and then need to be tended to so that they don't become possessed by the spirit of dweeb licks and and become a problem all the cast off from their experiments right ruin has to come along and clean it up shake his fist up at the Wizards yeah in the sewer he perhaps a druid is engaged in a magical breeding program to create the horse some kind of horse that's design that's perfectly designed for for war or farming or or transport and they're using magical means to sort of facilitate this the Druids there to just make sure that no one gets hurt and that the process itself isn't too you know isn't too ownerís on the animals thing about playing with the druid that first created the Centaur hmm there's a madman druid madman druid either it was on purpose or was after a long night of drinking he woke up it was like well [ __ ] but like quick-thinking building off of that right like what if you did have an order of druids who was opposed to civilization and and wanted to get back at them then why wouldn't they create a bunch of like monstrosity is inspired by the natural world two sinned against the against their enemies God do that in one of my short campaigns there was a whole part purpose rush it's a savage druid that was pissed off about them yeah taking all of his force away awakening a bunch of forest animals and organizing them into an army yeah yeah can you imagine what a bunch of forest animals that possessed human intelligence would do it'd be terrifying yeah there's a lot of um if there was a lot of them yeah it'd be bad many bad times for everybody so I think that I mean that's what obviously the sort of like the the newest unearths Arcana had the spores with circle of spores druid and that's necromancy focused druid I've been looking for something like this for a long time so I found it very fortuitous and curious yes that it curious but I really like the druid there I know some people are complaining about the poison damage and how poison damage usually resisted but I find it somatically very interesting a druid that doesn't see undeath as unnatural but is just kind of like there's life death and then there's undeath and the the bodies of the dead are still both useful and there's as long as they're not trying to turn everything else into an undead wasteland yeah there's nothing necessarily wrong with a little unlife as long as it's for a greater purpose right well all things in moderation all things in moderation of course I like the idea of a druid that goes around and likes a finds the corpse of an ant a half-eaten corpse of an animal in the woods and it's just like well I can make use of this this is not yet we're not done with this yet and animates this sort of like creature that's been like said half-eaten and gore covered and everything and now they're walking around with a pack of zombified animals you guys are gonna have to let animate dead do something more than just humanoids I'm sorry yeah what happened we'll see who's listening then those are kind of sort of the off-brand kind of druids that I can think of that the big one that I always want to try is just the nature wizard playing them like a wizard with a different spell list and a different abilities yeah but they go out in nature like with the purpose to learn and they categorize all the trees ah learn how to interact with it just by just sheer study and curiosity yeah I love that idea I'd probably take something like ritual caster to reinforce that thematic component to it so that they have both the wizard rituals but the druid the druid spell slots and spell lists and so like those are the kinds of things that I think like there's so many different ways to consider your druid yeah what they do what their relationship is with the world around them that I think just thinking about those things will begin to produce druids that move beyond the tree-hugging hippie types that that I think it's easy to start there but we don't want to finish there we wanted to expand our ideas sort of be online [Music] they smoke pipe they smoke pipe weed which I don't think talking meant as marijuana I think it's tobacco I think everybody else took it and ran with it because it was 70s and it sort of stuck well and there they say pipe weed they say pipe back they say weed yeah it means something different back then yeah yes it's pipe weed tobacco the oldest above a long barrel bottom from old Fozzy Longbottom leaf the whole scene of The Hobbit is that they all all the dwarfs again off sit around the fireplace blowing smoke rings at each other and Gandalf can make his look like different shapes with Prezi I just I just kind of see it more as like a hookah thing it's a little bit more than tobacco but not quite Mariana yeah but so there is a bit of an effect sure sure and there's a reason why people sit around and do it in groups as opposed to just you know yeah yeah so you know but you know they're not there just get [ __ ] up human now you'll funder buck he likes to get high no fun of Arts gonna have to see beyond he's got a CB on he got an audience his consciousness in any ways he can

Channel: Web DM

Views: 158,915

Rating: 4.9295111 out of 5

Keywords: Dungeons, Dragons, Role, Playing, Tabletop, Game, 5th, Edition, 5e, Web, DM, WebDM, D&D, DND, Druid, Classes, Roleplaying Tips, how to RP, Dungeons & Dragons, wild shape, moon druid, how to rp a druid, 5e druid, 5e rp tips, d&d rp tips, d&d rpg gameplay, dungeons and dragons druid, dungeons and dragons druid guide, dnd druid, dnd druid circles, d&d druid circles, dungeons and dragons 5e druid guide, how to rp druid, druid rp tips

Id: UHBSqmWb7PQ

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SadPandaFace00]

I've been on a Web DM binge for the past like week and a half, I don't know what I'm gonns do when I finally run out of stuff to steal from them watch.

[u/[deleted]]

The thumbnails are always so corny, but 100% on point and hilariously memorable.

[u/LaserLlama]

Love these guys

[u/-Sparrow_]

Always love to see some new webdm content. Really enjoying these class RP videos.

Would love to see you guys talk about Villains at some point. Might even make for a good topic for the Patreon podcast. Just a thought.

[u/IndexObject]

If the party I'm about to play in didn't have three melee characters already, I was planning on playing a Monk/Druid. Kung fu animals.

[u/FeedMePizzaPlease]

Have these guys made episodes about Xanathar's Guide's new subclasses? I'd love to hear their analysis of them.

[u/Mrallen7509]

In our next campaign, I'm planning on playing a halfling druid, and I'm totally stealing the Force analogy for his magic. I think you could also tie in the Matrix philosophy a bit with wild shaping. If you understand that you, the tiger, and stone are all made of the same primeval power, changing the shape of that power becomes an intuitive thing.

[u/blueflyingbear]

You guys made me love the Fae with your Razel-sinn one shot!

[u/Ianoren]

Is this series going in order of popular demand or possibly the classes with more complex relationships like Clerics with Gods and Druids with Nature?