Dungeon Fantasy Companion 3: The Speculation Thread

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

I wouldn't mind "at their best when those things are involved", but druids in the DFRPG take it to the point of "so focused as to be borderline irrelevant when they aren't". A Holy Warrior is still a capable fighter when there aren't demons to smite; a Scout is still a deadly archer when there's no wilderness to be an Outdoorsman in; even a Bard can find plenty of uses for his mind-control outside of town. The Druid's spell and ability list, by contrast, seem almost intentionally designed to be useless indoors.

Create Animal is fantastic even indoors. A handful of black bears or grizzly cubs all-out attacking or grappling may not last long, but they're great at attracting monster attention. Swarms of bats or rats are good too. Beast Seeker can get you access to better animals such as karkadanns, chimpanzees, elephants, and mammoths, as long as they exist in the game world.

The combination of Create Animal and Rider Within should not be underestimated in a world where invisible jellies lurk in dungeons just waiting for an unsuspecting fighter to walk into them.

Frostbite, Lightning and Spark Storm are all decent attack spells anywhere. Windstorm does a good job of protecting PCs from stuff like Horde Pygmy blowguns to the face or eyes, and can be usefully stacked with other penalties like Darkness or Pollen Cloud or bad footing or grappling or injury shock or Move and Attack penalties to deny many enemies even the ability to hit random hit locations or the torso.

Resist Lightning is useful both against friendly fire (see: Spark Storm) and several nasty monsters. Ditto Resist Cold.

Not having many animals around when you go in the dungeon is less of an issue if you used Beast Seeker, Beast Summoning, and/or Beast Link to set things up before you went in the dungeon. Works even on giant or dire animals--there's absolutely nothing wrong with being able to summon (via Beast Link) an Acid Spider, Slugbeast, Slorn or Electric Jelly in your hour of need, especially if you have the right advantages to control them when they get there (or at least hide from them or run from them).

And of course there's good old Shape Earth (pit-digging, wall-moving), Seek Earth (a.k.a. Locate Gold), Entombment, and Earthquake.

Druids are not as versatile as wizards but are still far from useless indoors.