Hummingbirds make for bad spys as they are an hour away from starvation for large parts of their lives.
But it’s a magic shapeshifter hummingbird. Do they even need to eat?
Good question, how far do wild shape replicate biologic aspects?
Well, obviously it doesn’t mess with your brain otherwise if you turned into a cat you’d probably just spend the rest of the day sleeping and licking your butt.
Maybe you wouldn’t, but IMO that’s half the reason to be a cat.
You’re a fool if you don’t think Sirius Black spent most his time in Azkaban licking his balls.
There are stories of druids shifting to wild shape and living among nature for years, so I would assume they need to eat the same way their shifted shape would. It seems unlikely that they could be sustained from the magic of a single spell for that long.
I have always played and DM’d that wildshaped druids can take their normal meal times like the animal would. So if they’re crossing a plain the druid could reduce the need for supplies by being a horse and eating grass
In 3.5e one of the strongest builds I’d ever seen was a hummingbird wild shape air-domain caster druid with the natural spell feat (I believe that is what it was called). They’d fly around the battlefield in bird form which gave them such insane AC bonuses as to be basically unhittable, then they’d just cast Call Lightning and Ice Storm and destroy the enemies while remaining untouchable. It was honestly insanely OP
Hmm, interesting build. Did the player ever run into trouble with AoE saves? I feel like a Con save with no to-hit roll would be the Achilles heel there
I only played a one-shot with the guy; it was just a fun-run kind of game so I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of character, just the one day worth of OP-ness.
The cat leaps for me and I wild shape into a flea which means I’m going to hitch a ride to the kitchens on this mean s.o.b. and hopefully I’ve got time for a short rest because fuck trying to explore a castle with a
walkingjumping distance of 8 inches.A flea is too small for wild shape.
This is a miniature giant space flea.
How does conservation of mass work with wild shape? Is that hummingbird 180 pounds? If so, how does it fly?
There’s no conservation of mass. Magic turned them into a bird. Any energy missing from the system went into the magic.
D&D ain’t no Brandon Sanderson crunchy magic shit. It’s Tolkien “this shit happened cause I magically said so” shit
It goes into the magic and comes back when the spell is over. It’s giving magic an interest free loan. Why does it cost spell slots to use this again?
The are two possible answers, depending on the angle you wish to take:
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For the same reason it costs energy to lift something onto a shelf then lower it back down, despite energy being conserved in the lifting and lowering of the object and its final energy state being unchanged. You need to impart external energy to cause change within a system.
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It’s a game and some abilities need to cost resources for balance reasons.
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Balance.
