We'll get around to why my quote today was from Skeletor, I promise. If we're talking purely about community perception, Druid is likely the butt of a lot of jokes. I doubt they(or any other class) will ever topple Bard as the "lamest" class, but that's because Bard has a long history of people thinking it's foolish or silly to gameify the merits of music in a small group. Not to go off on a tangent, but I feel like if bardic music didn't exist and they were simply tricky masters of skill who had a few spells, I doubt we'd be getting joke characters like Elan through most of the beginning of Order of the Stick.
Druids were obviously inspired by real life, but unlike the other classes, they have a stronger identity and history. Rogues and Fighters are obviously archetypes, but Druids were a specific people with a clear place in history. However, at some point down the line they...got really lame. Druid or other "Nature Guy" concepts in media are sometimes Aragorn, but more often than not they're Perfuma. I fucking love this character, but look at her over there. Admit it: You've seen this woman at Coachella. Flowers in her hair, constantly talking about energy or other spiritual concepts like a weird hippy...She's even barefoot. The idea of this woman leading her people in a ritualistic human sacrifice is laughable.She could kill you, though, I want to be clear. She summons massive choking vines as her go-to attack and can crush a tank with little effort. So why(other than this being a children's show, of course) are characters like her so often like this, and why is the class fantasy of Druids often a mirror of this character type? Why don't druids ever seem to get anything really cool in modern source books? The reasons why and how to avoid it(if you want to) are what I'm talking about today.
Druids were an integral part of Celtic society, and we have writings about them from as early as 50 BCE. They were religious leaders, but also legal authorities, medical professionals, and political advisors. They were very strongly revered, and had a reputation as being powerful diviners. To hear the Romans tell it, they also engaged in ritualistic human sacrifice. That's sort of the problem with Druidic knowledge or lore: A lot of what we have was written by the Roman Empire, or later by Christian philosophers. You can imagine there's some possibility of both groups using the label to "Other" the Celts and declare them savage, barbaric, or lesser. Celtic cultures have had a massive problem with that even later in history.
Woof. So let's skip ahead, to the Celtic Revival, modern Druidry and the place we probably got more of our class fantasy, including the intrinsic tie to nature.
The twentieth century saw a revival of Celtic culture and languages, particularly because a lot of Ireland's history is straight up fucked. They've been victims of deliberate attempts at erasure from the English in older times, they and the Scots both were seen as savages, and it created a fractured view of history, particularly in Ireland. Styles of artwork and even languages were revived in the Nineteenth and Twentieth century as a response to this.
So was Druidism, a "new" religious movement that sprung out of the Celtic Revival glorifying ancient Celtic peoples. This religion, which technically has no continuity with ancient Druids, is where we get our association with nature and the idea that Druids are "alternates" to the classic religious figure, the Cleric. In fact, in 1e, it even was. It was an advanced class like Illusionist, Assassin, and Paladin. It was harder to get into, but was better than just being a cleric.
Listen, before we go any further, I want to say that the origins of Druidism are a Gordian Fucking Knot of information and disinformation, and I'm just doing the best I can. Keep that in mind and do your own wikipedia crawling for fuller information on this stuff. I just don't really have the space to fully explain everything.
Modern Druidism is where we get the idea that they're figures of nature. Ancient Celtic stories is where we find references to magical powers or shapeshifting. The Cleric class in 1e is where we get a lot more of our structure: It's where the idea of the Druid as a more physically capable figure than a wizard comes from, as well as a lot of what's behind its spellcasting abilities.
But half or more of the time I open a book looking for Cool Druid Shit I find lame-ass magic items that grant Tree Stride or new but wildly unhelpful spells. Depending on which edition your playing, shapeshifting is either badass(Pathfinder, 5e), gameified(4e) or useless(Every other edition). Their spell lists are often pretty great, with staples like Flame Blade and Reincarnation remaining cool and useful throughout the years. However, there's also Goodberry, or the ten thousand ways to manipulate and/or speak to plants. Wonderful. You know, Speak With Plant even says in the spell description that plants don't usually have anything useful to say.
The first problem we're going to discuss is Alignment. It's a simple, reductive system that was probably invented to facilitate and maintain epic fantasy tropes in gaming. I'm not a fan. There are plenty of things that are "All good" or "all bad" in most editions of Dungeons and Dragons, but to be a character option, generally something has to have a good, or at least neutral version. So our first problem is that Druidism has to be seen within a certain set of morals to remain viable to play.
Let's put the idea of human sacrifice aside and just look at British and Celtic folklore. You really should dive into this some time, it's fucking wild. Their(and most of the rest of the world's) folklore is 90% full of dangerous shit. There just aren't any mythical figures that are nice. There's shit like skinless demon horses that trick you and drown you, or little gnome guys who murder indiscriminately and dye their hats in the blood. There just isn't any "good" or helpful folklore to pull from here. Evil druids are NPCs by the nature of the alignment in many, many games, and there must be neutral and good druids. So what do they get?
And there's where the first break happens. There's less to draw from, so the writer has far less structure already in place. Realistically, he also has deadlines and other classes to worry about, so some very basic things are trotted out, like being protectors of balance or nature. Nature in most fantasy settings doesn't really need protected. I mean, really, the idea that there's dudes in the forest who will lecture you for trapping rabbits and cutting down trees is absurd in a classic fantasy setting. No city is going to be large enough to make an impact. It makes the Druids seem picky or self centered. For this to be a justified point of view would require a city on the level of Waterdeep...and even there, Forgotten Realms makes no mention of Druids being angry. Probably because it was built along the coast.
Protecting nature definitely comes from the Hippy movement and the surge of conservation awareness in the 90s. D&D 2e was published in 1989, and 3e was published in 2000. In fact, the Hippy movement is probably where Druids took a lot of damage. There must be "good" druids, and the Hippies were preaching peace, love, and happiness, therefore it's easy to present a Druid using all of the Hippy's positive and negative traits since they share a focus on the natural world. The problem being, of course, that by 2018 the Hippy stereotype has gotten tired and irritating. In a fantasy setting it's also woefully anachronistic and takes most people out of immersion. The idea of conservation itself has also gotten a bad or "lame" reputation, thanks to shows like Captain Planet or most of the conservation PSAs of the 90s.
We also see animals differently in the modern world. While people still routinely get torn apart, eaten, or dragged off even in modern times, I think the average person feels they have a superiority or even a mastery over the animal world. We hunt with rifles and go to zoos. Preferably not on the same day. We have a near infinite access to videos of animals being cute, goofy, stupid or dumb. They're less compelling or "cool" to be associated with. Someone in 1970 surely thought of a tiger as a powerful murder machine and master of his environment. Not to discount the raw killing power of the tiger, but I have also seen numerous pictures of tigers doing goofy house cat stuff like curling up in boxes. It damages the tone, somewhat.
Every class also needs magic items themed toward them. Things that bring the fantasy of the class to mind, that make you better, in some way, at the class's iconic "thing". Even Fighter and Barbarian have a couple outside of the universal ideas of magic armor and weapons. There are two problems here. One is that other classes are more universal and have taken larger "concepts" as their own. So, if you're looking at a stealth related item, it's rogue themed even though a druid might benefit pretty strongly. Spellcasting assistance items are frequently universal, but when they aren't, they're split between arcane and divine. Mostly for ease.
So what we're left with is items that are associated with a quite narrow set of things. Items for shapeshifting, items associated with plants, and items that just lazily cast Druid spells. Shapeshifting items are, depending on your system, necessary. They certainly were in 3.X. They also aren't very fun. They don't give you anything cool. Numbers can be fun, but they're not cool. Items associated with plants are few and far between, and even if they were awesome, you're just not always going to be dealing with trees and bushes. The third category I outright hate, even for non-druids. Barkskin and Tree Stride get shopped around so much that you can easily assume your game is going to include at least one item that lets you cast Tree Stride. It's not even a very useful spell. Anyway, it's not exciting to get one of these items as a Druid. It's just another spell...one you can already cast...and it's more restrictive than just getting an item that lets you memorize another spell, like Pearls of Power.
Let's briefly go over mundane equipment. It can make a character feel much closer to nature to have to craft his own equipment. While that scenario sounds like a lot of fun, you simply don't do a lot of it in PNP style games. It's in their nature. Some editions try to squeeze in the concept by supporting it with class abilities, but overall...you end up having magic equipment at some point, and taking away that equipment as the GM often isn't a good idea. The fantasy of self-made gear never stays for long. 5e is the clear winner here with its lower reliance on magic items, but Pathfinder can also be set up using alternate rules to facilitate this as well. It also has some neat craft and scavenge rules in Ultimate Wilderness. However, this means the whole party has to alter play(even slightly) to help patch an issue with Druid's tone, so it's not really a solution.
The core concepts Druids ended up associated with just aren't ever going to be seen as cool. That's the problem, and the same problem Bard faces. Sneaking around or assassinating people is always gonna be "cool". Being the raging Barbarian with the two handed sword slicing Orcs apart is always going to be awesome. Even Swashbucklers, with their snarky wit and quick swordplay are pretty fucking cool. But Musical Instruments and Plants just...don't cut it. Both classes suffer from being somewhat specific, but also from culture and media moving past them. Iconic characters of virtually every other class are omnipresent in media. Just like Inigo Montoya the Swashbuckler, it's not hard to find a favorite, awesomely stylistic representative of your favorite class. Except...Bard and Druid are a lot fewer. If you discount video games which obviously took inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons like the Warcraft series, there's even less. Pathfinder in particular honestly makes this even harder by introducing so many classes. In 3e or 5e D&D I could certainly make a case for Sam Vimes of Discworld being a Bard...but in Pathfinder? He's obviously an Investigator. The class is practically hand designed for him.
I think the fact that I couldn't come up with even one Druid example for that last bit is telling, too.
This is getting pretty long-winded and rambly, so I'll tell you what. Let's talk about how to improve your Druid's style and avoid stereotypes next week.
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