Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 3275

On October 29 2014 07:11 TheYango wrote:

The Polymorph rules historically have always been ridiculously open-ended and generally results in the entire Polymorph line subsuming the function of many spells of similar level because picking an appropriate form essentially makes the individual spell redundant (e.g. you don't need an armor spell when you can just change into a form that gives you armor, you don't need spells like Fly or Spider Climb when Polymorph spells let you pick a form that innately has those abilities, etc.). Pathfinder identified this as one of the major problems of the core spells in D&D and made an effort to severely limit the options available for each level of Polymorph, but WotC didn't carry this over into 5E.

Personally, I've tended to restrict players to being only able to select forms that are plausible based on their character's knowledge of monsters/animals. It's not just a superficial disguise spell--it's physically changing you into the monster in question because you gain extraordinary abilities, so the character has to have a reasonable level of knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the monster in question, as represented by either an in-character encounter with the monster at some point, or through sufficiently high Knowledge skill.