Druids: Promoting and Maintaining Balance

[Keeper of the White Wyrm]

Okay, I'll confess, despite my love of druids, they've been to me the most reactive elements in efu. Whenever a necromancer comes up. DRUID GANK SQUAD

Mechanist? DRUID GANK SQUAD

Worshippers of the unnatural? DRUID GANK SQUAD

The question I pose here is this: how does one maintain and promote the balance without theoretically killing other players?

(I guess you could as fertilizer, but still...)

[Valo56]

Druids are like paladins.. They can redeem evil (or in this case, convince people to stop disrupting the balance) or they can smite evil (or in this case, DRUID GANK SQUAD).

My suggestion is to offer alternatives to whatever the 'disruptor' is doing.

[meow-mix]

Guided nature hikes FTW.
 
Uh...helping small time farmers?
 
Bringing surplus food and hides after you have to put down an entire herd of buffalo/mistlocke deer because of a grass blight that has put a heavy tax on the food chain.
 
Ummm...driving off road bandits, because you are tired of angry mobs coming trampling through the forest in search for them.
 
Brewing AWESOME nature-magic infused malt-liquors that, while you are smart enough not to drink them, make excellent bartering chips with the local village's brewery.

[Arch Rogue]

IMO, and it can vary greatly depending on the druid in question of course, generally druids -should- do whatever it takes to restore Balance, even if that involves killing those that threaten it. Of course, while a NE militant druid of Talos may just slaughter a group who has threatened his grove or Circle of brothers, a NG druid of (I don't really know any good nature deities, but whatever suits <_<) would probably attempt to persuade them to discontinue, then if they didn't subdue them violently, and only resort to killing if they -still- kept threatening the Balance.

[Portal Rat]

You could also go with the LN druid, a sort of feral bureaucrat who concerns himself not only with the Balance, but with the specific way in which the Balance is respected. This would be the type of druid who brokers agreements with the villagers, sees that hunters do not exceed their quotas, etc. There are all kinds of opportunities there for conflict that are not necessarily violent.

[Decimate_The_Weak]

Well, druids are supposed to maintain the balance between good & evil, as well as law & chaos.

So, technically, being "neutral" in some sense, they shouldn't interfere with everything going on in villages.

If there's a big villain in the city, and isn't terrorizing the forests or nature itself, they would likely let the good-aligned people of the city handle it first, and only intervene when one force gets too big or they start terrorizing nature.

[Egon the Monkey]

Well, druids don't all have to agree. You could decide that deer are overpopulated so hunting should be encouraged for a time to cull their numbers, rather than the usual 'HUNTER ARE BAD' response. For example, come up with some arbitrary definition of when animals or  plants are  "in season" so you can punish the hunters that go out of the  way to  provoke conflict, not chase everyone trying to get meat. That  could even win you allies in the form of PCs who want to see alchemy  plants or deer for meat and skins still around tomorrow. Remember even  druids skin animals to make clothes. Or you could protect predators or spread disease to see more deer die that way. Contagion on animals, anyone?

You could try and minimise the impact of Mistlocke or Sis Liman on the wilderness, and put yourself in conflict with the more sabotaging sort of druids because you know that the city will simply push back harder and encourage each other to do more damage.  You could aid farmers in order to stop people trampling about foraging, while punishing PCs who raze crops as a form of warfare. Hell, you could make herbal drugs and try and get the town too high to bother the wilderness! :D

You could mug people doing unnatural stuff and take away all their tools rather than kill them, force them to learn to live without it. You could even hand them into civilisation to deal with as a token of friendship/subtle threat "Hey look, we caught your crook, we hate that stuff too you know, but don't mess with us".  You could try and divert ganksquad formation by forming a group that distances itself from the crush druids and uses diplomacy and teaching herbalism etc to convince townsfolk to do things your way (you do get Persuade on a Druid). "If you respect the wilds, you'll benefit from them". Again, that can get towns PCs sticking up for you rather than "Bah, savages!/Bah, defilers!" Try and splinter the wilds a bit so that the response to conflict isn't "everyone and their wolf hunts down the offender", only the group that has the rivalry. Try and think up your own Aberdenn/Caermyn rivalry using totems/tribes with different agendas.

As for reactive, druids are more free to go and kill a clear enemy of their faction than other PCs. They don't care about the law or city politics, so that's not in the way. The sort of PCs taken out by a druid ganksquad are often well on the way to someone else flattening them, but the druids get there first because they're creeping all over the place buffed up, and have that opportunity. If you're playing a necromancer or an aberration cultist, you pretty much sign on the dotted line "I am right in the sights for PCs that oppose this" as a condition of going for the potential cool power.

[Caster13]

Well, druids don't all have to agree. You could decide that deer are overpopulated so hunting should be encouraged to cull their numbers, rather than the usual 'HUNTER ARE BAD' response.

The problem is that there is nothing within the gameworld that can indicate/simulate the nuances of the eco-system in a clear, concise, dynamic, and streamlined way short of a dedicated "nature DM" who'll post daily updates and continuously change the creature spawning patterns.

Druid 1: we should hunt the deer! There's too many of them!
Druid 2: what're you talking about a bunch of adventurer's just slaughtered 20+ deer yesterday
Druid 2: yeah, well, the deer came back real quick.

[Egon the Monkey]

You can make it up! Enough druids arbitrarily decide that things are being over-hunted even when you're waist-deep in spawns of them. Without a DM changing the spawns, PC can't do any damage to the 'ecosystem' either. Use your Incredible Druidic Knowledge to decide what's 'being invasive' or is 'open season' once a fortnight, and woe betide any hunter who targets the wrong stuff. If anyone calls you on it there's no IC mechanism for them to know any better, so all they're doing is raining on your parade for not doing things their way. You can always handwave stuff as "mist-fueled migrations" of creatures into areas where they've no natural predators, or whatever.

[Caster13]

I forgot to point out that "making it up" was the conclusion I was going for xD

I agree with you, making it up is pretty much the only thing you can do.

But, to me, that just sort of feels... dishonest(?) to change the "state" or "rules" of the game. It's like suddenly deciding that handballs aren't penalized anymore because a player's just making things up.

[404]

If you really can't come up with any good or creative and justified excuse to not kill somebody, that is the only time you should ever proceed to kill.

[Egon the Monkey]

It's more like deciding that penalty shootouts are a good idea because they make for more exciting TV than hours of extra time doing the same thing, if we're going to stretch this football analogy until it snaps. PCs make up visions and portents all the time to drive plots, this is the same sort of idea.

[Kinslayer988]

Myself being a druid and seeing the other druids around, we all have different ways to protecting the balance. Some might be politically, some might be threatening death, and others just want peace. Either way, the hunted/disruptor of balance should take the wilders into prospective. And for those who say:
"Druids just kill people who threaten balance bla bla bla" Are very wrong.
The Wilders give soooo many extra chances to characters, if they actually listen to our threats or take them into consideration they would not end up dead.
 
We full death most of the time because people are arrogant and do not listen to us. In the past there have been situations where its KoS on certain people like Qadima/Kreil, Mannichus, Stygians, Order, etc for their continuance against the natural world.

[Underbard]

I think Egon nailed it with having hunting "seasons".  Any druid worth his salt would know that some animals need harvested.  Leave it up to the player as when harvesting should stop.
  One druid might walk past and not blink and the next one would beat you down for over harvesting

[HaveLuteWillTravel]

To be honest, if you want to play a more militant druid you should consider stating the rules in some manner, so that characters who are also concerned with the same sorts of things can either choose to adhere, or not as they wish. I think a problem sometimes occurs when characters who are actually also nature oriented to an extent get beat up for something they don't see as wrong, but the druid does.

Making it up is fine, but setting the rules will likely help avoid situations where characters aren't on the same page as to what's acceptable ways to hunt in general, and what's not.

A lot of characters do this, you see their warnings posted on the forums all the time.