If you die as a Druid while polymorphed via wildshape (probably not polymorphed via other means), you should simply die outright, rather than reverting to your ordinary form. This is based on the idea that the regular polymorph “second health bar” in NetHack is a guard against randomly turning into a weak monster and having no other option than to die, but that doesn’t apply to Druids who chose to turn into something.

To compensate for this, Druids should be allowed to use wildshape without any limit or cooldown.

Polymorph should use the 3.7.0 system of tracking monsters you’ve seen, and only allow you to turn into monsters the hero has encountered rather than any monster the player knows about out-of-game. Possibly only for controlled polymorphs; uncontrolled polymorphs could still be able to turn you into a completely random monster you haven’t seen before (and presumably, turning into a random monster would inform you that it exists and allow you to turn into it on subsequent controlled polymorphs even if you never encountered one randomly).

For variants implementing a druid role with wildshape, this would follow the same rule.

The menu of druid shapechange options for #wildshape should be sorted by tiers rather than the game’s internal order of monsters.

Druids should be able to wildshape at will and for free while in their Quest branch, possibly only after Baba Yaga is dead.

Because wildshaping as a Druid is fun and many of its possible polyforms are situational, the cooldown for entering a new form should be short in most cases, but there should still be a penalty for using a form just as a source of bonus HP. Therefore, it should follow these rules:

• If your wildshape polyform times out and you return to natural form, there is no cooldown at all and you can immediately wildshape again.
• If you manually cancel your wildshape, there is a short cooldown on the order of a couple hundred turns.
• If you are killed in your wildshape, there is a long cooldown on the order of 1000 turns.

You might also be able to ignore the cooldown and force a shape change, at the cost of magic power and/or nutrition proportional to either the remaining cooldown amount or the strength of the form you want to take.

The Druid quest artifact should sharply reduce the cooldown timer for wildshape, or alternatively, make it easier to wildshape more often as you gain levels by adding extra “slots”, similar to how it works in most D&D editions.

If you have lycanthropy as a Druid, your shape-changing ability should be disabled. Or, alternatively, if your god is angry at you.

Druids should gain access to additional shapechange forms by some in-game process particular to the monster, rather than simply gaining the forms by leveling up. Potential options for these include:

• Taming the monster
• Eating the corpse of a monster
• Merely seeing the monster
• Any combination of the above