Druids should get intrinsic polymorph control when they are at XL 30.

Zapping a wand of polymorph at Master skill gives you control over the form the target monsters polymorph into, whether that is yourself or others. Other monsters still get their chance to resist the polymorph entirely.

It would not give you control over what an object would polymorph into, for obvious reasons.

However, if there are monsters that can use the wand of polymorph at master skill, this has the potential to become very annoying very fast, since they would be able to turn the player into a sessile monster, make them break their armor, or turn themselves into something very threatening and out of depth.

When you perform a controlled polymorph, you are only able to turn into monsters which have HD equal to or lower than your level. If you are using a mask, or if you are polymorphing randomly, it treats you as being 10 levels higher than your actual one.

Lycanthropic and vampire shapeshifting polymorphs are exempt from this restriction.

Controlled polymorph does not ask you what you want to turn into. Instead, it picks a random monster and asks you whether you want to turn into that, and you can only say yes or no.

If you have polymorph control, you can control what any item dipped into a potion of polymorph will become, respecting existing polymorph restrictions (i.e. not controlling the number of charges something will get, and incrementing the recharge count). This allows it to act basically like limited wishing, but it may be okay given the rarity of polymorph potions.

Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.
• You should keep the intrinsics from a polyform after you no longer have that form, but only temporarily, so they time out eventually.

Controlled polymorph does not allow you to become whichever polyable monster in the game you want. Instead, you are presented with a menu of several different random polyable monsters to choose one of.

Having multiple sources of polymorph control reduces the chance of the controlled polymorph reverting you to your original form by 80% for each source. Thus, wearing one ring of polymorph control produces a 20% chance (as it does currently), and wearing two rings produces a 4% chance.

With polymorph control, you can only polymorph into creatures that you have seen before in the game. You can still opt to not choose something to turn into, which could still give you a random form.