D&D 5E: Druid Shape Shift and FoundryVTT

My games seem to always include at least one player as a Druid, who inevitably love their Wild Shape ability.  As we are now playing on FoundryVTT, understanding how wild shape can be made to work in this VTT is essential. 

The rules for this ability are available on DnDBeyond, Wild Shape, I'll save some bits and not reiterate them here.  There are also multiple guides out there on how to use wild shape, I'll link to one on D&DBeyond here: Druid 101: Wild Shape Guide.  

The challenge I am looking at is how I want to make the ability operate in my games.  That's what I will be diving into in this post. 

I've started my dive by looking for existing guides, modules of macros.  I soon learned that FoundryVTT has some useful portion of this ability implemented in the base code.  The trick is to learn how to use it, and also to prune out cruft imported from my campaign's earlier life on Roll20.

12/5/21 Update -- Oh, That Was Easy

Sometime in the not-too-distant past, the DnD5E implementation on FoundryVTT was taught how to play nice with transformations such as wild shape.  Generally, it's pretty obvious with just one step that utterly fooled me.  

Here are the key steps for the GM:

1. Create actors (NPC are fine) for the shapes that will be assumed.
2. Give players at least observer (I need to verify this) access to the actors that can be shifted into.
3. Relax.

Here are the key steps for the Player to transform:

1. Open your character sheet.
2. Drag the actor whose shape will be assumed from the Actors Directory (Right Sidebar)
3. Drop the actor on your open character sheet
4. Deal with the huge pop up that appears
1. Ignore the many irrelevant choices above the horizontal line
2. Check the Transform All Linked Tokens box.
3. Click the Wild Shape button
5. Observe your newly baked character sheet and close it
6. Use your transformed token normally.

An example is inserted below.

To end the transformation:

1. Open your character sheet
2. Click the Restore Transformation choice on the sheet's top bar. 

Additional Notes

The transformation mixes the characteristics of the druid and the new shape per the rule book, taking the higher of skills, saves, adding the attacks of the new form and hiding spells, and so forth. 

I don't know what it does with a high-level druid who can cast from animal form.  That's something I'll deal with it ever becomes a problem in my game (not an issue in Curse of Strahd ending well below that level).

The remainder of this post is obsolete. I'll leave it here, in case it has any historical relevance (or someone is running ancient Foundry Code, like 6 months old.

Mister Weaver's Video

Mr. Weaver posted a very relevant video on April 12, 2021.  It's a bit stale in Foundry's frantic development work, but it seems the most on-point from what I have found.  I'll follow the link to the vid with my notes taken while watching it. 

1. (0:20) Wildshape as described requires the D&D 5E Rule System. ✓
2. (0:30) Wildshape is integrated into the 5E rule system. Just drag a creature from the Actor's Director (right sidebar), drop it on the Druid's character sheet, and click the wildshape button.
3. (1:00) Wildshape feature allows transform without digging into the side bar.
4. (1:25) Click Restore Transformation, from the top bar of the character sheet to shift back from the creature form to base, humanoid form. 
5. (1:39) Allow Polymorphing must be checked in System Settings for DnD5E
6. (1:50) Midi-QoL is needed.  These settings need to be on: (1) Add macro to call on use, (2) Auto apply item effects to targets.
7. (2:03) Players must be allowed to Create New Actors and Create New Tokens in the Permission Configurations. Players also need control over any actors that they will wildshape into (not clear what permission setting that actually maps to).
8. (2:20) Need two macros added. Both are available from DnD5e-WildShape.  They need to be added as script macros.
9. (3:25) Add macro to the Wildshape from SRD. Action type utility and On Use Macro should be pointed to the newly created wildshape macro.
10. The macros name a folder that must contain all of the shape shift forms allowed.  It's beasts in the example.
11. (4:08) Sometimes the temporary polymorphed creature sticks around and needs to be manually deleted from the beasts folder.

Doesn't look too bad.  I'll take a shot at implementing it.  

Implementing Mister Weaver's Approach

Well, I snagged the macros.  Installed them, applied some polish, and then discovered that they last worked for Foundry 0.7.9 (current version is 0.8.9) and now spit errors all over the place.  While they look way impressive, they need serious help, or I need a different approach.