Front-Line Druid #1 (Age of Worms)

The best way to make a badass melee-capable druid is to use the Shapeshifter variant (Player's Handbook II). Hence, that's what we're doing.

Alright, so we're going to start off by choosing a race for our druid. I've made my DM promise to kick me in the nuts if I try to make yet another human. Therefore, I have a choice to make. Obviously, I'll want to choose a race that's either naturally strong or naturally tough. If I stick to the races in the player's guide, that leaves me with only three options: the dwarf, the gnome, and the half-orc. Gnome gets discounted right away, due to their small size; smaller characters dish out less damage than their Medium counterparts, and I need to keep my character as a viable front-liner. It comes down to dwarf (+2 to Con) or half-orc (+2 to Str). I'm going to need all the extra hit points I can get, and so the choice is an easy one: the druid will be a dwarf.

Nest up, we'll need to purchase his ability scores. With the point buy system, every score starts at 8 by default, and we have 28 points to spend. The chart in the Dungeon Master's Guide has all the costs, so feel free to follow along as I build this character. Dwarves have (+2 to Con, -2 to Cha), so I need to take that into account as well. Let's see what we can come up with, shall we?

• Strength is important mainly because a druid's base attack bonus, while pretty good, is going to make some of the tougher enemies very hard to hit (mainly at higher levels). To some extent, the shapeshifting ability will help this attribute, so a 14 seems to be a good fit. Dexterity will be fairly important, as the shapeshifter forms have sub-par armor classes when compared to a fighter of the equivalent level. This will be at least a 14 as well, and possibly even higher.
• Now, we'll want a fairly high Constitution, partially to make up for the druid's slightly smaller hit die (d8 instead of d10, which only amounts to a paltry '1 hit point per level' difference), and partly because a front-liner can never have too many hit points. Let's set this to 14 for now, keeping in mind that the racial modifiers will give it a nice boost.
• Charisma is not useful for anything besides Wild Empathy, a class feature that I really don't care about. Therefore, this attribute can stay at 8 to save us some points. I know it'll get dropped to 6 when we figure in the racial modifiers, but that's okay.
• Intelligence ... is a tough call. I'd like to have as many skill points as possible, but I won't have enough points left over to raise it higher than 10. I definitely don't want to sacrifice anything form any of the other ability scores, though, so I'll just have to bite the bullet. Skills are nice, but not really the province of a warrior anyway. We'll let the other party members make up for my skill deficiency.
• Finally, while I'm not trying to make spellcasting the focus of this character, a Wisdom score that's high enough to allow casting of druid spells is still important. We'll put a 15 here for now.

Looks pretty good, right? If we total up the costs, we see that we've spent exactly 28 points: Strength 14 (6 points), Dexterity 14 (6 points), Constitution 14 (6 points), Intelligence 10 (2 points), Wisdom 15 (8 points), and Charisma 8 (0 points). The dwarf's ability modifiers set the final total to:

Strength 14
Dexterity 14
Constitution 16
Intelligence 10
Wisdom 15
Charisma 6

Looks decent to me, so I think we've got a winner. I'm still a little concerned about his Armor Class, but that'll have to wait for a different installment. We're done here, so you're free to go! Stay tuned, though!