GM Question - 5e Druids

Hey team. I'm newish to GM'ing, and this is the first platform I've tried it on and I LOVE it. Except for the Druid in my party. Some background, I create everything in roll20, throw it up on a big screen on a player account, my players come to my house with dice and books, and then I GM with a laptop on the other side of the room. Now on to my dilemma. I feel that every turn in combat, the druid does something that requires a ton of work. Shapeshifting, summoning woodland creatures, bears, eagles, ect. Everyone else's characters work really well with roll20, but not this one. Now I have made most of their spells and abilities into easy macros (if they choose not to roll themselves,) and this works well because it cuts the time down on "oh uhh how many dice...uhh I cast... wait... No ...uhh" Now the druid is level 7 and it just kills the pace of the game because he expects this program to have all of his nature nonsense ready at a click of a button. The player will also have nothing prepared because of these expectations. He will have no idea what the stats are of the creatue he is turning into, no idea on the stats of the 8 woodland fey he summons, no idea on any of his spells dot dot dot. Enough complaining, does anyone have any tools or references that could help with this headache? I Have the 5e rules installed, but none of the creatures that he summons/polymorph into are in it. I'm savvy enough to install API scripts manually if anyone has one for this purpose. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I might just kill him off if I can't make this easier because it is skewing the fun to work ratio in the wrong way. Thank you for time, Stoph

One possibility is creating a game, and (after promoting them to GM) task your druid with filling out Character Sheets for each and every creature they want to shapeshift into or summon in advance. Then, Transmogrify those Characters into your game when needed.

Druids can only change into creatures they've seen, so for the druid in my game, I drafted up a list of the creatures he had seen and would be likely to change into.  I made sure there were suitable creatures of various sizes and uses and we agreed those would be the only ones he could use during the game without giving me a week's notice to setup additionals.  For each of those creatures, I created an NPC sheet that I can use as encounters, then made a duplicate with his name in parenthesis and him assigned to control them.  I put all his in a folder with his character.  When he changes shape, he drags out what he wants to change into and then I move his regular character to the gm layer or just delete it. In the cases where he needs to change into something we don't have setup already, we either use one of the existing ones temporarily, or I just give him a raw token of the right type and handle it the old-fashioned way.

That's also a great option, @Silvyre! If they have a plus subscription, they could also create them in their own game and use the Character Vault to bring them over.

Thank you both for your responses!  I'm going to try Silvyre's approach after this weeks session and just be honest with him.  I have to tell him he is making not fun for me, so I'm going to focus on growing our campaign, and he can focus on preparing his character. I imagine that it will end up me doing it through Aaron's approach though, so thank you for giving me two options!

I use NPC character sheets for my druid's wildshapes. The shaped sheet has a companion script that allows for Monster Import or you can limit to what is available in the compendium. You can drag from the compendium and then alter the mental stats to same as the druid's. Give the player control and edit rights for the sheet. I haven't had to deal with summoned woodland creatures but I would try the same process as for wildshape. It only needs to be set up once for each wildshape/summoned creature. Just make sure each summoned creatures' token's HP are not linked to the sheet.

Ah, good point on the non-referencing HP.  I need to fix that for my druid's sheet.  I had set them up as represents like a character, but it makes far more sense to do it separately as they come out at full HP each time!  Thanks!

Doug E, great idea. I never knew about that tool. I'll check it out tonight when I'm not 'working.'

One thing I haven't tried but might work is setting up the druid's token from roll table for the different wildshapes. This way, the druid's initiative on the turn tracker doesn't get lost or need to be input doubled if one token form is on GM layer and the other on the object layer. But I need to play around with that to verify. Our workaround is just for the player to move his other shape token away on the map and use the present shape token in the battle.

Have you ever considered using the 5E-Shaped Companion API? It has functions to import monsters from a statblock. 

Saevar L. "Liquid-Sonic" said: Have you ever considered using the 5E-Shaped Companion API? It has functions to import monsters from a statblock.  Yes.  None of the woodland creatures he is summoning are on there, specificaly the pixie, which he summons 8 of, and these pixies all have polymorph, which he uses to polymorph willing creatures into monsters that also are not in the Shaped Companion.  If you are referring to another API script that isn't on that list, I will check that out.  I know I could go through the MM and just plug and chug a ton to cover these scenarios, but even at this point I'm thinking of canceling this week because it stresses me out.  I'm very moved by the responses though, thank you for your input!