A player wanted to use Wild Shape as an unlimited supply of feathers for our ranger to make his own arrows with and it sparked a discussion on whether or not parts of a Druid that are removed from said Druid's Wild Shape persist after the Druid is no longer in Wild Shape.
I have been unable to find any rules that either allow or disallow this action. Whereas there are specific rules on what happens to gear the druid is wearing, I have found no statement on what happens to removed physical parts of the Wild Shape form.
I have thought of two reasonable solutions:
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Removed pieces of Wild Shape form persist indefinitely. This would make a Druid Indistinguishable from a normal creature until knocked out of druid form and would make the party assassin happy as he now has a reliable fresh supply of Giant venomous snake venom to apply to his daggers.
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Removed pieces of wild shape form persist until the Druid leaves Wild Shape. This would avoid the issues of unlimited resources, but raise other questions such as whether blood spilled by the Wild Shape also disappears or whether a creature that has "become poisoned for 1 hour" would stop being poisoned when the Druid is knocked out of that shape because the poison has dissipated with his Wild Shape.
Which (if either) of these lines up with the rules? Or does this fall under DM fiat?
Best Answer
First of all, it's not an unlimited resource; the Druid can only wild shape twice per short rest, limiting the amount of poison the Rogue can attempt to harvest and by RAW:
Unless the Druid can retain his form after dying, the Rogue won't be able to farm Druid snake venom. Furthermore, the DMG says that harvesting poison requires a check:
It goes on about how to add proficiency to it and what happens on a failure but the DMG at least says that harvesting parts from creatures is not an easy task (DC 20 is hard, after all)
The point I'm trying to make is that you should allow your players to do clever things but limit the powergamey-ness to a minimum level that doesn't completely break your game. How you do this is up to you, I personally find that, at my table, at least, that doing the "yes, but..." approach to GMing maximizes the fun. "Yes, but you have to make a check to see if you can get enough venom for a single dose (this is important, you can get the vial half full but that won't cut it!). The druid can help you by giving you Advantage on the check, but it's not automatic." Being flexible like this allows your PCs to at least attempt the thing they really wanna do, and fosters a fun game.
As for other possible attempts to exploit "infinite" things, allow and disallow at your own discretion. A good tip for this is to think about how overpowered it would be to allow it.
Take your infinite arrow feathers example, by pulling the feathers off the wild shaped druid (ouch!), he is able to save a whopping 1 GP (What a bargain!). Consequences may or may not exist, depending on the kind of game you're playing but I would personally rule that once the druid reverts, he finds that he lost some of his hair.