Having recently started a Dungeon World campaign with one of the players' characters a Druid, I've run into an interesting game mechanics situation. The druid shapeshifts often. This is usually done because she believes one of her forms will be beneficial, only to discover minutes later that it isn't as helpful as she'd hoped and she needs to either be in her human form or a different animal form.
This has had two interesting ramifications:
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She rolls dice far more often, and thus gets 6- far more often leading to more experience. It has happened often enough that I've started telling her to simply not mark experience for some of those failures.
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It isn't clear how long shapeshifting takes, or should take. We've settled that it requires some measure of concentration and maybe at least 10 seconds, making it less of an option in a close combat situation. However, she has just leveled up and chosen the Shed advanced move which states:
When you take damage while shapeshifted you may choose to revert to your natural form to negate the damage.
If she is constantly shapeshifting, she will by far be the most useful character in any combat setting and rolling even more often as she has additional incentive to be shapeshifted. What is a Dungeon-World appropriate fiction to establish to restrict these two problems?
Best Answer
Based on the comments, the problem is 100% not how quick the Druid's shapeshifting is, it's that you haven't been making GM moves on 6−.
Restricting the move is not at all the answer. The GM doesn't have that authority in the first place, and more importantly, the Shapeshifter move needs GM moves on its misses in order for it to function correctly. If you haven't been making GM moves on a miss, the move is going to be completely unhinged.
Don't change anything else yet — fix the lack of GM moves first, and see how the move is supposed to work. You'll notice that it's still quite powerful, but so are the downsides when things go wrong. Play at least a session with the rules as written before attempting to hack it to fix a problem that the move only has because of the lack of misses.
As an important tip: on a 6−, the GM always makes a move, regardless of what the player move says. (And the player always gets to mark XP — that is another thing that isn't under the GM's authority.)
But since we're here… how long does it take the Druid to shapeshift?
Like many unwritten things about Dungeon World characters, the easiest way to find out is to ask the expert: the Druid herself!
This is a pair of GM Principles in action: Ask questions and use the answers and Be a fan of the characters. The Druid is the expert here, and that's great — let her player tell you how the Druid works, when Dungeon World doesn't already say. Then build on her contribution to fill her life with adventure, later, by using those answers for good and ill. No matter how awesome-seeming a player's answer about their character's abilities is, there are ways it can be good and bad, and the GM can build on it to make the PC and game more interesting in the future.
There's also a sneak peek at a possible future GM move (Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment) at the end there. The nice thing about Dungeon World is that, because you have full permission to make things go beautifully, entertainingly wrong on a miss, you can relax and let yourself let a move go beautifully, entertainingly right when it's a hit. Dungeon World characters are powerful, and the game wants to see them use it to change the world. It's normal and okay for the PCs to enjoy huge successes without the GM tempering them, because sooner or later something will inevitably go wrong too.
My own experience asking my Druid questions about how her class works can be illustrated with a brief tale: