So something I always find awkward is when my players communicate with animals, which is not infrequent. Typically the animals have animal INT, and my players will often ask complex questions. One of my players can 'speak with animals'--fine.
But animals don't talk, so more recently I've been like "you get a sense that it is afraid of something" rather than it saying "I'm afraid of the owlbear in the cave over there".
And even then, it seems awkward. I think it would make sense to understand basic emotions and to have a degree of empathy towards an animal such that you can tell when its feeling basic emotions, but a deer won't be like "go a mile that way, turn left at the glade and you'll find the goblin den".
I'm wondering how other DM's deal with this, because I find it so awkward.
I mean, even between themselves, animals don't convey much information--they seem to just inherently know complex pack tactics and to be genetically hardwired to do incredibly complex behavior. A wolf isn't going to be like "4 of us will circle round back and bite at its ankles!"
Speak with Animals means SPEAK with ANIMALs it's magic so yes it allows animals to talk using words. Because magic! Getting a sense of an animal's emotions requires nothing more than an Animal Handling check because ordinary people in the real world can do that just by reading the animal's body language - no magic required.
If your players are using magic they should be able to do things that are not normally possible. That's the whole reason it requires magic to do it.
-they seem to just inherently know complex pack tactics and to be genetically hardwired to do incredibly complex behavior.
That's no longer believed to be the case. Animals communicate with each other, they feel empathy for each other, and they learn from each other. Wolves aren't born knowing how to hunt, they learn how to hunt through play and watching their parents hunt. Mama and Papa wolf bring back injured prey in order to teach their pups how to hunt, same with cats and their kittens. Sure they don't use words to do it but they can read body language much better than most people can, in the past there were horses that could "do math" by picking up tiny changes in their owners posture when they had reached the correct answer. Research has shown that dogs are capable of basic logic, parrots can understand concepts such as size, colour, shape and answer questions related to it - e.g. give a trained parrot a blue cube and ask it what colour it is and the parrot will say blue. Crows can make tools, jays know when other jays are watching them stash food and will come back and move it later. Pigeons learn landmarks to navigate large distances. And Wasps can be taught to detect different illegal drugs and communicate that to humans by pressing different buttons/standing in different places.
Social animals naturally have the most complex communication systems. Prairie dogs and Meerkats have different calls for different threats, so if those keeping watch spot a hawk they make a different warning than if they see a cat/lion. Dolphins have names for each other. And Bees us their dance language to communicate distance and direction to sources of food so yes they can say: "5 miles SE there is a bunch of flowers" to each other. Wolf/dogs follow eye lines of each other / their owners to understand what their owner wants them to do, and can to trained to detect cancer or predict seizures based on smells from nearby humans.
Back to the topic at hand, the whole point of the Speak with Animals spell is that is translates these scent and body language signals into words that people can understand and translates human words into something the animal understands. It's completely reasonable for a deer to be able to say: "over that way is a large group of goblins" under Speak with Animals.
It still seems awkward. RAW it says they literally verbally communicate with animals, but I suppose to what extend does an animal communicate?
Regarding real life animals: Yes, they can empathize, communicate and learn from eachother. Not sure what you're talking about with wolves. A lone wolf will learn how to hunt without any other wolves around, and this whole "I'm proactively teaching my children" as though it is an intention of the animal to teach another, is just more projected anthropomorphism masquerading as explicit teaching, and its not. Animals learn passively from one another by simply observing. Humans explicitly teach, and virtually no other creature on earth does that. The rest of the commentary goes on an unrelated tangent, so no comment except that learning FROM others is an entirely different concept than being taught.
Anyway---so back to animals: I guess I'll start having them talk and just be really really dumb in most cases, it just seems really odd since a deer wouldn't communicate to another deer that there is a grizzly bear a few miles back near the pond, but with a human they would?
I have them talk. It’s magic; it just works. As for what they say, I try to keep it simple, a rabbit won’t know how far something is in feet or miles, but it might say, many hops. A bird might not be able to count how many bandits are in the camp, but it can say a lot of them, or not many. I usually have their concept of time be limited to the sun/moon cycle, and (with not counting) if something didn’t happen earlier that day, it happen a few or many suns ago (or moons).
And I also let the predator/prey dynamic matter. A deer will pay more attention to a wolf than it would pay to a rabbit, for example. And things outside their normal territorial range are completely unknown.
And, sometimes I’m willing to fudge things a little. If the PCs need help moving the story along, and they haven’t picked up on my clues, they might meet an unusually smart animal who happened to see the whole thing and can give them some plot exposition.
I just have them talk too, albeit in a very simple not particularly intelligent way. It's magic so it does what it says it does and trying to put that in some real world context feels like creating a hurdle you really don't need to
Anyway---so back to animals: I guess I'll start having them talk and just be really really dumb in most cases, it just seems really odd since a deer wouldn't communicate to another deer that there is a grizzly bear a few miles back near the pond, but with a human they would?
A deer would do so. Although they usually don't need to because all the deer can smell and hear the grizzly bear. The white tail of "white-tailed deer" exists entirely to communicate to other deer that there is a threat nearby. Meerkats and Prairie dogs call out to each other to verbally warn them of nearby predators and specify what type of predator it is. Birds also call out to each other to warn of nearby enemies. Sure they wouldn't say "1-mile away" because that requires a common definition of units of measurement which requires complex social structures & technology - if you have no yard stick to measure a yard describing anything in terms of units of "yards" is meaningless. It would be like going to any country that uses the metric system and saying "it's 1-mile away" - they will just stare at you blankly in confusion.
Animals communicate with each other all the time! A dog pees on a lamp-post to communicate with other dogs, bear scratch trees and rub themselves against trees to communicate with other bears, birds sing to each other all the time - every bird call you've ever heard is a deliberate form of communication - and they respond to each other too, if you're a good enough mimic you can communicate with them as well. Elk call, and rub against trees. Moose can be very loud when they are in the rut, but make lots of softer noises when communication between each other when close together as well. Just because it isn't words doesn't mean it isn't communication, and the whole point of the Speak with Animals spell is to translate it into words.
And lone wolves do not learn to hunt, it's a major major problem with Zoo-based conservation efforts. Endangered birds raised in captivity do not know how to hunt or migrate properly and usually die when released into the wild, unless the keepers spend time giving training them how to hunt, or releasing them with near wild birds already migrating. All social animals teach social skills and habits to each other, i.e. if you teach one set of monkeys that climbing a ladder triggers a bad thing to happen, then put a new monkey in with them, the other monkeys will teach the new monkey not to climb the ladder by punishing the monkey for going near it even if the new monkey never experiences the bad thing itself. Dogs, cats, and lots of other animals discipline their young with little nips to teach them to say near the den and or stay near their mother. Territorial animals are constantly teaching each other where one animal's territory starts and another's ends though scent marking, posture, and non-lethal violence.
Animals generally aren't capable of rewarding each other because they are incapable of carrying stuff around with them, so almost all teaching is done through punishment. But that doesn't make it not teaching. When your cat scratches the nose of your dog when the dog shoves its head at the cat when it is sleeping that is the cat teaching the dog not to bother it when it's sleeping. The cat could equally have run away and picked somewhere else to sleep but it didn't, it chose to defend its spot and communicate to the dog to leave it alone.
The difficulty is mostly with numbers and units, most animals can only distinguish: 1, 2, many. Some of the more intelligent ones like crows and dolphins can tell apart numbers up to ~4. Whereas humans can distinguish up to ~7, after that humans must count and/or do math to reach higher numbers which obviously requires a lot more complex technology, social systems and logical processing than animals have. Likewise humans have developed technology to measure stuff so we have cultures that define units that we can use to communicate specific quantities of stuff. Without that culture "one second" has no meaning, "one mile" has no meaning, etc... So animals can't really communicate specific quantities effectively, the "grizzly bear a few miles back near the pond" would be more like "Big bear nearby that way." while pointing using their eyes/head in the appropriate direction. It might have added to it "angry/scary" if the bear is hunting / aggressive, or "gentle/sleeping".
By appealing to literary history. I pick some trait that a human would ascribe to that animal, and then I speak in broadly human terms while trying to emphasize that characteristic. So a rat might begin with, "My cousin Sheila's second daughter says she saw the ogre the other night..." Or a fox might say, "I was trying to rob a chicken off the farmer when he said something about the wizard you're looking for." Aesop FTW.
I love the Speak With Animals spell! I love when my players cast it! It's so much fun. It gives me a chance to give an animal a personality, and a voice, and it gives a brief bit comedy to what might otherwise be a harrowing stage of the adventure.
As far as "how does the magic work?" - It's magic. Don't overthink it. Think of it like the Universal Translator from Star Trek. And remember - just because animals don't speak to us in languages we understand doesn't mean they don't know how to communicate complex ideas. A bee can communicate complex navigational information to an entire hive just by dancing. BY DANCING! Elephants have funerals for their dead. And don't get me started on octopodes! (Yes, I say octopodes, because "octopuses" just sounds creepy. Deal with it). And wolves are not genetically hardwired to use pack tactics. It's a skill that is taught and learned. We humans think spoken language is the only "official" form of actual language, but it's not. Animals can communicate enormous volumes to information amongst themselves through posture, and movement, and scent, and showing teeth, and changing colors, and eye contact, and by whatever rudimentary vocalizations their anatomy allows. Whales can communicate complex ideas to other whales across hundreds of miles - by singing!
Don't underestimate animals. Remember, we're animals too. We're just an animal that stacked all our points into a very narrow skill set, so we have largely forgotten all the other stuff that all the other animals still use very effectively.
But animals don't talk, so more recently I've been like "you get a sense that it is afraid of something" rather than it saying "I'm afraid of the owlbear in the cave over there".
I mean, even between themselves, animals don't convey much information--they seem to just inherently know complex pack tactics and to be genetically hardwired to do incredibly complex behavior. A wolf isn't going to be like "4 of us will circle round back and bite at its ankles!"
So how do you guys do it?
I agree no complex answers, but not as simple as your examples. Saying "I am afraid of a single big scary carnivore in the cave is fine." Maybe describing in detail the Owlbear and it's weapons and armor might be a bit much.
As for a wolf stating they will circle around and bite above the paws (implying reduce movement) is fine.
Animals probably have a bit more "intelligence" then early 20th and 19th century scientists gave them credit. I have a main stream reference book over 130 years old that scientifically explains how an orangutan is smarter than a person of color. That way of thinking that the superiority of Europeans are the smartest, never ceases to amaze a person today. When you start doing a historical dive you realize that the side effects killed 100 of thousands of Americans
"For the duration, you can comprehend and verbally communicate with Beasts, and you can use any of the Influence action’s skill options with them.Most Beasts have little to say about topics that don’t pertain to survival or companionship, but at minimum, a Beast can give you information about nearby locations and monsters, including whatever it has perceived within the past day."
You can comprehend and verbally communicate with the beasts. The spell even gives some ideas of the knowledge the beast might have access to including anything it has perceived in the last day.
Why does it work this way? MAGIC. It is one of the foundational elements of D&D.
Normally, these animals don't understand words. Normally, the spell caster would be incapable of understanding any sounds made, any body language, any other motion or activity by the creature. The spell allows them both to do so such that communication becomes possible.
The MAGIC of the spell makes them capable of communicating with each other. Since the spellcaster understands what the beast is saying through whatever means, I will usually role play the beast as if it was talking (keeping in mind that it isn't actually communicating in words but that the caster of the spell understands the meaning intended by the creature as if it was speaking).
So, when role playing, I just have the animal talk. Some animals will be brighter than others. Some more observant. Some would have more to say and others less but the spell allows for clear communication so I personally don't nerf it by just describing feelings or giving vague responses. The animal won't be giving a dissertation on quantum theory unless it turns out to be a polymorphed wizard - but within the scope of the spell, the animal will be able to clearly communicate with the spell caster.
Personally, I think BG3 did a good job of implementing Speak with Animals. There are a wide range of conversations that result from speaking with the animals - some with useful information and others with none. Playing BG3 without a Speak with Animals spell or potion misses some very amusing and interesting content. :)
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Greetings fellow nerds!
So something I always find awkward is when my players communicate with animals, which is not infrequent. Typically the animals have animal INT, and my players will often ask complex questions. One of my players can 'speak with animals'--fine.
But animals don't talk, so more recently I've been like "you get a sense that it is afraid of something" rather than it saying "I'm afraid of the owlbear in the cave over there".
And even then, it seems awkward. I think it would make sense to understand basic emotions and to have a degree of empathy towards an animal such that you can tell when its feeling basic emotions, but a deer won't be like "go a mile that way, turn left at the glade and you'll find the goblin den".
I'm wondering how other DM's deal with this, because I find it so awkward.
I mean, even between themselves, animals don't convey much information--they seem to just inherently know complex pack tactics and to be genetically hardwired to do incredibly complex behavior. A wolf isn't going to be like "4 of us will circle round back and bite at its ankles!"
So how do you guys do it?
Speak with Animals means SPEAK with ANIMALs it's magic so yes it allows animals to talk using words. Because magic! Getting a sense of an animal's emotions requires nothing more than an Animal Handling check because ordinary people in the real world can do that just by reading the animal's body language - no magic required.
If your players are using magic they should be able to do things that are not normally possible. That's the whole reason it requires magic to do it.
That's no longer believed to be the case. Animals communicate with each other, they feel empathy for each other, and they learn from each other. Wolves aren't born knowing how to hunt, they learn how to hunt through play and watching their parents hunt. Mama and Papa wolf bring back injured prey in order to teach their pups how to hunt, same with cats and their kittens. Sure they don't use words to do it but they can read body language much better than most people can, in the past there were horses that could "do math" by picking up tiny changes in their owners posture when they had reached the correct answer. Research has shown that dogs are capable of basic logic, parrots can understand concepts such as size, colour, shape and answer questions related to it - e.g. give a trained parrot a blue cube and ask it what colour it is and the parrot will say blue. Crows can make tools, jays know when other jays are watching them stash food and will come back and move it later. Pigeons learn landmarks to navigate large distances. And Wasps can be taught to detect different illegal drugs and communicate that to humans by pressing different buttons/standing in different places.
Social animals naturally have the most complex communication systems. Prairie dogs and Meerkats have different calls for different threats, so if those keeping watch spot a hawk they make a different warning than if they see a cat/lion. Dolphins have names for each other. And Bees us their dance language to communicate distance and direction to sources of food so yes they can say: "5 miles SE there is a bunch of flowers" to each other. Wolf/dogs follow eye lines of each other / their owners to understand what their owner wants them to do, and can to trained to detect cancer or predict seizures based on smells from nearby humans.
Back to the topic at hand, the whole point of the Speak with Animals spell is that is translates these scent and body language signals into words that people can understand and translates human words into something the animal understands. It's completely reasonable for a deer to be able to say: "over that way is a large group of goblins" under Speak with Animals.
It still seems awkward. RAW it says they literally verbally communicate with animals, but I suppose to what extend does an animal communicate?
Regarding real life animals:
Yes, they can empathize, communicate and learn from eachother. Not sure what you're talking about with wolves. A lone wolf will learn how to hunt without any other wolves around, and this whole "I'm proactively teaching my children" as though it is an intention of the animal to teach another, is just more projected anthropomorphism masquerading as explicit teaching, and its not. Animals learn passively from one another by simply observing. Humans explicitly teach, and virtually no other creature on earth does that. The rest of the commentary goes on an unrelated tangent, so no comment except that learning FROM others is an entirely different concept than being taught.
Anyway---so back to animals: I guess I'll start having them talk and just be really really dumb in most cases, it just seems really odd since a deer wouldn't communicate to another deer that there is a grizzly bear a few miles back near the pond, but with a human they would?
I have them talk. It’s magic; it just works.
As for what they say, I try to keep it simple, a rabbit won’t know how far something is in feet or miles, but it might say, many hops. A bird might not be able to count how many bandits are in the camp, but it can say a lot of them, or not many. I usually have their concept of time be limited to the sun/moon cycle, and (with not counting) if something didn’t happen earlier that day, it happen a few or many suns ago (or moons).
And I also let the predator/prey dynamic matter. A deer will pay more attention to a wolf than it would pay to a rabbit, for example. And things outside their normal territorial range are completely unknown.
And, sometimes I’m willing to fudge things a little. If the PCs need help moving the story along, and they haven’t picked up on my clues, they might meet an unusually smart animal who happened to see the whole thing and can give them some plot exposition.
I just have them talk too, albeit in a very simple not particularly intelligent way. It's magic so it does what it says it does and trying to put that in some real world context feels like creating a hurdle you really don't need to
A deer would do so. Although they usually don't need to because all the deer can smell and hear the grizzly bear. The white tail of "white-tailed deer" exists entirely to communicate to other deer that there is a threat nearby. Meerkats and Prairie dogs call out to each other to verbally warn them of nearby predators and specify what type of predator it is. Birds also call out to each other to warn of nearby enemies. Sure they wouldn't say "1-mile away" because that requires a common definition of units of measurement which requires complex social structures & technology - if you have no yard stick to measure a yard describing anything in terms of units of "yards" is meaningless. It would be like going to any country that uses the metric system and saying "it's 1-mile away" - they will just stare at you blankly in confusion.
Animals communicate with each other all the time! A dog pees on a lamp-post to communicate with other dogs, bear scratch trees and rub themselves against trees to communicate with other bears, birds sing to each other all the time - every bird call you've ever heard is a deliberate form of communication - and they respond to each other too, if you're a good enough mimic you can communicate with them as well. Elk call, and rub against trees. Moose can be very loud when they are in the rut, but make lots of softer noises when communication between each other when close together as well. Just because it isn't words doesn't mean it isn't communication, and the whole point of the Speak with Animals spell is to translate it into words.
And lone wolves do not learn to hunt, it's a major major problem with Zoo-based conservation efforts. Endangered birds raised in captivity do not know how to hunt or migrate properly and usually die when released into the wild, unless the keepers spend time giving training them how to hunt, or releasing them with near wild birds already migrating. All social animals teach social skills and habits to each other, i.e. if you teach one set of monkeys that climbing a ladder triggers a bad thing to happen, then put a new monkey in with them, the other monkeys will teach the new monkey not to climb the ladder by punishing the monkey for going near it even if the new monkey never experiences the bad thing itself. Dogs, cats, and lots of other animals discipline their young with little nips to teach them to say near the den and or stay near their mother. Territorial animals are constantly teaching each other where one animal's territory starts and another's ends though scent marking, posture, and non-lethal violence.
Animals generally aren't capable of rewarding each other because they are incapable of carrying stuff around with them, so almost all teaching is done through punishment. But that doesn't make it not teaching. When your cat scratches the nose of your dog when the dog shoves its head at the cat when it is sleeping that is the cat teaching the dog not to bother it when it's sleeping. The cat could equally have run away and picked somewhere else to sleep but it didn't, it chose to defend its spot and communicate to the dog to leave it alone.
The difficulty is mostly with numbers and units, most animals can only distinguish: 1, 2, many. Some of the more intelligent ones like crows and dolphins can tell apart numbers up to ~4. Whereas humans can distinguish up to ~7, after that humans must count and/or do math to reach higher numbers which obviously requires a lot more complex technology, social systems and logical processing than animals have. Likewise humans have developed technology to measure stuff so we have cultures that define units that we can use to communicate specific quantities of stuff. Without that culture "one second" has no meaning, "one mile" has no meaning, etc... So animals can't really communicate specific quantities effectively, the "grizzly bear a few miles back near the pond" would be more like "Big bear nearby that way." while pointing using their eyes/head in the appropriate direction. It might have added to it "angry/scary" if the bear is hunting / aggressive, or "gentle/sleeping".
By appealing to literary history. I pick some trait that a human would ascribe to that animal, and then I speak in broadly human terms while trying to emphasize that characteristic. So a rat might begin with, "My cousin Sheila's second daughter says she saw the ogre the other night..." Or a fox might say, "I was trying to rob a chicken off the farmer when he said something about the wizard you're looking for." Aesop FTW.
I love the Speak With Animals spell! I love when my players cast it! It's so much fun. It gives me a chance to give an animal a personality, and a voice, and it gives a brief bit comedy to what might otherwise be a harrowing stage of the adventure.
As far as "how does the magic work?" - It's magic. Don't overthink it. Think of it like the Universal Translator from Star Trek. And remember - just because animals don't speak to us in languages we understand doesn't mean they don't know how to communicate complex ideas. A bee can communicate complex navigational information to an entire hive just by dancing. BY DANCING! Elephants have funerals for their dead. And don't get me started on octopodes! (Yes, I say octopodes, because "octopuses" just sounds creepy. Deal with it). And wolves are not genetically hardwired to use pack tactics. It's a skill that is taught and learned. We humans think spoken language is the only "official" form of actual language, but it's not. Animals can communicate enormous volumes to information amongst themselves through posture, and movement, and scent, and showing teeth, and changing colors, and eye contact, and by whatever rudimentary vocalizations their anatomy allows. Whales can communicate complex ideas to other whales across hundreds of miles - by singing!
Don't underestimate animals. Remember, we're animals too. We're just an animal that stacked all our points into a very narrow skill set, so we have largely forgotten all the other stuff that all the other animals still use very effectively.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
I agree no complex answers, but not as simple as your examples. Saying "I am afraid of a single big scary carnivore in the cave is fine." Maybe describing in detail the Owlbear and it's weapons and armor might be a bit much.
As for a wolf stating they will circle around and bite above the paws (implying reduce movement) is fine.
Animals probably have a bit more "intelligence" then early 20th and 19th century scientists gave them credit. I have a main stream reference book over 130 years old that scientifically explains how an orangutan is smarter than a person of color. That way of thinking that the superiority of Europeans are the smartest, never ceases to amaze a person today. When you start doing a historical dive you realize that the side effects killed 100 of thousands of Americans
The Speak with Animals spell is very specific.
"For the duration, you can comprehend and verbally communicate with Beasts, and you can use any of the Influence action’s skill options with them.Most Beasts have little to say about topics that don’t pertain to survival or companionship, but at minimum, a Beast can give you information about nearby locations and monsters, including whatever it has perceived within the past day."
You can comprehend and verbally communicate with the beasts. The spell even gives some ideas of the knowledge the beast might have access to including anything it has perceived in the last day.
Why does it work this way? MAGIC. It is one of the foundational elements of D&D.
Normally, these animals don't understand words. Normally, the spell caster would be incapable of understanding any sounds made, any body language, any other motion or activity by the creature. The spell allows them both to do so such that communication becomes possible.
The MAGIC of the spell makes them capable of communicating with each other. Since the spellcaster understands what the beast is saying through whatever means, I will usually role play the beast as if it was talking (keeping in mind that it isn't actually communicating in words but that the caster of the spell understands the meaning intended by the creature as if it was speaking).
So, when role playing, I just have the animal talk. Some animals will be brighter than others. Some more observant. Some would have more to say and others less but the spell allows for clear communication so I personally don't nerf it by just describing feelings or giving vague responses. The animal won't be giving a dissertation on quantum theory unless it turns out to be a polymorphed wizard - but within the scope of the spell, the animal will be able to clearly communicate with the spell caster.
Personally, I think BG3 did a good job of implementing Speak with Animals. There are a wide range of conversations that result from speaking with the animals - some with useful information and others with none. Playing BG3 without a Speak with Animals spell or potion misses some very amusing and interesting content. :)