Speak with Animals is way more useful than Comprehend Languages because animals are everywhere so can tell you all kinds of stuff in all kinds of situations : could be witnesses of an attack, could have scouted out a enemy campsite, could know the safest route to get somewhere, plus you can use it to buff your animal handling checks
That depends a lot on how your DM interprets Speak with animals. A beast might tell you that you will find plenty of water if you follow the path of the great fireball, or that it is afraid of the great devouring beast that lives where the grass ends. He could tell you that he has seen many two-legs on his way here, or that none of his brothers have ever returned from beyond the twisted tree. It will hardly give you accurate information. It's not going to tell you "to the north is the den of thieves you're looking for." It's a very fun spell to role-play, but generally it's not going to be overly useful if you apply it with common sense.
I know there are people who interpret the beast as if it knew how to count, as if it knew how to distinguish a king from a beggar, or as if it could understand concepts that go beyond the understanding of a beast. But that really kills the whole immersion. The spell does not make the beast intelligent, it simply gives you the power to communicate with it. And normally a horse is not going to be able to communicate more than "scared", "cold", "hunger", and very very basic things. Being a spell, I allow the beast to communicate a little further, but never precisely.
In any case, however you play it, it depends a lot on how it is implemented, so it cannot be said that it is better than comprehended languages if you do not suspend common sense in your games.
If you like some of the mechanics, that's fine. The mechanics can go into other subclasses. I just find the core mechanical idea of the Hexblade (melee Warlock) to be redundant and the core flavor idea (I'm not even sure) to be very specific, incredibly confusing, and just not very interesting. I've seen far more reflavored Hexblades than ones that actually made a pact with a sentient weapon (or maybe they made a pact with the Raven Queen? Unclear).
My main problem with Hexblade is that it had absolutely nothing to do with using a blade; Hexblade's Curse is just as effective on eldritch blast so Hexblade also made for an easy blaster build, you just need to start close enough to apply the curse. A two-level Hexblade dip can net you Agonizing Blast + Hexblade's Curse on any character that wants some of the best ranged filth in the game, arguably the people dipping into Hexblade to boost melee on other characters were at least doing it for the right reasons.
Personally I don't think Pact of the Blade alone removes the need for a dedicated melee Warlock sub-class, but it would need to be quite different from Hexblade as it is now. Access to blur and shield is fine but not terribly exciting.
What it needs to do is actually lean into the whole "sentient weapons made of shadowstuff" thing; since sub-classes are at 3rd-level now they should get shadow blade as always prepared, and it should augment their pact weapon when cast (i.e- you're not summoning a new weapon, you're unlocking the full power of the one you already have), with further boosts at higher levels, like maybe Hexblade's Curse would come in later as a way to focus the weapon's anger on a specific target? Pact of the Blade wouldn't be a requirement of the sub-class but not taking it would raise serious questions about what you are trying to build.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Speak with Animals is way more useful than Comprehend Languages because animals are everywhere so can tell you all kinds of stuff in all kinds of situations : could be witnesses of an attack, could have scouted out a enemy campsite, could know the safest route to get somewhere, plus you can use it to buff your animal handling checks
I know there are people who interpret the beast as if it knew how to count, as if it knew how to distinguish a king from a beggar, or as if it could understand concepts that go beyond the understanding of a beast. But that really kills the whole immersion. The spell does not make the beast intelligent, it simply gives you the power to communicate with it. And normally a horse is not going to be able to communicate more than "scared", "cold", "hunger", and very very basic things. Being a spell, I allow the beast to communicate a little further, but never precisely.
This very much depends on your preconceptions of animal intelligence. Research has shown that at least some animals can recognize the faces of individual people (Ravens is the best known case, but also dolphins), they can certainly recognize the smells of individual creatures. Many domesticated animals can read the emotions of their owners and people around them (especially dogs but also horses). Lots of animals can navigate quite complex routes (e.g. any animal that migrates) and can remember specific information over long time periods (e.g. birds that store food like Shrikes and Jays). It even seems like some can plan ahead as there have been observations that Jays who store food while being watched by another jay will return later and move their stash. Most animals have particular locations they consider "home" and can navigate back to those locations even over relatively large distances - e.g. horses will often return home if they lose their riders. There is evidence that some bird species have different alert calls for different types of threats so clearly can recognize different types of animals in their environment.
So sure you won't have a sparrow tell you "the king came down the path 2 hours ago." but it is certainly plausible for the sparrow to tell you "two horses and a loud thing went down the gap in the trees when the sun was halfway up the sky." or for a pet cat to say "people were making loud angry noise at home so I came out here to hunt."
So sure you won't have a sparrow tell you "the king came down the path 2 hours ago." but it is certainly plausible for the sparrow to tell you "two horses and a loud thing went down the gap in the trees when the sun was halfway up the sky."
This example it's a bit of a stretch. Birds use the earth's magnetic field to guide themselves. I doubt that they understand the concept of "sky" or "sun", that they know how to count to two, etc... In this case I would allow, perhaps, the sparrow to say that some horses have passed through the hollow of the trees and that they were doing a lot noise (I don't think they can distinguish the horse from another creature that is riding on it either. I think they would understand it as a whole). And I would allow it because it's a spell, a fantastic setting, etc... In the real world, I don't think the sparrow would even have enough ability to understand what you're asking him (even if he understood the meaning of your sounds).
My university biology classes are very rusty. I completed my degree more than 15 years ago, and I have never worked as a biologist. But I do remember that in ethology class they insisted on not confusing the mechanisms that many animals have to understand and interact with their environment, with the cognitive mechanisms of human beings. A classic example is those people who scold their dog so that "it doesn't do it again." And they tell you: "Do you see how he knows that he has done wrong? He lowers his ears and makes eyes at me." The dog doesn't actually know that he has done something wrong. He feels hostility, because you are being aggressive. And he adopts a submissive posture to avoid conflict with you. But he doesn't understand that he has done it wrong, nor does he relate your anger to the cushion that he broke while playing, nor will he learn anything at all.
So sure you won't have a sparrow tell you "the king came down the path 2 hours ago." but it is certainly plausible for the sparrow to tell you "two horses and a loud thing went down the gap in the trees when the sun was halfway up the sky."
This example it's a bit of a stretch. Birds use the earth's magnetic field to guide themselves. I doubt that they understand the concept of "sky" or "sun", that they know how to count to two, etc...
There has been a ton of research on animal intelligence in 15 years! Birds use the sun, stars, and magnetic field to determine general direction, and use landmarks for following precise routes or locating precise locations. Many have been observed navigating using our roads as landmarks, and certainly birds of prey know to use roads, cliffs, and our paved surfaces to find updrafts to lift them up without using muscle power - I once went to a local narrow cliff (only ~400m long) that is specifically used by migrating birds of prey during migration season and over 2 hours a dozen of them passed over that ridge but no other migratory birds did. Lots of animals behave differently depending on the time of day which most of them sense based on light from the sun in combination with internal circadian rhythms. But can learn other cues as well - e.g. dogs learn when their owners come back from work based on the decay of scents and can use the same technique to determine the direction a creature they are tracking travelled. So a dog could absolutely tell you the direction and how long ago that a particular creature or type of creature travelled.
Many animals have a "number sense" (look it up on wikipedia) - it's often crucial for them determining whether to fight or not depending on whether they have numbers on their side - fish can tell the difference between 1,2, 3 and maybe 4, dogs can definitely tell the difference between 1,2,and 3 (and know that 1+1 =2), and birds can tell the difference between 1,2,3,4, and 5 things when trained to respond differently to them. While most can determine if one group is at least 2x bigger than another group.
In the real world, of course it is extremely difficult to get information from animals because we cannot talk to them as it's unclear whether any of them truly use syntactic language. But apes, and parrots can engage in rudimentary communication using ASL, symbolic buttons/token or vocalizing words, such as asking to be taken to specific locations or to be given specific things (and they know if they are taken to the wrong place or given the wrong thing), and answering simple questions like recognizing different objects, colours, or numbers up to 5. This is why we need the spell in D&D.
Social animals (those that live in groups at least some of the time) can certainly tell the difference between different individuals of their own kind and whether they are friend or rival. They can recognize different kinds of threats - e.g. birds respond differently to hawks than to cats than to horses - and different kinds of food - e.g. most predators have a small number of preferred prey species they will specifically seek out to hunt, as well as time of day, time of year, and recent (or soon to occur) weather.
Aside from being super off-topic, I think what's being missed in this discussion on speak with animals is that what an actual animal may or may not understand is entirely irrelevant; the spell is 100% an invitation to let the DM do whatever the hell they want, and have the animal convey whatever is needed in the moment (or just be an amusing diversion). It's a magic spell used in a magic world where animals may well be smarter than in our own, or the magic might temporarily make them smarter because the DM says so and it's 10d10 psychic damage to anyone who disagrees. 😉
In a one-shot I ran I had a puzzle chamber before a boss room (with a reduced threat lich who could be reasoned with). Puzzle basically entailed a sort of historical riddle and a set of statues, some of which had items that needed to be moved to the correct positions (from who had them originally, to who ended up with them later). But the twist was that two of the statues depicted the same person at different stages (once as a young princess, then again as horn-helmed knight). Since I knew this could become a hurdle if they didn't realise, or started moving things around at random, I had a couple of "safety" NPCs in the form of some bats, and a ghost who would eventually appear. Although the players didn't need it in the end, my plan was to have the bats describe how "the horned dead thing" wouldn't look at one of the "rocks" (the statue of herself as she was) which one of the bats would perch on to demonstrate. I have no idea what a bat is capable of, but that seemed a fair balance of useful and "they're just animals".
But you can go way more advanced with animal NPCs if you want to, or need to; one of my favourite things in Baldur's Gate 3 is how many opportunities there are to use speak with animals. For some it's just a line or two of dialogue/narration and that's that, but others can give you clues to things you might not otherwise find, some set off weird little unmarked side quests, another is a full blown conversation in which you can try to appease him about your intruding upon his territory, and one is a weird little merchant with some unique gear. And there are even stranger ones to find. First goal of D&D is to have fun, so just have fun with what NPCs do and say, that includes the animals.
Even if you want to try and be super realistic, it's reasonable to assume that if an animal can see or hear something, it can try and describe it via speak with animals; it might be limited to terms that make sense to it, and you may run into trouble roleplaying that, but you can also just describe what you want it to be conveying, or roll checks to see if there's too much of a conceptual barrier. By default you're probably not going to be able to debate philosophy with a stick insect, but that's usually not what players are after. If you want to know if a king passed by, ask about a tall thing with "shiny horns".
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
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That depends a lot on how your DM interprets Speak with animals. A beast might tell you that you will find plenty of water if you follow the path of the great fireball, or that it is afraid of the great devouring beast that lives where the grass ends. He could tell you that he has seen many two-legs on his way here, or that none of his brothers have ever returned from beyond the twisted tree. It will hardly give you accurate information. It's not going to tell you "to the north is the den of thieves you're looking for." It's a very fun spell to role-play, but generally it's not going to be overly useful if you apply it with common sense.
I know there are people who interpret the beast as if it knew how to count, as if it knew how to distinguish a king from a beggar, or as if it could understand concepts that go beyond the understanding of a beast. But that really kills the whole immersion. The spell does not make the beast intelligent, it simply gives you the power to communicate with it. And normally a horse is not going to be able to communicate more than "scared", "cold", "hunger", and very very basic things. Being a spell, I allow the beast to communicate a little further, but never precisely.
In any case, however you play it, it depends a lot on how it is implemented, so it cannot be said that it is better than comprehended languages if you do not suspend common sense in your games.
My main problem with Hexblade is that it had absolutely nothing to do with using a blade; Hexblade's Curse is just as effective on eldritch blast so Hexblade also made for an easy blaster build, you just need to start close enough to apply the curse. A two-level Hexblade dip can net you Agonizing Blast + Hexblade's Curse on any character that wants some of the best ranged filth in the game, arguably the people dipping into Hexblade to boost melee on other characters were at least doing it for the right reasons.
Personally I don't think Pact of the Blade alone removes the need for a dedicated melee Warlock sub-class, but it would need to be quite different from Hexblade as it is now. Access to blur and shield is fine but not terribly exciting.
What it needs to do is actually lean into the whole "sentient weapons made of shadowstuff" thing; since sub-classes are at 3rd-level now they should get shadow blade as always prepared, and it should augment their pact weapon when cast (i.e- you're not summoning a new weapon, you're unlocking the full power of the one you already have), with further boosts at higher levels, like maybe Hexblade's Curse would come in later as a way to focus the weapon's anger on a specific target? Pact of the Blade wouldn't be a requirement of the sub-class but not taking it would raise serious questions about what you are trying to build.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
This very much depends on your preconceptions of animal intelligence. Research has shown that at least some animals can recognize the faces of individual people (Ravens is the best known case, but also dolphins), they can certainly recognize the smells of individual creatures. Many domesticated animals can read the emotions of their owners and people around them (especially dogs but also horses). Lots of animals can navigate quite complex routes (e.g. any animal that migrates) and can remember specific information over long time periods (e.g. birds that store food like Shrikes and Jays). It even seems like some can plan ahead as there have been observations that Jays who store food while being watched by another jay will return later and move their stash. Most animals have particular locations they consider "home" and can navigate back to those locations even over relatively large distances - e.g. horses will often return home if they lose their riders. There is evidence that some bird species have different alert calls for different types of threats so clearly can recognize different types of animals in their environment.
So sure you won't have a sparrow tell you "the king came down the path 2 hours ago." but it is certainly plausible for the sparrow to tell you "two horses and a loud thing went down the gap in the trees when the sun was halfway up the sky." or for a pet cat to say "people were making loud angry noise at home so I came out here to hunt."
This example it's a bit of a stretch. Birds use the earth's magnetic field to guide themselves. I doubt that they understand the concept of "sky" or "sun", that they know how to count to two, etc... In this case I would allow, perhaps, the sparrow to say that some horses have passed through the hollow of the trees and that they were doing a lot noise (I don't think they can distinguish the horse from another creature that is riding on it either. I think they would understand it as a whole). And I would allow it because it's a spell, a fantastic setting, etc... In the real world, I don't think the sparrow would even have enough ability to understand what you're asking him (even if he understood the meaning of your sounds).
My university biology classes are very rusty. I completed my degree more than 15 years ago, and I have never worked as a biologist. But I do remember that in ethology class they insisted on not confusing the mechanisms that many animals have to understand and interact with their environment, with the cognitive mechanisms of human beings. A classic example is those people who scold their dog so that "it doesn't do it again." And they tell you: "Do you see how he knows that he has done wrong? He lowers his ears and makes eyes at me." The dog doesn't actually know that he has done something wrong. He feels hostility, because you are being aggressive. And he adopts a submissive posture to avoid conflict with you. But he doesn't understand that he has done it wrong, nor does he relate your anger to the cushion that he broke while playing, nor will he learn anything at all.
There has been a ton of research on animal intelligence in 15 years! Birds use the sun, stars, and magnetic field to determine general direction, and use landmarks for following precise routes or locating precise locations. Many have been observed navigating using our roads as landmarks, and certainly birds of prey know to use roads, cliffs, and our paved surfaces to find updrafts to lift them up without using muscle power - I once went to a local narrow cliff (only ~400m long) that is specifically used by migrating birds of prey during migration season and over 2 hours a dozen of them passed over that ridge but no other migratory birds did. Lots of animals behave differently depending on the time of day which most of them sense based on light from the sun in combination with internal circadian rhythms. But can learn other cues as well - e.g. dogs learn when their owners come back from work based on the decay of scents and can use the same technique to determine the direction a creature they are tracking travelled. So a dog could absolutely tell you the direction and how long ago that a particular creature or type of creature travelled.
Many animals have a "number sense" (look it up on wikipedia) - it's often crucial for them determining whether to fight or not depending on whether they have numbers on their side - fish can tell the difference between 1,2, 3 and maybe 4, dogs can definitely tell the difference between 1,2,and 3 (and know that 1+1 =2), and birds can tell the difference between 1,2,3,4, and 5 things when trained to respond differently to them. While most can determine if one group is at least 2x bigger than another group.
In the real world, of course it is extremely difficult to get information from animals because we cannot talk to them as it's unclear whether any of them truly use syntactic language. But apes, and parrots can engage in rudimentary communication using ASL, symbolic buttons/token or vocalizing words, such as asking to be taken to specific locations or to be given specific things (and they know if they are taken to the wrong place or given the wrong thing), and answering simple questions like recognizing different objects, colours, or numbers up to 5. This is why we need the spell in D&D.
Social animals (those that live in groups at least some of the time) can certainly tell the difference between different individuals of their own kind and whether they are friend or rival. They can recognize different kinds of threats - e.g. birds respond differently to hawks than to cats than to horses - and different kinds of food - e.g. most predators have a small number of preferred prey species they will specifically seek out to hunt, as well as time of day, time of year, and recent (or soon to occur) weather.
Aside from being super off-topic, I think what's being missed in this discussion on speak with animals is that what an actual animal may or may not understand is entirely irrelevant; the spell is 100% an invitation to let the DM do whatever the hell they want, and have the animal convey whatever is needed in the moment (or just be an amusing diversion). It's a magic spell used in a magic world where animals may well be smarter than in our own, or the magic might temporarily make them smarter because the DM says so and it's 10d10 psychic damage to anyone who disagrees. 😉
In a one-shot I ran I had a puzzle chamber before a boss room (with a reduced threat lich who could be reasoned with). Puzzle basically entailed a sort of historical riddle and a set of statues, some of which had items that needed to be moved to the correct positions (from who had them originally, to who ended up with them later). But the twist was that two of the statues depicted the same person at different stages (once as a young princess, then again as horn-helmed knight). Since I knew this could become a hurdle if they didn't realise, or started moving things around at random, I had a couple of "safety" NPCs in the form of some bats, and a ghost who would eventually appear. Although the players didn't need it in the end, my plan was to have the bats describe how "the horned dead thing" wouldn't look at one of the "rocks" (the statue of herself as she was) which one of the bats would perch on to demonstrate. I have no idea what a bat is capable of, but that seemed a fair balance of useful and "they're just animals".
But you can go way more advanced with animal NPCs if you want to, or need to; one of my favourite things in Baldur's Gate 3 is how many opportunities there are to use speak with animals. For some it's just a line or two of dialogue/narration and that's that, but others can give you clues to things you might not otherwise find, some set off weird little unmarked side quests, another is a full blown conversation in which you can try to appease him about your intruding upon his territory, and one is a weird little merchant with some unique gear. And there are even stranger ones to find. First goal of D&D is to have fun, so just have fun with what NPCs do and say, that includes the animals.
Even if you want to try and be super realistic, it's reasonable to assume that if an animal can see or hear something, it can try and describe it via speak with animals; it might be limited to terms that make sense to it, and you may run into trouble roleplaying that, but you can also just describe what you want it to be conveying, or roll checks to see if there's too much of a conceptual barrier. By default you're probably not going to be able to debate philosophy with a stick insect, but that's usually not what players are after. If you want to know if a king passed by, ask about a tall thing with "shiny horns".
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.