So a player in my ongoing campaign is playing a Druid and loves summoning beasts then using Animal Friendship and spells that allow him to communicate with bats, rats, and the like.
So just asking for individual DMs to share their unique takes on doing this to keep it interesting. And maybe players can share their experiences.
Also any relevant game mechanics and rules in this scenario are welcome.
And are they Disney talky animals or just like Pokemon who mainly use sounds and body language.
I communicate via regular speech, mostly for the sake of keeping things going forward, but I try to adjust to the knowledge of creatures.
While DM'ing my party found a cat in an abandoned house where the owner had been killed by zombies. The Ranger used Speak with Animals to interrogate the cat, and the cat didn't really understand what happened. It just called zombies the "Stinky Men", and decribed them as smelling "Wrong", and also explained to the player that they can sense that this implies a deep, unnatural instinctive distrust, but the spell at best interprets it as just the word "wrong".
They also spoke to a well-trained work horse and it basically spoke like, "Hello, Sir or Madam, how may I be of service to you?" just to help reinforce the idea that the horse has been trained to assist others without much question on its part.
I always try and keep in mind the animal’s intelligence and general life context. Creatures with a 2 int, to my mind, probably can’t count, they may know there’s a lot of goblins, or only a few, but not exactly how many. They won’t have a PC’s concept of distances. They will have little concept of time beyond it being light or dark, and when you couple that with not counting, they may know something passed by, but couldn’t explain if it was a day ago or a week ago. But I would allow them to retain lots of details about things that matter to them a lot, like a predator or a food source.
I also keep in mind the motivations of the creature. Speak with Animals just gives you the ability to talk to animals. It doesn't guarantee any will want to talk to you. Usually, they're willing to spare a moment, but won't go out of their way to help you unless you persuade them, and depending on the animal, might be more or less impatient or lazy.
Many animals do have languages. Every social animal does. The languages are not always purely verbal and are often specialized or limited, but exist. Bees, for example, communicate through dances.
Plus speak with animals covers the language issue and IIRC even boosts the creature's int a bit for communication purposes.
Mechanical language, not real life language. Rules question, rules answer.
Obviously animals can communicate with eachother, I wasn't trying to imply that, thus mentioning Disney talking animals in the same sentence.
So a player in my ongoing campaign is playing a Druid and loves summoning beasts then using Animal Friendship and spells that allow him to communicate with bats, rats, and the like.
So just asking for individual DMs to share their unique takes on doing this to keep it interesting. And maybe players can share their experiences.
Also any relevant game mechanics and rules in this scenario are welcome.
And are they Disney talky animals or just like Pokemon who mainly use sounds and body language.
Thanks!
Speak with animals explicitly enables “verbal communication,” so that seems pretty clear.
Animal friendship on its own doesn’t enable any such communication, so it’s down to the same body language that we have to interpret in real life.
Animals don't usually speak a language, so no Disney scenario without specific magic.
Conveniently, TCoE just added some optional rules/guidelines for interacting with various monsters by type:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/tcoe/dungeon-masters-tools#ParleyingwithMonsters
I communicate via regular speech, mostly for the sake of keeping things going forward, but I try to adjust to the knowledge of creatures.
While DM'ing my party found a cat in an abandoned house where the owner had been killed by zombies. The Ranger used Speak with Animals to interrogate the cat, and the cat didn't really understand what happened. It just called zombies the "Stinky Men", and decribed them as smelling "Wrong", and also explained to the player that they can sense that this implies a deep, unnatural instinctive distrust, but the spell at best interprets it as just the word "wrong".
They also spoke to a well-trained work horse and it basically spoke like, "Hello, Sir or Madam, how may I be of service to you?" just to help reinforce the idea that the horse has been trained to assist others without much question on its part.
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I always try and keep in mind the animal’s intelligence and general life context. Creatures with a 2 int, to my mind, probably can’t count, they may know there’s a lot of goblins, or only a few, but not exactly how many. They won’t have a PC’s concept of distances. They will have little concept of time beyond it being light or dark, and when you couple that with not counting, they may know something passed by, but couldn’t explain if it was a day ago or a week ago. But I would allow them to retain lots of details about things that matter to them a lot, like a predator or a food source.
I also keep in mind the motivations of the creature. Speak with Animals just gives you the ability to talk to animals. It doesn't guarantee any will want to talk to you. Usually, they're willing to spare a moment, but won't go out of their way to help you unless you persuade them, and depending on the animal, might be more or less impatient or lazy.
Mechanical language, not real life language. Rules question, rules answer.
Obviously animals can communicate with eachother, I wasn't trying to imply that, thus mentioning Disney talking animals in the same sentence.