Danger & Doggos
You’d think Team Bounty Hunter would have tried speak with animals before now. After nearly a year of barking and growling at Bad Cat, I know I’d have turned to the resident animal lover for an explanation. I can only suppose that it’s yet another example of Inquisitor’s frankly abysmal detective work in action.
Any dang way, we must wait until Friday’s comic to discover whether Ranger took ranks in pantomime. That leaves us with a full work week to ponder the real topic of today’s comic: roleplaying dogs and trees.
Between the aforementioned speak with animals and the similarly-named speak with plants, GMs are often told to take on the role of some less-than-intelligent characters. There’s a lot of leeway in phrases like “a plant’s sense of its surroundings is limited” and “a beast is limited by its Intelligence.” Sure we can ask questions and get answers. But are our non-humanoid conversational partners suddenly acquiring names and human-like personalities, like Patches here? Or are they limited to vague feelings and simple, animalistic desires?
“This kill is my kill! Do not come closer! I will bite!
Or do we go full Octodad with these shenanigans? “The tree sways with the wind, almost as if to say, ‘It was a band of of 17 gnolls on riding geckos. One of them had a red bandana and was missing half an ear?”
The comedy approach is also an option. If there are any Glass Cannon Podcast fans out there, you might recall a particular obnoxious falsetto used for insect spies. (If you hate your eardrums, you can get a taste around 47:00 here.)
All of this leads us inevitably towards our discussion of the day! When you’re taking on the role of a puppy, plant, or bug, how do you hold a conversation? Sound off with your own interpretation down in the comments!
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It probably helps that the magic is meant to translate what the plant or animal is putting out so the one casting the spell can pick it up. And both Patches and Ranger know who Antipaladin, Magus and Demon Queen are, so there’s that.
Never fear, brave pup! Ranger has been known to speak once in canon and once non-canon… and she can still write!
When speaking for the plants and animals, I like to go from common ground.
A dog, cat, horse or monkey could know who you’re looking for from acquaintance and have a clear mental image of them, even if they don’t all know their name. ‘That one’ could translate from a combo of height, scent etc. into “Yes, I saw him”!
Bugs and plants have less common ground.
A tree can’t see anyone – but is aware of vibrations and the passing of days. ‘Eight pulses passed by me very quickly five warm times ago and took off some of my low leaves’ could translate as ‘eight horses passed me five days ago and went roughly south’.
A bug’s perspective is very limited due to its size and minuscule brain. But if you’re looking for robbers lying in ambush and ask a local mosquito swarm ‘Where’s the blood, other than mine?’ or if you want to break in somewhere secure and ask the local anthill ‘Where do you go to raid the big stompers’ food?’, you’ll get a very clear ‘Here’.
You can rely on the magic to translate, but need to be willing to communicate.
> Never fear, brave pup! Ranger has been known to speak once in canon and once non-canon… and she can still write!
For those citizens of Handbook-World who’ve followed the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy, this is more than conjecture. Ranger has been keeping a very-secret-diary, thus indicating that she *can* read and write.
But whether she can bring herself to do on command in a time-sensitive situation….
> A bug’s perspective is very limited due to its size and minuscule brain.
So give me the play-by-play. If you asked a mosquito swarm where a hiding goblin was lying in ambush, what would they say? Gimme the transcript!
> thus indicating that she *can* read and write.
Ranger didn’t WANT to learn to read or write (how was that going to help her hunt?), but her wolf parents were very insistent that they were not raising an illiterate pup. And thus, Ranger became the first member of her pack to attend college. (Clown college, but still.) She became president of the Alpha Omega sorority as well.
> So give me the play-by-play. If you asked a mosquito swarm where a hiding goblin was lying in ambush, what would they say? Gimme the transcript!
Q: “Where is warm blood-source =/= me?”
A: *chorus* “Here – here – here.”
Mosquitos swarm over Goblin’s hiding-place, still chorusing “here – here – here”.
Goblin:
Sort of like the “mine. mine.” seagulls from Nemo.
Once in a Pathfinder Society module, we were at the docks and needed to find information about a ship that had visited. The gnome wanted to first try Speak with Animal to gather information without tipping anyone off. The module didn’t take that option into account, but the GM adapted the section about what if we tried a regular gather information (diplomacy) check.
Which is how we ended up getting our information from a cat with a golden earring and an eyepatch.
So in that case it worked just like talking to a human, which we played for humour. We could do that since it didn’t really matter in the module how we got the information. If it was a more critical investigation phase or a less rigid adventure I assume there would have been a limit to what we could have learned. Cats don’t read ship names, obviously, and don’t care enough to give accurate description, but they take note of ships arriving and leaving as temporary hunting grounds. The might even be able to give an indication of size. What I can’t say is how long they remember stuff. Normally memory is tied to Int, and with a score of 1 or 2 you’d expect them to forget the moment is cases to be relevant. But animals are known to remember people (scents?) for years.
I think as a GM you should definitely keep an animal/plant’s perspective in mind when using Speak with XXX spells, but not play them as too stupid. If it’s the same as talking to people it doesn’t feel magical, and if they never say anything useful your players won’t bother.
> The module didn’t take that option into account, but the GM adapted the section about what if we tried a regular gather information (diplomacy) check.
As a module writer, it is absolutely miserable trying to outguess a bunch of players that you’ll never meet. Good on the GM for adapting in the context of Society. It ain’t easy to do given the constraints of “run this thing as written.”
> a cat with a golden earring and an eyepatch.
So the character was anthropomorphized somewhat, but its actual words were the slightly confused “there was a new hunting ground that appeared two weeks ago” type description of a ship?
It’s been a while, but I think we just played it for laughs that it was obviously intended to be a human NPC. That’s sounds like how I would do Speak with Animal, though.
I haven’t used or seen talk with plants but animals yes. One of the guys I played with used to GM talk woth animals as animals resorting to like baby speech or smarter ones sounding like village idiot or one track mind. As for personal use, leaning heavily into stereotypes and childrens stories with talking animals, wolves being hungry and on the look out for easy prey, bears wanting you to F off, giant squid looking for snacks and wondering why is there a big floating whale that breaks apart and has very little tasty eating.
The baby speech thing is so hard. I feel like that’s the most logical way to play it, but I always feel slightly guilty when I don’t give my players a fully-developed personality.
This version from Tolkien always sticks in my memory:
“A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped
several minutes and sniffed.
“‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange
doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out
of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty
queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any
more about it.”
My take is that a spell like that gives you the ability to instinctively understand what the animal is saying in human terms — so you you get words, not just emotions. But it has to be simple — not just because the animal isn’t very intelligent, but because of the limitations of human senses… e.g. a dog can tell you about a threat, but it can’t tell you that the threat is a bear, because you can’t comprehend what a bear smells like to the dog.
Plus, as I mentioned in a recent conversation along these lines, it’s also about what’s important to the animal. If you ask a mouse about dangerous creatures in the neighbourhood, it’s going to tell you about the local owl, because that’s dangerous to mice. And it won’t tell you about the werewolf pack, because they don’t prey on something as small as a mouse.
The idea isn’t to cheat the players, of course, making the spell useless or giving them false information. It’s the flavour thing I’ve talked about before… the emphasis that they’re not talking to humans, they’re talking to animals, with animal thoughts and priorities.
Is there a bit of a logic puzzle at play as well? By that I mean players having to figure out what the mice mean by “many flying predators,” and how to properly convey the idea of “dragon” vs “owl” to a mouse?
I’m not much into putting logic puzzles in games personally — as a software guy, I spend too much of my day on that kind of thing — but yeah, you could take that approach. Could be entertaining, trying to get a character (or better yet, player) doing dragon impersonations to a mouse.
As a a side note – this is why I almost always have the minor-illusion cantrip if I’m playing a caster. Perhaps not so effective with low-intelligence animals (who might mistake it for the real thing)… but it can be an effective way of cutting through communications difficulties. I usually favour Star Wars-style holograms, projecting a ghostly image in the palm of my hand. “Have you seen these droids?”
I wonder if there’s been a cultural change in terms of illusion spells since the old days of D&D? With the advent of smart phones, everyone has more resources and references at their disposal for describing smart maps and holograms and info vis.
Surely Ranger can utilize her until now unseen powers of eloquent literacy (learned at her formerly unburnt foster home) to transcribe and write down the crisis at hand.
Unless she slept through those lessons and relied on her canine upbringing.
Like I said a little further up the thread:
For those citizens of Handbook-World who’ve followed the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy, this is more than conjecture. Ranger has been keeping a very-secret-diary, thus indicating that she *can* read and write.
But whether she can bring herself to do so on command in a time-sensitive situation….
I am reminded of the time Troy from the Glass Cannon podcast butchered the ‘Insect Spies’ spell by giving the talking animal(s) in question a completely abhorrent, annoying and incomprehensible voice.
I agree. That’s why I linked that ep in today’s rant. 😛
Ah yes, as we like to call it every time it comes up in our games: Bird CSI. Need to figure out what happened? Ask some birds.
lol. I played with some first-timers over the summer. The druid got into a 15 minute solo conversation with a pigeon while trying to solve a missing person case. It was pretty special.
I had a party member who could speak with bats just… all the time. This came up rarely, because the party was not nocturnal, but once, they found some bats who lived up at the top of a big old orc castle called Bigwall Keep. It took them a while to really get on the same page, because a bat’s priorities are very different, but eventually…
“oohhh, you mean the Pooping Place! Yeah, they have some great bugs over there!”
They did eventually get some actually helpful information out of the bats, like side entrances, but that was most of the important part of the conversation. Needless to say, that was one of my favorite sessions to DM.
The bats example reminded me that this is something PCs have to contend with as well:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/pest-control
I’m reminded of the time the Season 2 Critical Role crew turned into bats for a recon mission and wound up getting distracted by bugs. Lots of Int checks to stay on mission.
“When you’re taking on the role of a puppy, plant, or bug, how do you hold a conversation?”
Like so many of my comments here… it depends.
It depends on the genre if it’s silly or serious, if the magic is communicative or investigative, if it’s a Deity filling the plant or animal with with Divinely inspired intellectus or just “magic” letting the caster understand the intent behind the animal’s noises and communicate intent back to them.
> Like so many of my comments here… it depends.
That is indeed the question. But I think there’s an implied, “How do you like to run it in *your* game?” attached to these discussions. “It depends” is certainly the correct answer. But the point of the exercise is to articulate/defend the choices you make in your specific circumstances rather than in general.
This came up the most the time I ran a warlock with beast speech (reflavored as a constant, innate ability to talk to animals). In that case it was a very fairytale-inspired character; the warlock was a cat who had wished to be human. So the animals pretty much talked like people, just with slightly skewed perspectives.
The highlight of the ability was exploring her thoughts on killing and eating prisoners; “all the prey I’ve ever caught has begged in vain for its life, why should this be any different?”
I’m reminded of my favorite small god from Exalted.
In one of my lunar games, a player decided she wanted a cat form. In that system you’ve got to ritually stalk, hunt, and consume the forms you acquire. So this lunar went hunting for a fat orange cat only to find that he was El Gato Grande, the small god of all house cats. After the big bear lunar spat him out the party learned that other cats became temporarily sentient and gained the power of speech in El Gato Grande’s presence. He didn’t really understand his own powers though, and so he thought that humans were cruel slave owners.
He was a blatant Puss in Boots ripoff. My Antonio Banderas impression got a workout.
Anyway, El Gato Grande needed the party to help him win the love of a certain Persian. Fur as white as the driven snow, etc. You see, while the small fluffy god was usually a great lover, he grew tongue-tied in the presence of his lady love.
And that’s the story of how my players had to do the balcony scene from Cyrano to a fucking cat.
Talking familiars? Speak With [___]? Oh yes, there WILL be voices. Tiny, Loony Toons voices for some critters, cockney (or Bronx) ravens, psychotic parrots, and trees… that… talk… like… Treebeard. I have one player who got a Dancing Shield (Intelligent, empathy, no telepathy or speech abilities). In the same dungeon was a “useless” item with the secondary power of Speak With Mirrors. He claimed it and polished his shield to a high sheen–instant mirror! Now he can talk to his sentient magic item. (And no, I hadn’t planned it; the treasure was all somewhat random.)
For those animal companions who lack human intelligence and for whom a magic solution isn’t available, I put together a table of binary questions that a capable trainer could ask a well-trained dog or horse (in my experience, cats don’t put up with interrogations). If the player’s expectation is brief and reasonable, I don’t worry about it, but if they want Nixon-Frost with a labradoodle, I whip out the worksheet.
Druid: “Hungry boy?”
Horse: (nods)
Druid: “I’ll bet you are, old son.” (squints at the sky) “Well, it’s not near supper time. I’ll give you a treat, though. Would you like an apple?”
Horse: (nods)
Druid: “Can do!” (proffers an apple)
Horse: (greedily eats the apple; whinnies; signals “it’s complicated”; signals “many”)
Dunno: “You greedy-guts, you! I am most certainly not feeding you a bushel of apples. Do you want to get bloat?”
Horse: (nickers, showing his teeth in jest)
Basic (Taught) Questions:
1. Did you see someone? (Yes / No)
• Who did you see? (1.People / 2.Horses / 3.Creatures / [complicated; rephrase your question])
• Did you see (People / Horses / Creatures)? (Yes / No)
2. How many were there? (One / Two / Three / “a few” / “many” / [complicated; rephrase your question])
(1.One / 2.Two / 3.More than two → 1.One more than two (3) / 2.A few more / 3.Many more)
• Was there more than one group? (Yes / No)*
3. How big were they? (Small / Medium / Large / [complicated; rephrase your question])
(1.Smaller than a man-sized / 2.Man-sized / 3.Larger than man-sized)
• Were there (Small / Medium / Large) beings in the group? (Yes / No)
4. How long ago? (1.Just now / 2.Recently / 3.A while ago / [rephrase your question])
* A mixed group of creatures or multiple groups make this sort of binary questioning complicated and tedious for both the animal and his interrogator.
Further Handle Animal checks may be required if the animal becomes frustrated with the Q&A process and decides to shut down and sulk.
What I like about this is that you’re still relying on Handle Animal rather than switching to Diplomacy. That always struck me as a bit too Utility Shot:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/utility-shot
As a GM, I’ve never encountered anyone who’d use those spells. As a player, I usually don’t bother anymore. The handful of times I’ve tried, the GM usually isn’t prepared for an unscripted and unconventional NPC. So it ends up being a waste of spell slots.
Well that’s sad times. This mess can be a lot of fun, and ought to be at least a little useful for the cost of a spell slot.
I have a party with a vine leshy in it, and he gets Speak with Plants at will. The plants tend to not be very helpful, mostly because their understanding of time is very different from humanoids – they tend to see things very long-term, often in years. I do usually try to slip in a little bit of information so the leshy’s ability isn’t totally wasted, and occasionally there is some humor – grass that is upset that Steve was killed when the plot next to it was dug up, for example.
Funniest example I ever encountered was grass. Dude asked the grass which way the baddies went.
The grass: “*Grasssssss.*”
GM had decided the grass didn’t know anything useful. So rather than say that outright, the grass just repeated its name like the world’s least helpful Pokémon. Stupid grass….
Insert joke of having Patches talking like Scooby-Doo.
For some reason, I was thinking Pinfold form Danger Mouse. (That’s not set in stone though.)
Cor’, chief!
Watched some OG Danger Mouse last time I ate a psychoactive confection. I never realized as a kid that the voiceover guy was genuinely funny.
I’ve mentioned my reincarnated paladin, Wymond Dwerryhouse, before, as well as his porcine pal Triath. Triath is honestly a lot like Patches: when he was initially written in 1e Pathfinder, he was actually a Cassisian Angel disguised as a barnyard pig who was sent by the god Erastil to serve as Wymond’s teacher and advisor.
He underwent a bit of a change when our game transitioned from 1e Pathfinder to 2e, since the specific kind of paladin Wymond was didn’t exist in 2e (Chosen One, a self-taught paladin with a familiar rather than a mount or celestial weapon or armor). We flavored it as Triath shape-shifting from a small pig to a more battle-ready celestial boar to better deal with the threats we were dealing with in the megadungeon.
After Wymond’s unfortunate death, I actually roleplayed AS Triath in the interim until we could get Wymond brought back. I even had him make a little speech at the ceremony where Wymond was reincarnated, thanking the rest of the party for how much they’d helped and cared about Wymond, though only the druid conducting the ritual actually understood it!
An animal companion transitioning between familiar and mount, eh? Hmmm… Might have to noodle with this one myself. 😀
I generally go with bestial intelligence, akin to the above example, “This kill is my kill! Do no come closer! I will bite!”, however if the creature’s intelligence is too low (such as a bug, or a plant), I default back to human intelligence, and put on a squeaky/Treebeard voice (though not to the squeakiness in the Glass Canmon ep. above. Yeesh, that’s gonna haunt me for awhile).
> not to the squeakiness in the Glass Canmon ep.
Sometimes you can tell when your GM does not appreciate your “clever plan.”
I’m a fan of relatively coherent Speak With Animals effects.
“This kill is my kill! Do not come closer! I will bite!” is honestly a lot easier to follow than some of the worse portrayals of critters that I’ve seen.
I’m also honestly fine with “The tree sways with the wind, almost as if to say, ‘It was a band of of 17 gnolls on riding geckos. One of them had a red bandana and was missing half an ear”, though maybe shorten it a bit to make it a bit less comedic. (A bit of comedy is fine.)
> “This kill is my kill! Do not come closer! I will bite!” is honestly a lot easier to follow than some of the worse portrayals of critters that I’ve seen.
I always like to imagine the voice like a bad dub over old Japanese monster movies. You can still hear the barking in the background, but your magically-enhanced brain turns it into an unaccented version of Common.
Patches, just have Ranger take you to Druid. She can cast Talk To Animals as well AND can talk to the others.
Patches probably doesn’t want to go anywhere near Druid. Druid herself is fine… but her friend Allie is kind of scary…
Alright! Folks out here remembering their continuity.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dog-park
It’s getting tough though. I like to link to my comics to try and help newcomers understand what’s up, and it’s getting straight up difficult to find the relevant ones in the backlog.
Eh, Ranger can keep Allie from eating Patches.
My players started asking a tree how it felt to be granted life. For some reason I decided to answer “Terrble!” and that tree became a depressed tree that hated being Awakened and was a believer in Treedestination, and knew it was going to hell.
Heh. Marvin the Paranoid Android as a tree.
“What’s the point? We’re all bound for the lumber mill anyway.”
Well, I don’t have any notable examples from those specific spells in D&D. I’ve used them sure, but the results weren’t memorable enough to stick with me.
But I did once run a homebrew game where one of the PCs was an elf-equivalent species and had a very low power ability to speak to plants at will. But without putting anything more into it, I had to plants be really really stupid and focused on plant stuff. So they were mostly focused on sunlight, water, and dirt and could *maybe* get cajoled into giving the most minimal of info about things that had occurred around them. Of course played for comedic effect. Which I felt was fair as this was just a free added ability to the character.
Cool example. Flavor abilities are flavorful. That’s the time when the comic version of this interaction shines. When you start spending actual resources for ’em though, I feel like that’s the time to adjust the plant’s intelligence upward by a few notches.
Agreed 100%.
What gods does Patches worship / is aware of? DQ clearly isn’t one of them.
Dogs are listed as Neutral. However, we can logically infer that they follow Lawful Good deities, as all dogs go to Heaven.
Personally I try to lean towards the animals (or plants or objects or whatever thing the players can talk to that they normally can’t) being close enough to human to be useful to talk to, at least when the players try to get information.
They might use substituted “animal like” terms for things, and they wouldn’t be able to tell you what people said (since they don’t speak the language) but ultimately I’d aim for them being understood.
This is because it’s pretty easy to end up making these sorts of abilities a huge frustrating waste of time otherwise and I’d want to catch myself there.
If the whole thing takes too much time from overuse, I recommend using similar techniques as if the players wanted to speak to everyone in the village/city district in a way that’d take too much time.
For instance I might call for a gather information check representing talking to a bunch of plants/creatures (I’d let them substitute Handle Animal, know Nature, survival or wild empathy for diplomacy here) and then just zoom in on the ones that knew something helpful/summarize what they learned depending on circumstances. (or say that none of them did, if they failed the check).
Good instincts there. That may work in a comedy show like Glass Cannon, but I’d be hesitant at an IRL table.
Any favorite animal “informants” that became recurring go-to sources of information in your games? That’s the other way I could picture it playing well. Sort of like that one specific thrush from The Hobbit.