Wild Empathy and outsiders?

[Dwimmerlied]

A few ideas I'm playing around with for dealing with animals. Firstly, I'm thinking of houseruling to allow Wild Empathy to enable those with this class feature to influence the attitudes of some outsiders, such as fiendish-template animals and hellhounds. I'm thinking a +4 to the DC.

Another idea I have is changing how Wild Empathy works, so that those who have this ability can use their Handle Animal skill to influence the attitudes of animals and magical beasts, primarily because I can't understand why it doesn't already work like this. Not sure yet though, because I'd like it to somehow work like the search skill does for trapfinding. Anyone can attempt to calm an animal after all, its just that only rangers and druids are masters at it.

Any thoughts or suggestions before I implement this would be much appreciated!

 

[delericho]

Another idea I have is changing how Wild Empathy works, so that those who have this ability can use their Handle Animal skill to influence the attitudes of animals and magical beasts, primarily because I can't understand why it doesn't already work like this.

Yeah, it's an odd one. The one thing I would note is that wild empathy is tied to Ranger/Druid levels rather than skill point expenditure, which means two things:

- Rangers and Druids get it for 'free', which potentially means they could have 0 ranks in Handle Animal and yet still use this ability.

- Multiclass Rangers or Druids can't spend skill points from their other class to improve their ability with Wild Empathy. (For example, a Ranger 1/Rogue 14 could, in theory, have 18 ranks in Handle Animal, where his Wild Empathy power would only gain +1 from his Ranger level.)

I don't think either of these is particularly an issue, and certainly not a game balance concern. On reflection, I think I may well do the same for my next campaign - and maybe do something similar with Bardic Knowledge and Artificer's Knowledge also.

 

[Tuft]

Having Handle Animals being a sort of Diplomacy/Intimidate against animals make a lot of sense...

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Wild Empathy doesn't allow the use of Handle Animal for influencing attitudes, because Wild empathy itself serves as Diplomacy for this purpose.

Since your Wild Empathy is your Druid/Ranger level + Charisma mod., I usually write "Wild Empathy" on my character sheet with my list of skills, and just drop 1 rank per level as if it were a free skill point. By conceptualizing it as a class-specific skill (since it acts like one), it makes it easier for me to track and use.

Since it's essentially a skill that "adds ranks" while you level, it frees up your skill points to do other things.

Adding Outsiders who have an intellegence of 1 or 2 could be a cool houserule. Maybe since it's a -5 penalty to use Wild Empathy on Magical Beasts, you could come up with a similar penalty for Outsiders?

There's an item called the Amulet of Aberrant Empathy in Complete Adventurer p.132-133 that allows the use of Handle Animal to serve in place of Diplomacy for dealing with Aberrations with an INT of 9 or lower. It's yet another way to influence attitudes of more creatures.

Beast Heart Adept prestige class from Dungeonscape p.48 has the Monster Empathy class feature, which allows you to influence the attitudes of Magical Beasts with no penalty, and also influence animals and Aberrations at a -5.