Wild Empathy: won't animals get to attack you for 10 rounds free?

[Plane Sailing]

Got a player who's actually using his wild empathy ability (ranger).

It says 1 minute. Does that mean that a hostile animal can attack him for 1 minute (give or take a little according to the rules) before he gets to make his roll?

Please help.. got an upcoming game.

Jay

I often see DMs play animals as 'automatically hostile, jumping the party' - behaving very unlike real animals, and making wild empathy a lot less useful than it could be.

I think it is a shame, as it is a neat ability with a lot of flavour. Apart from the situation where the party blunder into an ambush predators path, I'd allow the ranger to attempt his animal empathy (as long as the rest of the party stays still and quiet), and nothing kicks off until the ranger actually fails his check, or someone else does something stupid*


* which in most parties is the determining factor, right?

Cheers

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

I agree. A lot of it depends on the DM. Just make it known ahead of time that you'd like to use Wild Empathy whenever possible and the DM should create some opportunities for you.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

I often see DMs play animals as 'automatically hostile, jumping the party' - behaving very unlike real animals, and making wild empathy a lot less useful than it could be.

I think it is a shame, as it is a neat ability with a lot of flavour. Apart from the situation where the party blunder into an ambush predators path, I'd allow the ranger to attempt his animal empathy (as long as the rest of the party stays still and quiet), and nothing kicks off until the ranger actually fails his check, or someone else does something stupid*


* which in most parties is the determining factor, right?

Cheers

You could also say that the WE user makes the check at the beginning of the minute - if it suceeds, he still has to spend the minute before the animal will do anything but provisionally stare at him, and his allies have to remain still and quiet while that minute passes before they can try to start sidling around the animal. If it fails, he fails at the very beginning to get the animal to listen, and combat can get going.