D&D 5E Ploymorph and Concentration

[Ilbranteloth]

The "Speak with Animals" spell does say that knowledge and awareness of many beasts is limited by their intelligence, but there is no particular guidance how. 5e doesn't have 3e's hard-coded 3 int = language use rule. Looking in the critters section the Frog has an int of 1, a Mule has an Int of 2 and a Wolf has an Int of 3.

But in the stats for pretty much every beast it has 'Languages: - ' which implies they don't understand the usual spoken languages.

It's interesting, because I get the idea of the turning your opponent into a toad, that simply hops off since it's now completely a toad. But obviously you don't want to do that to yourself. In prior editions, Alter Self was the self-inflicted form of polymorph, but that's been changed here as well.

In the 1st Edition variant there was Polymorph Other, which had a 100% chance of changing the mental abilities and personality, -5% per point of Intelligence, and Polymorph Self which had no chance of doing so. Polymorph Other also required a system shock save to even survive the change, and was permanent but could be dispelled (with another system shock check) by a dispel magic.

So I wouldn't have any problem house-ruling that casting it on yourself works like the Druid shapechange (and the way it worked in earlier editions - mental abilities are retained, physical ones are not, at least for a Transmuter. Otherwise it's easy enough to create a second spell.

Ilbranteloth