Wild Empathy or Bardic Knowledge?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Bardic lore.

Normal animals rarely attack. Big animals are easy to spot, except (for instance) dire tigers, that are actually aggressive enough to attack armed adventurers. But at that point, you're too busy pulling a friend out of grapple to actually use the wild empathy ability.

Follow-up question (highlighted here to improve odds of new readers actually noticing):

How useful is the information that's usually provided by bardic lore checks?

Generally not that useful; highly GM dependent.

I saw one that was 100% a couple months ago.j

How biased was it?

 

[el-remmen]

How useful is the information that's usually provided by bardic lore checks?

Depends on the DM and the situation.

 

[Jdvn1]

How biased was it?

It wasn't. It was a rules question (uh oh! rules forum!) that was pretty straightforward, but the OP's buddy thought he had a case or something. Everyone disagreed with him.

There was another one a couple weeks after that that was around 95% or higher... pretty one-sided again.

EDIT: There've been a couple extra votes since.
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=173561
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=173763

 

[Driddle]

93 percent for one choice. I'm surprised -- I expected a winner, but not by that big a margin.

Tell ya what, based on the massive dismissal of one of the options here, I'm going to put it up against another character element that typically gets no love on the boards. New poll coming up ...

(And thank you for the feedback.)

 

[Sejs]

Additional Follow-Up Question: How much effort do players of rangers and/or druids actually put into making Wild Empathy useful?

There's very little they CAN do to make it useful, that's up to the DM in how often they encounter animals against which it can be used. It's similar to the Favored Enemy issue, but even more so.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

There's very little they CAN do to make it useful, that's up to the DM in how often they encounter animals against which it can be used. It's similar to the Favored Enemy issue, but even more so.

Sort of like having Favored Enemy: Animal preselected for you, isn't it? Except in this case, it's Favored Friend: Animal.

 

[Sejs]

Sort of like having Favored Enemy: Animal preselected for you, isn't it? Except in this case, it's Favored Friend: Animal.

Exactly. Well said.

 

[Driddle]

There's very little they CAN do to make it useful, that's up to the DM in how often they encounter animals against which it can be used.

How about, "While you guys hang out at the tavern, I'm going to go empathize with some animals out in that stand of trees at the town's edge..." Force the DM's hand!

 

[Felix]

If the ranger picked up Favored Enemy: Animals, then I'd give him the corresponding bonus on any Wild Empathy checks he made.

But yeah, Bardic Knowledge is the way to go twixt the two.

 

[Terwox]

I voted for wild empathy, solely because in my experience it has been far more useful than bardic knowledge.

This has been more a function of characters in games I play in interacting with animals, and I have a DM who is particularily fond of animal spirits, where communing with nature is very important. I've also played in several games that feature little to no interaction in towns... so, the knowledge a bard might have is less useful than that of a druid.

In any normal game, far and away bardic knowledge!