How to shoo away beasts


Rules Questions

Dark Archive

Let's assume you're a druid, ranger, cleric with an appropriate domain or simply a friend of animals.

You are in an encounter with an animal. How can the animal be shooed away so I doesn't have to be killed? Killing a beast just because it was in the wrong area at the wrong time might be an option, but avoiding it would be something the above mentioned chars might at least want to try.

My first guess would have been handle animal, but nothing there seems to allow this. Intimidate was my 2nd guess, but again, bad luck.

Is there an option, or is it simply not something the rules want to allow, since it would be a too-easy way to get around these types of encounters?


Wild empathy is the go to ability for doing that.

Many of my characters also buy a 3 gp pig in a bag of holding and drop it on the ground for carnivores.

They work well together, since the pig should buy you at least enough time for the wild empathy check to kick in, if you don't have fast empathy.


charm animal seems to be the go-to method for 1-round resolution of such encounters. I don't think all animal encounters start out with Hostile beasts, so that should permit Wild Empathy attempts without requiring 'fast empathy'.


Wild Empathy improves their attitude towards you (Hostile->Unfriendly->Indifferent->Friendly->Helpful) but doesn't itself allow issuing commands/requests. That comes down to Handle Animal, either Handle (if it has already be trained to perform that trick, not necessarily by you), or Push (if they haven't been trained). Per Wild Empathy, the 'typical' domestic animal starts as Indifferent, the typical wild animal starts as Unfriendly (varying per situation, e.g. guard dogs wills be hostile, etc)

AFAIK, the rules are not clear on what attitude an animal needs to have in order to issue it a command (and/or how different attitude states affect the DC of the check), although that is prime FAQ material, IMHO.

I might guess/house rule that it works like Diplomacy "making a request", i.e. they must be at least Indifferent. Note that per new Handle Animal info in Animal Archive, there is a specific "Exclusive" trick which is needed for an animal to NOT follow commands of people besides it's master, and it goes out of it's way to say that it works this way "even if it is friendly or helpful toward them (such as thru charm animal)". Since this is the closest the rules get to the issue (AFAIK), I would defer to requiring Helpful/Friendly in order to issue commands, i.e. more stringent than Diplomacy on intelligent creatures (which was never tied to Handle Animal to begin with, per RAW).

It would make sense to alter the DC like Diplomacy does, i.e. the 'minimum' friendly state for potentially following commands has a higher DC than more friendly states have... Base off of Diplomacy table?

Really, this should be FAQ'd. -> HERE is a new thread requesting a FAQ on the specific issue of Handle Animal Attitude requirements/mechanics, please hit FAQ on it if you are at all interested...

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