Fable_Wright's page

Is there an easy way for Rangers to get access to 3rd level Comprehend Languages without Dedication feats? Trying to remove the -4 penalty that Bear Companion suffers on his Intimidate skill, and I'm wondering if Wizard Devotion and Ring of Wizardry are necessary items for the build.

Aside from that, the creature rules are written from a point of view that if something is a significant piece of the essence of a creature that it will have specific abilities representing that thing - so "is frightening" gets represented by abilities like Terrifying Display of apes, Terrifying Touch of banshees, a bunyip's Roar, or the Frightful Presence of dragons and things of that sort.

While I can sort of understand that, it still feels like the devs included a trap option in adding the Bully animal companion specialization or giving the Bear an Intimidate trained skill at all.

Thinking out loud here, because the other day, my party's Druid tried to have her bear scare some critter, and they were slapped with a -4 penalty for not being able to speak a language. Needless to say, that went poorer than expected.

But it does raise to me the question of why the penalty exists in the first place. A raging level 1 bear is actually less scary than an untrained level -1 gnome in their pajamas.

It's clearly not intended to be a hindrance to PCs. Intimidating Glare only requires Trained in order to intimidate any non immune critter at no penalty. It really only affects monsters without language, really, since they don't have feats. It only penalizes animal companions and monsters that just have an Intimidate modifier in their stat blocks, and I'm just wondering... why? Does it make the game more fun? Is there a rules trick or exploit that occurs if things without a language can intimidate effectively? I'm genuinely curious.

Thank you!

Not sure if this is the right place to ask rules-y stuff, but we had a weird question come up the other night in the session. The Gnome Druid in the party wanted their Bear Companion to support the party with Intimidate, and it came up that apparently the bear was stuck with a -4 penalty to all Intimidate rolls because none of our enemies spoke bear. We eventually house-ruled that bear is a universal language, but I was just wondering if there was some official word of god on this somewhere out there.

Thanks! :D

(If this isn't the right place, could you point me to where I should put this? Very new here.)