Talk With Animals (Ex)

[Indagare]

In many stories there is either some child that can talk to animals or some adult who was raised by animals and so knows their language(s). In any case while there may be one or many animal languages the character can generally speak with almost any species in the story.

So I was wondering how this might work out as a feat or even a class skill. Would anyone have any suggestions?

[*Thelith]

Linguistics let's you learn languages, just let animal groups have learnable languages? Canine, feline, etc.. Or maybe a feat that requires handle animal and linguistics that allows one to communicate with animals?
Really just depends on how hard or easy you want it to be.

[Pizza Lord]

Like Thelith says, it really matters on how you want it to work. Gnomes get speak with animals 1/day (spell-like). Rangers and druids have wild empathy which could let you know basic stuff an animal is trying to convey possibly.

If you just want the person to understand animals just... give them a constant speak with animals effect. The rest is just deciding why or how they have it: fairy-boon at birth, born under an animal sign, destiny, actually were a baby deer that a wizard polymorphed into a baby for his barren wife or some other family in need and never told them, etc. A passing reality-altering comet seems popular.

[Indagare]

*Thelith wrote:

Linguistics let's you learn languages, just let animal groups have learnable languages? Canine, feline, etc.. Or maybe a feat that requires handle animal and linguistics that allows one to communicate with animals?

Really just depends on how hard or easy you want it to be.

Thanks! Well, I thought this would be something neat to introduce as an extraordinary (rather than spell-like) ability, but I wasn't sure exactly how to go about it or what the ramifications would be. Probably if I just put it as a bunch of different languages it might be best. Someone knowing how to talk to canines would not necessarily know how to talk to felines and so on. On the other hand, being able to do this any time the player wants may cause other issues down the road. It also implies a lot about the intelligences of animals in the setting.

Pizza Lord wrote:

Like Thelith says, it really matters on how you want it to work. Gnomes get speak with animals 1/day (spell-like). Rangers and druids have wild empathy which could let you know basic stuff an animal is trying to convey possibly.

If you just want the person to understand animals just... give them a constant speak with animals effect. The rest is just deciding why or how they have it: fairy-boon at birth, born under an animal sign, destiny, actually were a baby deer that a wizard polymorphed into a baby for his barren wife or some other family in need and never told them, etc. A passing reality-altering comet seems popular.

Thanks! Well, the speak with animals thing is only once a day and this would not only be at-will but also not spell-like (entering a magically dead area would have no effect - though being bound and gagged would). I agree the person would have to provide a reason they have it (though classes that regularly have a connection with nature are basically self-explanatory; part of their training was learning the language of animals).

[Pizza Lord]

Well... everyone knows the real truth. Animals are just faking it. They can talk. Always could. They walk around, play games, chit-chat, and throw parties when people aren't around. Sometimes they'll pick one poor schmuck and just chatter on and on and then shut-up and play dumb when anyone else is around. The poor individual tries to explain who they were talking to and everyone else just thinks they're going nuts. You've heard the story of Mr. Ed? Dr. Doolittle?

Animals are jerks... unless you're a princess.

[Lazaryus]

The way you're going, you should add animal languages, but lock them behind a background trait (a wealthy merchant who spent his whole life in a big city shouldn't be able to learn the languages of animals).