Author Topic: Animal Empathy  (Read 2498 times)

ViktorYouFool

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Animal Empathy
« on: August 26, 2018, 07:02:34 PM »
Animal Empathy in NWN is based on Wild Empathy ability in D&D. The text of this ability is as follows, per the 3.5e SRD.

Quote from: Wild Empathy
A ranger can improve the attitude of an animal. This ability functions just like a Diplomacy check to improve the attitude of a person. The ranger rolls 1d20 and adds his ranger level and his Charisma modifier to determine the wild empathy check result. The typical domestic animal has a starting attitude of indifferent, while wild animals are usually unfriendly.

To use wild empathy, the ranger and the animal must be able to study each other, which means that they must be within 30 feet of one another under normal visibility conditions. Generally, influencing an animal in this way takes 1 minute, but, as with influencing people, it might take more or less time.

The ranger can also use this ability to influence a magical beast with an Intelligence score of 1 or 2, but he takes a -4 penalty on the check.

Animal empathy is therefore a social skill aimed at animals, rather than a magical ability. You aren't magically mind-controlling the creature. You are convincing it that you are not hostile and that it should help you.

I bring this up because the current animal empathy implementation is really jarring.

If you are a ranger and walk up to a worg, the following happens:

Worg: I HATE THIS GUY, IM GONNA EAT HIM.

Ranger: Calm down, buddy. I'm a friend.

Worg: I LOVE THIS GUY, IM GONNA EAT MY FRIENDS FOR HIM.

Ranger: There you go. See. We're friends.

Three minutes later

Worg: NO WAIT A MINUTE, I HATE THIS GUY, I'M GONNA EAT HIM.

I get that you shouldn't have the animal as a follower indefinitely. The time limit on that makes perfect sense for balance reasons, if nothing else. What doesn't make any sense is why the creature would go hostile immediately thereafter. It doesn't fit the actual fluff of what animal empathy is. After the empathy wears off, they should at worst be neutral towards you unless actively provoked.

Not does the current setup not make sense in-character, it actually can be horribly out of character, as it means that your animal-whispering nature loving druid has to turn around and murder the creature it just made friends with.

Is there a way to make make creatures turn neutral after animal empathy wears off?



Jeebs

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #1 on: August 26, 2018, 07:56:53 PM »
Yeah, it's not a perfect system but sadly it's probably hard-coded into NWN. Personally I would prefer it if it was just a "charm" spell instead of a full-blown domination. That the animal would not attack you, makes sense. But I'm right there with you on the whole "I'm going to kill my pack-mates for this dude" seeming out of place. If Animal Emptahy isn't strictly hard-coded, you could try changing the domination to a "charm" effect since it would make a hostile creature "neutral" to you and not put it under your control (I think) and have it so that when the timer runs off, it triggers a short-duration fear effect to make the animal run out of the player's range before it returns to being hostile.

ViktorYouFool

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #2 on: August 26, 2018, 08:57:37 PM »
Convincing the animal to work for you is the main value of the skill mechanically, so if you remove that you won't see people take the thing for anything other than RP.

What I would love to see is for hostile creatures to use the same script as bears when empathy runs out. You would empathy the worg, but after empathy ran out it turned neutral. If you got too close or hung around too long, it would give you a warning behavior (POSES MENACINGLY) and if you didn't get the hint, then it would go hostile. That would at least provide an RP bridge between "This animal was working with me" and "Oh dear, I have to stab it to death now."



zDark Shadowz

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #3 on: August 26, 2018, 10:43:18 PM »
What I would love to see is for hostile creatures to use the same script as bears when empathy runs out. You would empathy the worg, but after empathy ran out it turned neutral. If you got too close or hung around too long, it would give you a warning behavior (POSES MENACINGLY) and if you didn't get the hint, then it would go hostile.

^ This, as long as it was neutral to every PC and had a timer beyond the proximity to set it to hostile after 1 minute or so as well.

Maybe also have some worgs / wolves / bears & boars etc secretly flagged as shapeshifters too so when someone tries to animal empathy and fails they'll realise 'Oops, this one is secretly a werecreature' and they get mauled for trying to AE it.

MAB77

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #4 on: August 27, 2018, 05:54:17 AM »
Having them turned only neutral and nothing else is just the equivalent of having them under your domination all the time as it can be redone right away and at will. This already makes animal empathy more powerful than summons spells, it should not be made even stronger.

A more nuanced solution would be to have them turned neutral AND leave the scene/despawn without the possibility of dominating them again. In-game this would represent that the animal instinctively feels it did its service to the druid/ranger and owes him nothing else. Druid/rangers could still use animal empathy at will, but this would require them to seek out other animals once a particular animal completes its service.
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zDark Shadowz

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #5 on: August 27, 2018, 06:22:04 AM »
That does also solve possible problems of creatures being left in places where they normally wouldn't be.

BraveSirRobin

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #6 on: August 27, 2018, 01:07:17 PM »
Having them turned only neutral and nothing else is just the equivalent of having them under your domination all the time as it can be redone right away and at will. This already makes animal empathy more powerful than summons spells, it should not be made even stronger.

A more nuanced solution would be to have them turned neutral AND leave the scene/despawn without the possibility of dominating them again. In-game this would represent that the animal instinctively feels it did its service to the druid/ranger and owes him nothing else. Druid/rangers could still use animal empathy at will, but this would require them to seek out other animals once a particular animal completes its service.


That, however makes the ability weaker than it currently is. Depending on how invested you are into AE, you can just catch it when it turns hostile again. AE, rinse and repeat. There aren’t many NPC animals in the game world that make such a thing worth the effort, in the first place. .. And your suggestion would also mean that once the animal was released, it would disappear... So you could clear entire packs of wolves by just chain AE’ing and dismissing them, which suddenly turns it into a super powerful, infinite way to clear animal-based spawn, which, I might add aren’t prevalent enough in any appreciable quantity for it to matter.

ViktorYouFool

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #7 on: August 27, 2018, 03:59:29 PM »
Having them turned only neutral and nothing else is just the equivalent of having them under your domination all the time as it can be redone right away and at will. This already makes animal empathy more powerful than summons spells, it should not be made even stronger.

A more nuanced solution would be to have them turned neutral AND leave the scene/despawn without the possibility of dominating them again. In-game this would represent that the animal instinctively feels it did its service to the druid/ranger and owes him nothing else. Druid/rangers could still use animal empathy at will, but this would require them to seek out other animals once a particular animal completes its service.


That, however makes the ability weaker than it currently is. Depending on how invested you are into AE, you can just catch it when it turns hostile again. AE, rinse and repeat. There aren’t many NPC animals in the game world that make such a thing worth the effort, in the first place. .. And your suggestion would also mean that once the animal was released, it would disappear... So you could clear entire packs of wolves by just chain AE’ing and dismissing them, which suddenly turns it into a super powerful, infinite way to clear animal-based spawn, which, I might add aren’t prevalent enough in any appreciable quantity for it to matter.

I don't know how it scales for other critters, but by the time you can reliably dominate wolves, you could as easily kill them. That's not a thing I'd be overly concerned about.

MAB does have a point in that it would be easier to dominate the creature the second time if they just went neutral -- though, as it stands, can you -reroll dominate on a creature currently dominated, or do you have to let it drop before you can "refresh" it?



MAB77

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #8 on: August 27, 2018, 09:12:33 PM »
Pacifying whole packs of wild animals is right into the province of druids and rangers anyway. Doing so would also mean sacrificing any battle XP or pelts that could be useful to crafters and sold for gold, so not only I would not overly worry about that possibility, I even encourage it as being eminently in character for those classes.

But I would not just make "empathied" animals despawn at the end though. I'd also have them work a bit more like the summon spells so that players get a maximum RP time out of it. You'd have up to 24 hours to rp as you see fit with the animal and buff it as you like. The 1 turn/level countdown would start only once you pitch it in battle.

I'd even go a step further by suggesting to reward druids/rangers that actually befriend hostile animals then set them free with a small XP bonus. The XP bonus would apply at the end of the animal empathy duration only if the animal survived. Like crafting xp, the bonus would apply only if the empathy attempt is not a guaranteed success.
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MAB

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Blight

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Re: Animal Empathy
« Reply #9 on: August 31, 2018, 02:21:53 PM »
I was able to reliably empathy wolves at level two.
Just another lesson from the School of Hard Knocks... PHD!