How Does Speak with Animals Work?

Speak with Animals at a Glance

Speak with Animals allows the caster to communicate with wildlife. The spell is pretty self-explanatory. The Player’s Handbook explains: “You gain the ability to comprehend and verbally communicate with beasts for the duration. The knowledge and awareness of many beasts is limited by their intelligence, but at minimum, beasts can give you information about nearby locations and monsters, including whatever they can perceive or have perceived within the past day. You might be able to persuade a beast to perform a small favor for you, at the GM’s discretion.” Casting time: 1 action (or 10 minutes as a ritual) Range: Self Target: Self Components: Visual, somatic Duration: 10 minutes As a note, only Bards, Druids, and Rangers can learn Speak with Animals. Forest Gnomes also get access to “Speak with Small Beasts,” which is slightly different than the Speak with Animals spell but in the same ballpark.

Should I take Speak with Animals?

Speak with Animals is highly productive in roleplay-heavy games. If your DnD campaign is all about combat and puzzles, Speak with Animals probably isn’t going to be very productive. But if your game involves a lot of roleplaying in natural settings (which is most games), Speak with Animals is an extremely useful spell. Speak with Animals can also be cast as a ritual, which means you don’t have to use a spell slot to cast it. This makes it a great spell if you find yourself running out of slots while travelling. Remember, if you’re playing a druid you’re allowed to swap out your spells after every long rest. If you want to experiment with Speak with Animals, go for it! You can always swap it out for a more useful spell later if you aren’t enjoying it.

What does Speak with Animals sound like?

It’s 100% up to the DM what the conversation sounds like. There are a few potential options here when it comes to how a Dungeon Master plays out Speak with Animals. Here are your options: Animals now speak common and everyone can hear a Speak with Animals convo. This is a fun way to play it if you want to use these conversations for unique roleplaying opportunities everyone can enjoy. The conversation happens telepathically with the spellcaster and the animal. This is best if you don’t want to roleplay unique voices for the animals and you want to focus on the “business” side of the spell and not the entertainment value. The spellcaster can now speak whatever animal language they need to use. This is a funny option that involves you and your player making animal noises (i.e. they bark like a dog to talk to a pug they encounter).

Use Cases for Speak with Animals (for Players)

Try using the spell to negotiate with hostile wildlife and avoid combat. Normally, a party will have to duke it out with a random pack of angry wolves if they stumble across them on their travels. But if your party is low on health or you’ve got more pressing matters, why not try negotiating?! You could use Speak with Animals to offer some meat to the wolves in exchange for leaving you alone, or offer to help them avenge a friend if they let you pass in peace. Remember, the animals you speak with are gated by their intelligence. This means you’ll have an easier time brokering a peace treaty with aggressive dolphins than a gang of rabid squirrels.

Break the spell out to ask for directions or help. Lost in the woods? Ask the nearest raccoon to point out where the exit is. Looking for a hidden passage to a temple in the forest? Call out to the eagle in the trees and trade some dead mice for help spotting the temple from above. Keep in mind that not every animal is going to be interested in helping you. It helps to have something the animal wants if you’re going to ask for support!

Use Speak with Animals to ensure your pets or familiars are happy. One of the great things about Speak with Animals is that you can use it to ask your mount, magical familiar, or pet what they’re up to. Whether you’re a Ranger with a barn owl on their shoulder or a Bard with a pack mule, who doesn’t want to know how their animal homies are doing? Remember, Speak with Animals can be cast a ritual. If you’ve ever got downtime while traveling, cast the spell as a ritual and chat with your animal companions! No spell slots are needed.

Create a spy network using an animal companion. Use the Find Familiar spell, cast Animal Friendship, or employ Animal Messenger to help build your own creature-based recon team. Send your critter friends out to collect information, report on enemy movements, or fetch you some fancy medicinal herbs you’ve been looking for.

Trip up your DM’s roleplaying ability with Conjure Animals. Want to mess with your DM (in a fun and playful way)? Use the Conjure Animals spell to summon a fey beast from the void of time and space. Then, cast Speak with Animals and ask the creature about the nature of the multiverse, where it came from, or how magic manifests itself. You can also test your DM’s patience by using the Raise Dead spell and Speak with Animals spell to talk to animals about what the woodland creature afterlife looks like.

Tips for Managing Players Using Speak with Animals (for DMs)

Reward players for finding innovative ways to use Speak with Animals. Speak with Animals is one of those non-combat spells that only has utility so long as you allow the spell to do something meaningful as a DM. When your players use Speak with Animals, avoid letting your players feel like they wasted the spell. In other words, if players want to talk to a stray dog, avoid saying something like, “The dog doesn’t really want to talk. It ignores you and keeps walking.” Instead, maybe take that fun speech you had saved for the vegetable vendor and give it to the dog. Players will feel rewarded by the interaction.

Tuck fun side quests into conversations with unique animals. Maybe the squirrel they ask for directions has the lowdown on a buried pile of treasure nearby, or perhaps that platypus they talk to while washing their weapons in the river is actually a polymorphed wizard who needs help getting smuggled out of enemy territory. Want to increase the odds players use Speak with Animals with the “right” targets? Give the animals something unique. Maybe make the special deer albino, or give the special housecat a goofy little fez.

Remember to use the animal’s intelligence when roleplaying. It’s very easy to get caught up in the roleplaying when it comes to Speak with Animals, but it’s important to differentiate for gameplay reasons. The best way to do this is to always shape your RP based on the intelligence scores of the creatures in the Monster Manual. For example, imagine a player is asking a mouse, “Where does the owner of this house hide their treasure?” A mouse might say, “Treasure? Like their cheese and crumbs?” while a parrot might say, “My owner has never shown me, but he does have a locked drawer in his chest that would be a promising place to look.”