Difference between revisions of "Talk:Table: Class Skills"

Revision as of 10:28, 20 January 2010

Looking at this table, I now realize that anything with Ride as a class skill also has Handle Animal. My bad. -Slitherrr

Yeah. I would be surprised if it were not so. Isn't Handle Animal stuff like knowing how to take care of your mount? Anyway, the situation with Gnob was more, Ride = The Horse You Are On. Handle Animal = A Horse Someone Else Is On. Even if Fighter's did not have Handle Animal, that'd be the skill to check to grab control of a horse they're not "ride"ing. -gm

Well, except grabbing someone else's reins really is more of an Opposed Ride check, because it's more about getting into better position. In Gnob's case, though, the horse was still in control of itself, so Handle Animal still applies. My interpretation would be that, in general, Handle Animal for when the horse is in control of itself (aside from the process of mounting), and Ride for when the horse is under any rider's (not just your) control, since the rider generally has final say over where the horse goes.

When I thought that Fighters and Paladins didn't have Handle Animal as a class skill, I was thinking that Ride just covered Handle Animal-type actions with mounts, because it would make up for the lack of general animal knowledge. After all, getting a horse to calm down and stuff is definitely within the Fighter and Paladin schticks (especially since Paladin gets a special mount as a class ability). Since Handle Animal is a class skill for both of those, I have revised my thinking. -Slitherrr

As I understood it, Ride is a physical skill that covers your competence on and around a horse (hence being dex based). Things like getting on a horse quickly, staying on a horse in combat, getting off a running horse, etc. Handle animal is used for interacting with a horse--mostly getting it to do things it might not otherwise do (cha based). Getting a horse to charge into a pike line, run down a steep hill, or leading a horse to water and making him drink. I think the section on mounted combat has some examples of this sort of stuff. --Msallen

No, pretty much anything in the rules that you do while on a horse (including getting it to do stuff it doesn't want to do) is covered by ride. To wit:

Spur Mount

You can spur your mount to greater speed with a move action. A successful Ride check increases the mount’s speed by 10 feet for 1 round but deals 1 point of damage to the creature. You can use this ability every round, but each consecutive round of additional speed deals twice as much damage to the mount as the previous round (2 points, 4 points, 8 points, and so on).

Control Mount in Battle

As a move action, you can attempt to control a light horse, pony, heavy horse, or other mount not trained for combat riding while in battle. If you fail the Ride check, you can do nothing else in that round. You do not need to roll for warhorses or warponies.

Those are the only similar things that it talks about. There's convincing wild animals to do what you want to do with the wild empathy druid/ranger special ability, but that's distinctly different. -Slitherrr

Also, just so the protest is recorded, Handle Animal definitely talks about "domesticating" wild animals. The correct term would be "tamed". To "domesticate" a wild animal takes several hundred generations of selective breeding, and at that point, "wild" no longer applies. My wife would be quite agitated to hear their usage.-Slitherrr

Ah, ok that makes sense. So I guess HA is just used for teaching animals tricks and stuff like that. I guess presumably if you had a pet dog you would use HA and not ride, or possibly to issue order to a horse that you are not sitting on. --Msallen

Yeah, it's weird, you don't even use Handle Animal for wild empathy checks as a Ranger (it's got its own check). The SRD definitely limits Handle Animal to care and training. Hence, my interpretation of "Once the target is being ridden, it's ride (even someone else's horse), but while the animal is still in control of itself, it's Handle Animal"-Slitherrr