A Land Far Away

So what I'm looking for is a way to get this implemented. before anyone gets off track I'm not suggesting anything like the broken animal empathy skill back in nwn1 where you could get animals to fallow you around. Instead maybe just a widget you could use to "calm" hostile NPC animals/magical beasts for a duration so you can pass by them without being molested using the rules below provided you are not in combat with said animal already.

Is this feasible? Because honestly i think its one of the coolest abilities druids get and i simply never see it used in nwn2.

Wild Empathy (Ex)
A druid can improve the attitude of an animal. This ability functions just like a Diplomacy check made to improve the attitude of a person. The druid rolls 1d20 and adds her druid level and her 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 druid and the animal must be able to study each other, which means that they must be within 30 feet of one another under normal conditions. Generally, influencing an animal in this way takes 1 minute but, as with influencing people, it might take more or less time.

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

The main thing that's stopping this from going in is the same as the main reason that diplomacy doesn't have a similar implementation: doing it by the books, in the context of NWN2's simplified versions of NPC responses (help, harm, or don't care) means that those creatures which we have the most desire to influence (i.e. the ones who wish to harm you) are also the ones least practical to influence (i.e. take 10 rounds or take -10 on the check-- which is DC 20-25, depending on whether the threshold to stop an ongoing attack is an attitude of "unfriendly" or "neutral").

As a result, the implementation isn't terribly appealing. It has a restricted audience (just animals-- magical beasts are their own type, usually intelligent, and usually not affected) in a niche use case (adjusting an animal's attitude in a meaningful way, by the engine's definitions, in circumstances when the acting character is either high-level enough to afford a -10 on the check or can spend 10 combat rounds on the act) of questionable value (animals are usually pretty low CR relative to HD) with complications of development (managing creature-specific reputations relative to parties in hostile-factioned creatures; ensuring that all 10 rounds are spent on the task at hand) and very little opportunity to re-use (just diplomacy, really) and not being prerequisite or foundation to anything more interesting.

That, of course, doesn't mean it's infeasible. It just means that someone with the skill will have to get excited about it, or recruit someone who is, to see it happen. Current plans wouldn't call for this except as handling for subdued NPCs in our AI rewrite, as a part of resolving post-recovery reactions (and clubbing an angry wolf over the head to make it stop chewing your face off is a very different RP than soothingly talking to it until it ceases the face chewing).

Cheers, and all is well in the realm.

Don't forget that when a DM is around, you can use this to your hearts content.

I used a wild empathy check just a few days ago, even!

Mind you, this is also a class ability for rangers.

Also a class ability for spirit shamans.