OH SH** BEES!

Another one of those thoughtless little curioso posts of mine for character creation. This one's more about animal empathy, etcetera. How often have you run across a situation where animal empathy could help out? Will it really calm down those guard dogs? Will it honestly keep that paracritter from morseling up your team?

Can you use it to redirect or even train a few wild things? This is for those of you who are GMS, or those of you who have actually used this skill to some effect.

And why type of animals -can- you empathize with? Could you, for kicks and giggles, be really good and handling bees, wasps, (insert swaming, stinging insect type) and use that as an obscure advantage? Sorry for the odd questions, I finished reading Augementations SR4, and realized that a lot of the 'augmentations' are about getting unusual advantages on unsuspecting opponents that only occur under certain situations.

Under-Tongue baton blade, anyone?

Well, here is an interesting question. I have run a character that used animal empathy to a huge advantage. The character was a paranormal animal trainer. I would use the animals to help with the jobs I was running. The animal empathy would let me train the animals easier, and the animals would respond to me more when I was trying to get them to do what I wanted.

Another character I had had animal empathy, but it was only for one kind of animal. He was a shape shifter, and the animal was what he was in animal form. I could get the animals, in my case wolverines, to respond to me and do some of what I wanted. Again, my GM at the time made it easier because of the animal empathy.

As a GM, I have never seen any of my runners take the quality. Most of them seem to think it is a useless quality. Just like most of them don't take many Knowledge skills because they think they are useless as well. I will show them.... hehehe... (In my RW games. In the PbP it is a little harder... or is it??? lol)

Running Wild, dude, Running Wild. There's TONS of stuff on this sort of thing in there, including a good deal on how to handle swarms, in combat, how to train them, etc. There is also an Attunement (Animal) Adept Metamagic for telepathic communication with even mundane animals. There really is too much for me to just copy and paste here.

Yeah. Rigger doesn't hold the monopoly on packs of critters... in fact, rigger is only the modern version of a pack handler. Having a paranormal pack of Irish Mastiffs (depending on their powers...) would be an extremely large benefit to any team, especially if the pack trainer also had an "extraordinary ability" to communicate with them.
Or, as you mentioned: Bees. It's really tough to shoot down a swarm of bees, regardless of the pistol caliber. And they react really well to being sliced at with a monofilament whip as well. While we're at it: Rats. Devil Rats. Since people don't go the "Druid" route in SR too often, it's not something that we pay a lot of attention to, but being able to put together a small team of animals can be a huge benefit for all sorts of reasons. Combine that with the "Conceal" power an Air Spirit can pull out, and you could have anything from an extremely effective natural distraction, right up to a trained muscle team, ready and waiting to be called in. And one that doesn't say "no" to any job...

Now that you've brought it up, I think I will put an "Animal Handler" together next. If not for play, then for kicks. It'll be fun!

Man, I want to make a beekeeper, too. This is gonna be AWESOME. I can see it now.

Uhh.... That's not quite what I had in mind... And that's a little creepy...

The second guy looks like he got his neck photoshopped out.