Serious Skills: Nature

The Nature skill represents the character’s skills and knowledge of all things related to the natural world, including but not limited to trailblazing, natural hazards, living off the land and natural beasts/monsters.  Passing a level-appropriate Nature check can provide a bevy of information and abilities:

• Easy DC: General knowledge of nature
• Moderate DC: Expert-level knowledge of nature; origin, type, keywords, temperament of a Natural monster
• Hard DC: Esoteric knowledge of nature; calm and maybe train an animal; powers, vulnerability and resistances of a Natural monster

In addition, passing a DC 15 Nature check allows a character to forage for food and water that will sustain one person for one day. A DC 25 Nature check expands this to five people.

So… Nature. Yeah. Except for Diplomacy, no skill makes me want to throw heavy objects around like Nature. With merely one character trained in Nature the party is nearly immune to being lost, running out of food, being seriously surprised by a monster’s tactics or wandering into hazardous terrain. And furthermore, Nature is one of the broadest skills of all time, useful in temperate forests, steppes, deserts, savannahs, tundras, mountains, even underwater for crying out loud!! Does that seem fair? I suppose it’s no worse than Diplomacy or History covering all possible cultures and perspectives… oh wait, I had a problem with that too, didn’t I? Well, too bad for me. The PCs are supposed to be unique, larger-than-life figures for whom minor details like ecology are no sweat; it’s just one of the conceits of the game. Primal characters (and rangers) packing ONLY 16 or better Wisdom and Nature training with no further bonuses will fail to forage a paltry 30% of the time at 1st level. By Paragon Tier, they can’t fail at all. A 1st level Nature twink can easily hit a +17 bonus out of the gate, keeping their party well-fed and safe nearly indefinitely. Now tack on the 75 or so rituals that key off Nature – most of which include a duration based on a Nature check – and you have an incredibly powerful character completely regardless of combat prowess. Everything from denying random encounters (Create Campsite), sending messages to faraway contacts (Animal Messenger), locating destinations (Find the Path) and knowing things you have no business knowing (Commune With Nature) are within the purview of a ritual caster with a kickin’ Nature bonus. While I can’t prove this exactly, it’s been my experience and estimation that no other single build choice gives a character the ability to circumvent trouble like having a good Nature skill.

Now admittedly, I play primarily in Heroic and low Paragon where the natural world is still a threat. By mid-Paragon and epic, the Arcana skill may overtake Nature in sheer DM-denial ability but recall that the vast majority of games start at low-levels. Many of these will never get above 15 or 17, so I still tend to hand it to Nature over Arcana but I will at least put that bias out there.

Due to the sheer bulk of material covered by the Nature skill, you almost have to wonder why anyone wouldn’t be trained in it. Agriculture, animal handling, trailblazing, mountaineering, weather forecasting, botany, herbology, fishing – it seems like nearly anyone from a primarily agricultural society would be trained in one if not several of these disciplines at least enough to survive, right? Well, that depends. If your character is from Eberron or another highly urban area, maybe not. In that case, you’d be the Noble Savage or at least the Out-of-Towner to have a significant amount of nature knowledge in a gamespace dominated by civilization. If it was your choice to leave that setting for the wider, wilder world, consider being the Hermit, the Tree-Hugger, or the Man with an Animal Soul. All Primal characters except for the Barbarian are trained in Nature by default so if nothing else, Chosen of the Spirits is a simple, clean way to go.

What if your game world is highly ‘natural’ though? Say it’s dominated primarily by nomadic tribes with the occasional small village which fends for itself with basic agricultural technique. Now is the whole world trained in Nature? Still the answer is ‘no’ because of the breadth of the skill. Being a fisherman doesn’t mean you’re trained in Nature. Knowing how to raise crops and prepare wild game doesn’t really qualify either. A character actually trained in Nature signifies a character who can fish, farm, hunt, cultivate, gather, climb, camp and at least a half-dozen more on top of that. This is a generalist, not a specialist. How does one get this sort of training? First, you must be Well-Traveled . The Nature skill encompasses a dizzying number of terrains and ecologies and you’ve got to be moderately familiar with all of them. Second, you’re going to need a reason to insist on relying on the natural world for providence rather than civilization or magic. Perhaps you have some religious thing going on where Nature is My Faith . It’s possible your character just Doesn’t Play Well With Others, but this is a cooperative game so I suggest going Rugged Individualist instead to temper the personality. You could also simply have a kind of fondness for nature based on personal reasons – anything from the relatively mundane Inspired by Nature to the outlandish Dances With Raised by Wolves. Finally, there will be questions as to how you know so much about so many monters… and lived to tell about it. At least the Arcana and Religion folks have books to work from. You probably don’t. This suggests you’re either an Epic Bad-Ass (or will be by Level 21!), Fast on My Feet (for when fighting isn’t an option) or have the Devil’s Own Luck. In conclusion, Nature is a skill that really begs for backstory if it’s going to be played to its fullest. There’s a lot of knowledge and experience to ‘justify,’ but doing so provides a myriad of opportunities for your character to be an integral part of the story of the game.

Nature can in fact be a very profound and unique sense, but it requires a certain finesse on the part of both player and DM. I sometimes like to think of it as ‘Perception by proxy.’ Think for a moment – how does a traveller find cardinal directions? The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and there’s a star that always points north. Even before the storm clouds roll in, the saying “red skies at night, sailor’s delight; red skies in morning, sailors take warning” gives a clue as to tomorrow’s weather. The presence of a predatory animal might be preceded by three or four deer running by, heedless of stealth. The character trained in Nature sees indirectly. She’s tuned into the signs and cycles that are then interpreted as something else. Where the ground cover is uneven or bunches of leaves are oddly gathered – there probably lies a trap. This gives the character the ability to notice and know things beyond normal humanoid senses.

Just how far you want to run with the idea is your call. It’s not unreasonable that a Nature-trained character could do some pretty outlandish scouting; the ‘ear to the ground’ trick to hear oncoming herd animals or horses at great distance immediately comes to mind. A perfectly normal-looking stone wall might be tagged as illusory due to the way the wind is blowing straight on from that direction. Depending on your stance on such things in your game, a Nature character might be able to read ‘natural’ divinatory signs such as the flight pattern of birds (commonly called augury), the entrails of slain animals (extispicy) or the positions of stars (astrology). Remember, though, that a character using Nature to perceive is never perceiving directly. (S)He is always interpreting signs, omens, cycles and trails of all kinds to deduce the desired information.

At the other end of communication, the idea remains much the same. A Nature-trained character is likely to know how to posture or move to display dominance, submission, pleasure, etc but will probably lack the facial control of a Bluff master and thus look less than humanoid to some extent. While a Nature check might be a really clever way to try to seduce someone, it’s not necessarily going to do you much good in heated intellectual debate. In general, the closer your message is to something instinctual, the more likely you can say it with Nature instead of some other skill.

That leads us in conclusion to the social tact of a Nature-trained character. Even if not using Nature directly as a communicative skill, it’s very likely the general feel of the discussion will be subtle and mischeivous. The character is likely looking for those signs to clue him or her in as to how to proceed and thus may play things pretty cagey and close to the chest at first. However, nature is not without its force as well and so when an advantage is gained, watch for Mr(s). Nature to jump on it. Like the tides vs. a tsunami, the opening of a flower at midday or a stalking jaguar, the Nature specialist blends both secrecy and power into their social interactions.

Hope you enjoyed that breakdown of Nature! Next week: Perception.