[RPG] Does a Beast Master Ranger’s animal companion gain more actions when its master becomes incapacitated

actionsanimal-companionsdnd-5eranger

This question comes from discussion in the comments to the question "Can my Beast Master ranger's baboon animal companion use her Wand of Magic Missiles?"

The description of the Beast Master ranger's animal companion states:

[…] The beast obeys your commands as best as it can. It takes its turn on your initiative. On your turn, you can verbally command the beast where to move (no action required by you). You can use your action to verbally command it to take the Attack, Dash, Disengage, or Help action. If you don't issue a command, the beast takes the Dodge action. […]

I'm unsure whether this is a list of the only actions that an animal companion can take during combat (and thus excluding options such as Use and Object and Hide).

Notice that this is different from what find familiar states:

[…] Your familiar acts independently of you, but it always obeys your commands. In combat, it rolls its own initiative and acts on its own turn. A familiar can't attack, but it can take other actions as normal […]

The description of the Ranger's Companion feature goes on to state:

If you are incapacitated or absent, your beast companion acts on its own, focusing on protecting you and itself. […]

Here there are no such action restrictions put on the beast companion. Does this mean that while you are Incapacitated your animal companion could now take actions such as Use an Object if they protected you, whereas otherwise it could not?

Best Answer

I think it's telling that the Revised UA Ranger was updated to more closely match the wording for familiars:

  • The companion obeys your commands as best it can. It rolls for initiative like any other creature, but you determine its actions, decisions, attitudes, and so on. If you are incapacitated or absent, your companion acts on its own.

But, leaving that aside, it seems to me that the way these two clauses interact is critical to the interpretation:

If you are incapacitated or absent, your beast companion acts on its own, focusing on protecting you and itself. [...]

I would interpret "on its own" to mean in the way it would naturally act in the wild. For lack of intelligence and manual capability, you don't see too many wild animals slinging wands of fireball around.

In the context of the rules, this would mean playing the animal companion directly from its stat block. However, the general rules in the Monster Manual (pg 10) do say that

When a monster takes its action, it can choose from the options in the Actions section of its stat block or use one of the actions available to all creatures, such as the Dash or Hide action, as described in the Players Handbook.

and since "Use Object" is such an action, an animal acting "on its own" in accordance with the general action rules would be allowed to use an item among other actions available to it.

Some animals are pretty intelligent and do possess opposable thumbs or prehensile tails, etc, so it's conceivable that they could intuit that the long stick its master waves around to turn things into smoldering corpses could be used in defense.

At the end of it all, I don't think it's possible to arrive at an answer that isn't "Ask your DM" because the rules seem to allow the companion access to the full array of actions but don't necessarily allow it to think or act any differently than a wild animal would act.

Related Topic