Need some DM assistance with Handle Animal and Wild Empathy

[Cravix]

So there was an encounter in a book im running where my CR8 group would have to deal with a CR10 Giant Snake. So the snake has a low charisma and the druid just makes a simple wild empathy check and all of a sudden my gargantuan guard snake isnt supposed to guard any more. Also they wanted to argue that they could use Handle Animal to use push and tell the snake to go away. They argued with me and when i said no im doing dm ruling they got super gripey with me. So are there official rulings, threads anything that can help me out with this?

[zlefin]

need some more info:
Why did the snake not attack the druid when he got close enough to try the wild empathy check? wild empathy says it takes time like a diplomacy check, 1 minute by default, and within 30' of each other.
what was the snakes' initial attitude toward the party?
what number did the druid get on his wild empathy check? (and hence what would it move his attitude to according to the table)
why was it guarding the area? and what exact actions was it supposed to prevent?

is this 3.5 or PF? i'm using the 3.5 texts for now.

sometimes your party simply finds a way around an encounter that you didn't expect, and they should just get to succeed.

[Hackulator]

Yeah, as the guy said, using wild empathy on an animal takes a minute. The guard snake should have just attacked them immediately.

Also, assuming its starting attitude was "hostile" and in order to get the guard snake not to attack them they need to get it to "friendly" (indfferent isn't good enough, its job is to attack them) that is a DC 35 wild empathy check which very few level 8 druids could make.

However, if they guard snake didn't attack and they did make the roll, yes they should be able to bypass the snake. I mean, he's a druid, making friends with animals is one of his specialties. If someone used an animal against him, they made a bad decision.

[Crake]

need some more info:
Why did the snake not attack the druid when he got close enough to try the wild empathy check? wild empathy says it takes time like a diplomacy check, 1 minute by default, and within 30' of each other.

Keep in mind, just like a diplomacy check, you can take -10 on the check to do it as a full round action, though if it's pathfinder (which I am inclined to believe it is, since he mentioned the snake's charisma modifier, which helps determine the DC of the wild empathy check), then I don't believe that option still exists.

We do need to know a bit more about the encounter, but honestly, if the druid managed to influence the snake to at least indifferent, and then succeeded on the check to push the animal, as long as leaving was a reasonable option (like, for example, if the snake was guarding her eggs, leaving would NOT be reasonable), though I can see an argument for handle animal only working for domesticated animals.

In that case, assuming you're using pathfinder again, the diplomacy option for "make a request", handled through wild empathy should have been sufficient. Either way, there's no reasons this should have been something out of the ordinary. What did you expect, when you're throwing animals against a druid?

[Elkad]

The fact is, some encounters (especially against single creatures) just break in the first round.
They get charmed, dominated, wild empathy, a paralyze sticks, Ray of Stupidity drops them to 0 Int, the Barbarian does a charging power attack and crits for x4 damage to one-shot it, or dozens of other things.

No big deal. The party gets an easy one occasionally.