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Hi everyone,
From what I can tell, I'm sure tons of you are sick of reading rules questions regarding animal companions. I'm here to wreck your day! (Not really.)
For context: I've got an aasimar hunter in PFS that I am interested in playing correctly, or at least as correctly as the glorious web of poorly-interlocking rules for animals and animal companions will let me. One of the appeals of the race/class combo for me was Celestial Servant (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/arg-feats/celestial-servant-aasimar) which gives your animal companion (or etcetera) the Celestial template. I feel like this stuff has been adequately clarified for houserule purposes, but I'm not really sure how this works in a strict-RAW environment like PFS yet.
Question 1: Has there ever been any official ruling on how animal companions apply combat options? This applies to my case not just for power attack but also for smite evil. At early levels the celestial template seems mostly useful for the smite evil ability, but there are lots of neutral thugs out there in scenarios. If the AC just kinda smites the first thing it sees, that's not a very useful template until the DR starts kicking in. I personally would not have a problem with the "increase its int and give it a rank in Linguistics so you can bloody tell it when to use its combat options" approach as a solution to the problem. Unfortunately for me, that clearly doesn't work for eliminating handle animal checks, and post-clarification I'm not sure what the RAI even is in this case, let alone RAW.
Question 2: Has anyone official ever officially clarified whether a celestial template's Smite Evil is the Paladin's smite evil or not? I am assuming no, and I think I see that the community's assumption is that they are different. Still, fifteen forum posts from five-star GMs are not the same as an official Paizo clarification somewhere. This might be especially useful for when I'm GMing and a player who hasn't spent half a weekend reading forum posts tries to have his paladin's mount smite something and they want the persistent effect.
This last one particularly bugs me because the generally implied rule in complex rule systems is that entities with the same name should be treated as the same entity in all cases, following rules laid out elsewhere for resolving which description supersedes the other(s). And this really looks to me like a case where someone said, "We can't fit all this text into the character limit. What can we trim?" (Or alternately, it was written before the paladin got its smite evil buffed.)
Thanks!
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Celestial Servant PRD Link, for reference.
Regarding Celestial Servant SR, James Jacobs comes as close to "official" as I've ever read. Even though he's "not a rules guy", his answer is better than arguing with a GM.
Following up on the Celestial Servant question, how am I supposed to calculate the CR of my mount, to figure out its spell resistance? I browsed the Bestiary, but could find any pattern to go by.Animal companions, mounts, familiars, and the like do not have CR scores. Use your character's CR (this equals your character's total character level minus 1) instead as the SR baseline.
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Thanks for the response.
Nothing, with respect to #1, I totally understand that. That is a huge amount of leeway for PFS and could potentially make combat options useful or useless depending on the GM. I was curious whether there were any rulings as to how players might communicate intent with an animal companion in strict PFS. I was unable to find any, so maybe they just don't exist.
With respect to #2, I am also aware of how the community feels about it, but I don't feel it was straightforward, and I was curious if anyone was aware of an official ruling on the subject. I explained why I felt there was ambiguity--they have the same name and thus are not clearly and obviously different. In fact, because they share a name, in most rulesets they would be the same ability, and one description would supersede the other. I get that the PF community disagrees, but I have seen no reason to rule with a random member of the community over my hypothetical interpretation.
With tabletop rulesets, the way you usually separate out revisions to the same entity from the creation of a new entity is by name. Same name means it's a revision. Different name means it's a new thing.
This happens occasionally in certain other tabletop systems, including the one that Pathfinder grew out of. You may not personally be familiar with that practice, but for someone who is, it makes the situation unclear.
Nefreet, thank you for the answer, but... I didn't have a question about spell resistance.
Ac are presumed to know how to use any ability they posses. If a feat or trait has been legally applied to an ac the dm has no grounds to restrict its use.
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Nefreet, thank you for the answer, but... I didn't have a question about spell resistance.
Ah. Indeed. Sorry. 9 out of 10 times I see a question come up about Celestial Servant, it's regarding its undefined SR.
Your stance about abilities of the same name being the same thing is (mostly) endorsed in Pathfinder. There's a lengthy post by a Developer that even clarifies that is the case. But that same Developer is also the one that specified that a Celestial "smite evil" and a Paladin's "smite evil" are different things, so it's not a consistent stance.
Run it as per the rules for the paladin,use the linguistics tactic for control over what gets smit and when.
Nothing broken there, just logical.
1. You can push an animal to do something it has not been trained to do, so you can do that to make it not smite. Otherwise I would assume it is not smart enough to not smite. As a GM, if someone gave it an int above 2 it might be able to figure it out.
Of course some might argue that since a cheetah knows when to use its speed burst, that an animal can instinctively know when to smite. It could be similar to how snakes figure out how much venom to put into someone. Basically there really is no rule for it.
2. They are not the same. The half-fiend and half celestial also smite differently and they do it just like the paladin. So if the celestial template was intended to work the same way it would use either the paladin's description or the one from the half-celestial template.
There are also other abilities with the same name, that don't do the same thing. Same name does not mean they work the same.
Channel energies are independent, but they all use the same rules. There is no paladin channel energy, cleric channel energy.. its all just channel energy
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HERE is that Developer using Channel Energy as an example of "things that should be the same" (liked by 63 people to date, I might add), though I'm having trouble finding where he clarifies that Celestial "smite evil" and a Paladin's "smite evil" are not "things that should be the same".
This argument came up before, and someone tried to use word count as an excuse but there is only about a 5 word difference between the half celestial version and the celestial version.
Also there is no "general" version of smite. That is why one can reference the paladin's smite, and another can work differently.
Those GM's can try to say it was a misprint, but they are incorrect.
As an example of a monster using an ability differently from a class the Cannon golem has "gun training" and so does the gunslinger, but they don't have the same wording. Do those GM's think the cannon golem should target touch AC?