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I'm playing in a PF1 campaign and we just reached level 7. My intention from the start was to have my halfling take Leadership and recruit his riding dog as a cohort. By the Monster Cohort rules it would probably have an effective level of 1 or 2 for the purposes of recruitment. Once recruited it would start gaining exp with the party and begin gaining levels in fighter, eventually reaching the cohort level limit of 2 less than their Leader.

I'd thought I'd been clear with my plan, but now that we're actually there I'm being told that's not allowed. That in order for an animal to be a cohort or to gain levels it would need to be Awakened first and I don't see any reason for that to be necessary. Here are some of the reasons I've been given:

1. Animals can't have Int more than 2, so they can't have a class. I've never seen, nor can I find, any rule that requires a creature to have a Int of 3 or higher to accumulate exp and/or earn class levels. And the monster advancement rules in the Bestiary clearly contradict this idea since it has rules for giving monsters classes as well as other ways of advancing them.

2. Animals can't have Int more than 2, so they can't be recruited as a cohort. There's nothing in the Leadership rules that require a cohort to have an Int of 3 or higher. Yes, the Monster Cohort rules give examples, and none of the examples are animals or have an int less than 5, but it doesn't say that creatures need an Int of 3 or higher to be a cohort so it should be possible.

3. Animals aren't Monsters, so the Monster Cohort rules in the Bestiary don't apply. This is the most annoying argument imo because the Table of Contents in the Bestiary clearly classify animals as monsters.

If anyone can shed some light on where these 'rules' are so I can look them up I'd greatly appreciate it. I've already given up on trying to discuss it with my DM, he made his ruling and I don't want to argue with him about it. But I'm really trying to understand where these ideas are coming from because I can't find anything about it in the sources I have on hand.

I only see one other thread on these forums about the topic (from 2015) and it doesn't have any answers for me.

I don't want to have the dog Awakened, it's not something that's available till we reach level 9, and it's not something that the character would do to his dog. I know that I could take feats for, or cross class into something that has, an animal companion or special mount and just treat the dog as a class feature. That's also not something I want to do for various reasons, but mostly because it feels like it cheapens the life of the animal since it makes them more easily replaceable.

I had a situation recently where a player fell off her mount and ended up prone in a melee. She was adjacent to her mount when her turn came around and she asked if she was able to use Fast Mount to get up from prone and mount her horse in a single action. I wasn't sure so I let her roll for the Fast Mount because I thought it would be cool, but now I'm trying to find an official ruling on the question and I've been unable to.

The Mount/Dismount a Steed action doesn't specify that you need to be standing to do it, just that it's a move action. Mounting also doesn't provoke AoOs, so if you can do it from a prone position it would allow characters with mounts to bypass the AoOs standing up usually incurs. Further, using Fast Mount to get up from prone would be a free action bypassing the normal action economy of having to Stand Up.

Unless I'm missing something it definitely seems like RAW you can mount a steed regardless of your current position, tho now the pedant in me is pointing out that it doesn't specify that you need to be adjacent to your steed to mount it either...so you could mount your steed from across the room and teleport to your mount if it worked that way.

I'm a bit unsure about RAI on the issue tho. There are feats specifically for standing up without provoking AoOs or with less action cost, and it feels exploitive to let someone replicate those effects with a basic skill check.

So I was helping a player out with his new PF2 Wild Druid and I noticed something that feels like an error. The base Dinosaur Form spell says it gives a +9 bonus to damage, but when heighted to lvl5 the bonus drops to +6 and that seems extremely counterintuitive. I recognize the heightened spell also increases the number of damage dice, but the lvl7 version of the spell also doubles the damage dice and the damage bonus jumps up to +15. So it starts at +9, then drops to +6, and then goes up to +15? This seems very wrong to me and definitely feels like a typo.

I looked at a few of the other Form spells and I don't see any of them doing something like this, so I'm pretty sure this is an error but I wanted to see what the community thinks or find out if there's been a comment from Paizo about this that I haven't been able to find via google and the forum search.