Animals and heal checks

[Jadeite]

Are there any actual rules that prohibit an animal, a bear for example, to make an untrained heal check to stabilize a dying character?

[Aubrey the Malformed]

Rules, I suspect not - same way that there are not explicit rules on how amoebas can ride bicycles as the eventuality arising seems pretty remote. However, I would be interested how you would justify this in-game to the DM with a non-Awakened animal, unless having your faithful hound lick your wounds counts as a Heal check. Just because the rules don't say you can't do something isn't the same as saying that you can - this one is surely down to a DM's ruling at the time based on the circumstances.

[udalrich]

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

However, I would be interested how you would justify this in-game to the DM with a non-Awakened animal, unless having your faithful hound lick your wounds counts as a Heal check.

It seems fairly plausible with a bonded companion (familiar, druid's companion, paladin's mount). (I know the familiar is not an animal, but it's similar. It's also smarter than an animal, so that makes it even more plausible.)

With a normal animal, I would consider it (as a GM) if I was accidentally inflicting a lot more damage than I intended too. (Wow, that's the third crit in a row from that classless kobold. Are you still alive?) Otherwise, it would have to be an animal that regularly travels with the party, and where the player had made some impressive Handle Animal checks to train it to do this.

[DM_Blake]

You know, an animal doesn't necessarily have to clean your wound and wrap you in bandages to stabilize you.

Death from negative HP can be just as easily attributed to shock as it cen be to bloodloss. In fact, knocking a fighter from 200 HP to 0 doesn't cause any mechanical bloodloss, so doing one more point doesn't seem to warrant a deadly amount of bloodloss.

So let's call it shock from the accumulation of all that damage (and exhaustion, and running out of luck, etc.).

Now a cold muzzle and a slobbery tonge in your face might reach through that trauma and give you a little jolt, and little reminder iin your subcionscious reptilian mind that the world of life is slipping away, and it might even resuscitate your will to live.

In game terms, that means stabilized. You're not getting medical treatment, not getting HP back, not healing in any way. But you're fighting for your life and no longer dying of shock.

Easy enough to rationalize.

I think I would accept such a rationalization before I'd allow the character sheet to slip away into the paper recycler.

[Mosaic]

Maybe make it a Trick that the animal has to be taught, "Stabilize." That way it has some cost but isn't impossible or automatic. Examples of animals saving their partners can be found in TV, movies and literature, why not make space for it in the game.