Animal Companions, tricks, and Handle Animal

[JolarEQ]

I have a question about how Animal Companions work, when it comes to tricks. I'm going to be playing a Mad Dog, with a wolf as a companion. Now, since she has 2 Int, I know she gets 6 tricks, plus 1 bonus trick. My question about the tricks is, does she know them already, or do I have to train her before she can use them? I know the bonus trick doesn't need any training time, but what about the first 6?

Also, when having her do one of her tricks, whether it be attack or flank or whatever, do I need to do the Handle Animal check to get her to do any of those tricks? Again, I know the bonus trick can be done without the check, but wanted to double check about the original 6.

Thanks!

[Michael Sayre]

Tricks that the animal knows don't typically require checks. Most GM's will start you out with the assumption that you have spent some time with your animal companion and it already knows its full suite of starting tricks. You typically don't start adventuring 5 seconds after you've finished wrestling a bear into submission and before you and the bear have even had a chance to introduce yourselves. If you acquire your Animal Companion after 1st levl, your GM may require you to spend the appropriate amount of time using the Handle Animal skill to train your new friend accordingly.

[RumpinRufus]

Technically, having your AC perform a trick it already knows is still a DC 10 Handle Animal check (DC 12 if it's injured.)

The easy solution to avoiding Handle Animal checks is bump your companion's INT to 3 ASAP, then give it a rank in Linguistics and teach it a language you know.

[Michael Sayre]

RumpinRufus wrote:

Technically, having your AC perform a trick it already knows is still a DC 10 Handle Animal check (DC 12 if it's injured.)

This is true. Considering that you get a +4 to handle your AC and a single rank in Handle Animal should have you at at least a +8 (hopefully more if you have anything resembling a CHA score) I've never known it to be an issue, but that is required by RAW.

[JolarEQ]

Ok, great! I figured it would be that they already know the tricks, but I'll discuss that with my GM. With the +4, I'm only at a 7, which still isn't too bad (-1 on Cha.) So, a 10 shouldn't be too hard to get (although with my rolls lately...)

Thanks for the responses!

[BigNorseWolf]

JolarEQ wrote:

I have a question about how Animal Companions work, when it comes to tricks. I'm going to be playing a Mad Dog, with a wolf as a companion. Now, since she has 2 Int, I know she gets 6 tricks, plus 1 bonus trick. My question about the tricks is, does she know them already, or do I have to train her before she can use them?

Its not specified, but most people assume that you didn't get the animal yesterday, and you've trained it before the campaign starts.

Quote:

Also, when having her do one of her tricks, whether it be attack or flank or whatever, do I need to do the Handle Animal check to get her to do any of those tricks?

Yes. The dc is 10 for tricks they know and 25 for ones they don't.

You should have

1 rank in handle animal
+3 from the class skill bonus
+4 from the "Link" special ability on the critter

Meaning that you should only need a 2 or so to get it to do tricks.

Remember to give it the attack trice twice, or it won't attack some kinds of monsters for you. The general purpose "combat trained" and using the extra trick to learn attack again works fairly well.

According to the monkey see monkey do blog, upping the int to 3 and giving it a rank in linguistics won't negate the need for handle animal checks (but should give it a fair bit of leeway in what it does when its not listening to you)