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So feinting against a non-humanoid has a -4 penalty... but what if you are a non-humanoid? Does a Ghoran take a -4 for feinting other Ghorans but not Elves? What about the various Native Outsiders?
I mean, I assume it's written like that because the game is humanoid-centric, but the spell Hideous Laughter has this:
A creature whose type is different from the caster’s receives a +4 bonus on its saving throw, because humor doesn’t “translate” well.
so I'm not sure if the rules for feinting are like that on purpose or because the devs just plain forgot that there might be non-humanoid races feinting.
It does appear to be written like that. I mean you shouldn't run into other Ghorans THAT much.
You could rationalize it as saying that other races simply are wired differently, and using human tactics isn't always effective.
In a home game it seems pretty simple to smooth over with your DM, but I believe in previous posts you mentioned being in a strict RAW community.
There are places in the rules where they use "humanoid" in the English sense of "shaped more or less like a human" rather than the technical game sense of "a being of type humanoid." This is probably one of them.
Another is the "humanoid creatures need two free hands to grapple properly" rule, and the Armor for Unusual Creatures table captions. That last one is the clearest case; I find it obvious that they're not saying an aasimar's armor is somehow more expensive than a human's!
The use of "humanoid" as an adjective instead of a noun is a good flag. If the feinting rules did that I'd be sure they meant the English term instead of just suspecting it strongly.
It's just too bad English doesn't really have a synonym for "humanoid" that PF could use for that. The Bestiary descriptions of several types use "generally humanoid in form," which is a bit cumbersome.
That is a good point, Fuzzy. And it would certainly make more sense...