It's not feasible to assume, since the retraining rules explicitly disallow it.
Retraining takes all your attention for 8 hours per day for a number of days based on what you’re retraining. You can’t perform any other strenuous activities while retraining, such as marching, adventuring, or crafting magic items. You can retrain only one thing at a time; you must complete or abandon a particular training goal before starting another one. Abandoning unfinished training means you lose all progress toward that training’s goal and all costs associated with that training.
Handle animal allows some other activities, provided that they aren't full-day activities; this is because animal training uses three-hour days:
For tasks with specific time frames noted above, you must spend half this time (at the rate of 3 hours per day per animal being handled) working toward completion of the task before you attempt the Handle Animal check.
So you could train one animal while "crafting while adventuring" a magic item, for example - or even train two and make a cheap scroll or potion. But you can't retrain while doing so, because retraining occupies the whole day.
I have always assumed that days on golarion were 24 hours long, am I wrong?if they are you need to sleep for 8 hours and retrain for 8 hours but where did the other 8 hours go? Of course you would need to spend some time eating and going to the bathroom and whatnot but that shouldn’t take the whole 8 hours. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that 3 hours could be spent training your pet. Yeah your days would be pretty full but I think it would still be possible. Maybe have to make some Fort saves to avoid fatigue though. Duh I totally glazed over the “no strenuous activity part and focused in on the time aspect. Anything combat oriented would be out but something simple like “come” or “stay” might be feasible. I guess it would depend on the trick. Your pet is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting here I think. When I trained my dog to fetch it took some time but wasn’t what I would call physically demanding.
|
It all depends on what you or your GM see as strenuous activity vs having fun.
I am sure we can find plenty of examples of people that feel that coming home after work and spending 3 hours training their dog, horse, or whatever is the best thing in the world, fun and energizing. But you will find many more that would feel it is a core and a drain in energy.
Same thing for coming home after work and crafting jewelry, building models, blacksmithing, etc.
As the rules can't cover the personal passions of the characters against what they will feel is strenuous work, they use a minimum common denominator, so all extra work that does something useful in the game is considered strenuous. Doing otherwise, the players will have an easy time saying "Thanks to my ring of sustenance, my character works 20 hours a day." and do that for 2 years of character time, without any consideration on how it will feel for the character.
Not so long ago the work time was longer than 8 hours, but generally, real productivity wasn't higher, even in fields where modern technology doesn't make a real difference. You can do overtime for a period and get more work done, but beyond a point, you lose efficiency.
Both training an animal and retraining a feat are at least as strenuous as walking. The rules for movement state that you can walk for 8 hours before you start having to make CON Checks to avoid taking non-lethal damage and becoming fatigued. This clearly shows that RAW after working for 8 hours you are start to have problems. Since a fatigued character can no longer run or charge I would say that once fatigued they can no longer retrain or train an animal.
From personal experience I can say that after working for more than about 8 hours your efficiency starts to fade. In reality it starts to fade a lot sooner but most people take breaks during the work day. If nothing else most people at least break for lunch. Typically you work for about 4 hours and then take a half hour to an hour for lunch. Eating lunch usually does not take that long, but the rest of the time is spent relaxing.
Another thing that people are not taking into account is that caring for the animal companion also takes time.
Figure that in addition to sleeping a character will be spending at least 2 hours a day eating and otherwise relaxing. Out of a 24 hour day that leaves 6 hours of free time. Another thing that is not being factored in is that taking care of the animal companion itself takes time. Pets need attention so figure the character is going to need to spend at least another hour probably more feeding and caring for his animal. So that drops the time available to train an animal to about 4-5 hours. Could a character use that time to train his companion?
I would have the character make a few CON rolls before even attempting. 2 CON rolls is about right, this is to cover taking care of feeding and playing with the animal and other miscellaneous chores the character needs to do. So the character would need to make a series of CON Roll to successfully train the animal after spending the day retraining. The first 2 rolls (12 & 14) would need to be made before he can even attempt to start training. After that he would need to make 3 more rolls of 16, 18 & 20 before he can make the check to see if he can keep going long enough. As per the rules in animal handling any failure on any of these rolls causes the attempt to automatically fail.
So while it may be theoretically possible to train your companion while retraining it is going to be incredibly difficult to actually do so. It will take 35 CON rolls in a row to succeed.