How smart are tashtaris? Alien Archive 2 entry is confusing.

[Tusk the Half-Orc]

From the thread ”What other Uplifted Animals do you wanna see?”, a couple of years ago:

Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:

For home game use, i remain a big fan of creating any uplifted animal i want with this product (written by Alex Augunas and published in conjunction with my company, Rogue Genius Games) - https://paizo.com/products/btq01xdb?Star-LogDeluxe-Uplifted-Animals

For official Paizo creatures, I'd love to see something *very* different, like uplifted tashtari!

This goes to the reason why I'm searching "tashtari" on the forums this evening, as I prepare to run an encounter with them: how intelligent are they?

According to the tashtari stat block in AA2, the standard tashtari has an Intelligence modifier of +0, making them as intelligent as the average human (in which case they wouldn’t need to be uplifted).

The narrative description, however, suggests that they are closer to animal intelligence, with references like "Sentient species of Castrovel refer to these beasts as tashtaris..." and "Attempts to domesticate tashtaris .... but trainers must closely monitor..." (emphasis mine).

How do you run these creatures? As human-level intelligent adversaries, or hungry pack hunters? And can we get a FAQ or errata to tell us what the official answer is?

[CorvusMask]

Starfinder isn't super consistent with stat modifiers in general, like I think 2e is actually more consistent with them in general

(also really starting to get annoyed about continued confusion of sapience and sentience in paizo material x'D Majority of animals are sentient, only few are sapient)

[Metaphysician]

CorvusMask wrote:

Starfinder isn't super consistent with stat modifiers in general, like I think 2e is actually more consistent with them in general

(also really starting to get annoyed about continued confusion of sapience and sentience in paizo material x'D Majority of animals are sentient, only few are sapient)

Eh, the whole distinction between "sentient" and "sapient". . . arguably, it only was created so as to try and maintain humanity's special status once that started failing with new discoveries. Yes, they technically have different meanings, but the question isn't whether they mean different things, but whether those different things are actually *important*. People using the term "sentient" to mean "intelligent in the way humans are and thus potential people" are using it in its original meaning, and its not exactly ambiguous the intent.

( Now if you want to argue that the original intended usage of "sentient" was *stupid* from the getgo and founded in some really weird and ignorant ideas about how animal life works, *that* I would agree with. )