Summoner and Eidolon share Initiative?

[Bloodright]

Pardon my ignorance,

my group and I are new to the pathfinder 2e system and are still learning the ropes. We can't find anywhere a definitive answer on whether the Eidolon and the summoner share the same initiative or are separate, but sharing the actions across the turn.

Any way to point out something in the books as a definitive answer would be greatly appreciated.

[Bloodright]

ok, I think we found our answer. My player was looking at information from PF1e, which was causing his confusion and brought doubt to our train of thought.

[breithauptclan]

I'm also not aware of anywhere that it actually says that the Summoner and Eidolon share initiative, but sharing actions pretty heavily implies that it is needed.

While there may be some ideas to throw around to make it work to have them taking their actions at different points during the round - it would cause a few rules problems.

You only gain your three actions for the round at the start of your turn and has to be able to give actions to the Eidolon. So if the Eidolon beats the Summoner in initiative, the Eidolon wouldn't have any actions to use.

Summoner and Eidolon do explicitly share a Multiple Attack Penalty, but Multiple Attack Penalty does not apply when it isn't your turn.

There are also some logistics problems that would make the game harder to run.

Players would have a harder time effectively and efficiently spending their actions. They would have to pre-allocate actions for the character of the pair that is going later in the initiative order - hoping that the dynamics of the battle haven't changed so much that their idea of how to spend those actions hasn't become invalid.

It would be harder to keep track of how many actions have been used for the round. Especially the reaction. The pair still only gets one of those.

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TL;DR - if you want the Summoner player to have to roll initiative twice and take the worse result, just say so. Because trying to run them at separate initiative counts is going to be even more painful than that.

[batimpact]

I guess this could be relevant for things that activate from an initiative roll like if the eidolon had Battle Cry for example. We've always just treated it as being shared though.

[The Raven Black]

Rolling initiative for your eidolon is useless / makes no sense because of this : "You and your eidolon share your actions and multiple attack penalty. Each round, you can use any of your actions (including reactions and free actions) for yourself or your eidolon."

Which means that your eidolon does not have their own action pool.

Even if they were first to act, they would have zero action they can use until it's the start of your turn.