Commanding a Summoned Animal

[SuperParkourio]

Summon animal lets you summon an animal to fight alongside you. My understanding based on the summoned trait and the minion trait is that the animal takes its actions once per turn when you Cast or Sustain the Spell.

What I'm trying to wrap my head around is whether you have any control over what the animal specifically does. Sustain a Spell/Activation is described in the minion trait as the action you use to command a summoned minion to act. But in the summoned trait, it says you can command it if you can communicate with it. So does the animal just go on the offensive against your enemies when you Sustain the Spell, and the GM decides how it does so? And if you have some means for the animal to understand you, could you make the animal use the exact actions you want it to use?

I'm thinking of a spellcaster that summons a purple worm, has it swallow a creature, then uses the worm's burrow Speed to bury the creature alive. (This would take two turns to do because a summoned worm can't use Fast Swallow.)

[Blave]

By RAW, if the creature can't understand you, it does its best to help you, but it can't follows your commands to the latter because it can't understand them.

Most GMs I know still let the player determine the actions of the summoned creature, if only to not have to worry about yet another thing to control.

[breithauptclan]

RAW on this is a mess.

By RAW, if you use Summon Animal to summon a Riding Pony then it will immediately flee from combat.

Unless you succeed at a Nature check during the Command an Animal action. That has no requirement of sharing a language, but it also isn't available for summoned Minion creatures - only naturally occurring animals. Summoned creatures have to be given commands using the Sustain a Spell action instead.

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Summoning spells are bad enough as it is. They don't need further nerfs by not allowing the player to decide the actions the summoned creature takes - within reason. A GM should feel fully justified in shutting down any overpowered tactics that the player manages to find.

[Chrono]

Revised wording in Player Core: "Most animals panic in battle unless specifically trained otherwise."

I would presume that the combat spell Summon Animals summons combat trained animals.

As for everything else - 'if you can communicate with it' is kind of ambiguous phrasing. Notably, it doesn't use the phrasing 'if it can understand the language you are speaking', and the minion trait notes "if not otherwise specified, you issue a verbal command as a single action with the auditory and concentrate traits". Notably, this action does not have the Linguistic trait - meaning it does not require language to be understood to have an effect. I think it should be taken to mean 'if it is deafened/otherwise unable to hear you', given nothing else in rules supports the idea of intelligible communication being necessary.