Missed Opportunity For Awakened Animals

[WarDriveWorley]

I love the Ancestry and Heritages, but I feel there should either be a heritage for a slow moving armored animal or a feat that gives natural armor.

Personally I think both could be justified with the feat making the heritage's armor better, but also offering natural armor to other heritages.

Hoping Paizo adds these at a later date

[Ryuujin-sama]

Yeah not sure how well the Ankylosaurus could be portrayed by the Awakened Animal, I assume just choose to be large and maybe have the option to pick a tail attack or something. But a slow moving armored form would probably better fit it. Would also help if they could pick a tail attack like what the Ankylosaurus instinct Animal Barbarian apparently gets.

[Easl]

Resistance of 1/2 level round up to one type of damage (here, P or S?) is consistent with some other L1 ancestry feats. If you wanted it as a free baseline ancestry feature instead, combine with -5' to base move for balance maybe? You could then add resistance to the other (S or P) as a L5 ancestry feat, and then have it go up to resistance = level as a L9 or L13 feat.

You could also make that available to awakened anthromorphic turtles. Because everyone needs chargen access to a teenage awakened rogue turtle.

But this discussion (and additional discussion on other homebrew awakened animal packages) probably now belongs in the H&HR section.

[Ezekieru]

A Level 1 feat that gives the Medium natural armor, like what Automatons gets with Reinforced Chassis, would be a great future addition to Awakened Animals.

[The Raven Black]

Simplest RAW way currently would be to create a custom mixed ancestry heritage based on an Ancestry with this kind of armor feat, such as Automaton or Kashrishi.

[Kelseus]

I think it is more that they have limited space for an ancestry that allows for infinite possibilities. They have heritages/feats for climbing, running, swimming and flying animals, plus feats that don't fall into one of those categories.

I would work with your DM to allow for feats for an animal that doesn't fit easily in those broad categories. There are Athamaru and Nagaji heritages that grant natural medium armor.

I would hesitate to give anything more than that.

[Zoken44]

While it won't work for PFS, I imagine if you explain this right, you shouldn't have a problem getting your GM to accept such a feat, so long as it matches in level an number.

[Gaulin]

I was also hoping for some sort of built in armor feat (or even graft) but I definitely understand that you can't fit every cool animal thing into a single ancestry.

[JiCi]

Here's the thing: would it be a heritage or a feat that would grant natural armor? If flying animals lose their ability to fly once awakened, pretty sure skins, scales and chitins become weaker and softer as well.

Also, burrowing animals got the short end of the stick IMO, although I've seen someone suggesting to allow them to select the Shoony's Dig Quickly feat as a houserule.

Finally, no word was given on alternate awakening methods... I would love to see differences for awakening with the spell versus Numerian technological experiments (insert Guardians of the Galaxy reference here), Mana Wastes mutations or even Entu Symbiote symbiosis (from Starfinder).