Mature Animal Companion and the Traversal trait in Starfinder


Rules Discussion


2 people marked this as a favorite.

The Mature Animal Companion feats for Ranger and Druid both have this text:

Player Core wrote:
During an encounter, even if you don’t use the Command an Animal action, your animal companion can still use 1 action that round on your turn to Stride or Strike.

If you have an animal companion which uses a non-land movement speed as its default (such as the bird or shark), there is a very awkward interaction. Since Stride is explicitly a movement using land speed, your animal companion cannot make use of this benefit. I believe that this is an oversight that could be corrected with the Traversal trait mentioned in Disembarking the Starfinder Second Edition Playtest blog post.

Disembarking the Starfinder Second Edition Playtest wrote:

Traversal

One new element we'll be introducing is the traversal trait. This new trait mostly applies to player-facing rules that reference Stride. When it applies, traversal allows the use of alternative movement types (burrow, fly, and swim) to be used in place of land Speed, akin to how Sneak works. Expect to see this greatly impact some abilities used by the envoy and solarian (to name a few).

I would appreciate it if this got a look over by Paizo, or if I could be corrected if this is indeed intentional.

Thanks!


It's a universal limitation of PF2e. So it's not exclusive to companions.

Many things in PF2e uses Stride as action, but Stride is exclusive to land speed, so it makes many things in the game impossible to be used with others speeds.

I usually ignore this rule and allows using any movement exclusive action (actions that move the token willingly like fly, climb, swim but not move actions that doesn't move like Stand and Prone or aren't movement exclusive) to be used in place of stride. But it's a homebrew that I use personally, it's wrong by RAW.

That said I think that I'm not only one that do this with probably many people using Stride with any move speeds sometimes not even knowing that it is not allowed by the rules.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Second Edition / Rules Discussion / Mature Animal Companion and the Traversal trait in Starfinder All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.