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I have in my party a L6 Cleric of Sarenrae who has taken a Beastmaster dedication. She recently got access to the Final Sacrifice spell, and now is gleefully training new animal companion for the purpose of kamikaze-ing them at any combat, and is rejoicing about having basically a mill of firebombs that she just has to retrain every week.
While it’s not explicitly written, I think Sarenrae would have a problem with that, to the point of it being an anathema. She is denying an innocent creature life, in a very „ends justify the means“ way.
What things can I cite which show Sarenrae being very against this sort of thing? Or, am I misinterpreting and actually Sarenrae would be somehow maybe not thrilled but also OK with this?
Would appreciate your take
ETA: I’m the GM. I’m not super happy of the ammo mill but RAW it’s not an anathema at least to Sarenrae and I think not even to her throuple, but I had thought that maybe if the character is really too wantonly sending animals to die, maybe a DC5 flat check for the animal to rebel which gets higher with each offense
RAW you aren't violating an anathema once that Sarenrae anathemas doesn't include this.
But I believe that she doesn't become happy of one of her clerics not following the edict of "protect allies". But while you are doing this in the name of greater good maybe she (your GM) may turn a blind eye.
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Moral quandary aside, I question the mechanics of this idea.
You don't get to retrain the Animal Companion instantly once per week. That isn't how retraining works.
You take an entire week off of adventuring and spend that time Retraining your Animal Companion feat to get a new companion. You don't get to Earn Income during that time. You don't get to craft new equipment or consumables. You don't get to replace spells in your Repertoire. And you certainly don't get to go adventuring with your party.
The rest of the party is either going to go adventuring without you, or will have to also spend a week of Downtime finding something of their own to do (possibly while the world burns down around them). Or you are going to go adventuring with the party to save the world and will have to put off getting a new Animal Companion for a while.
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The trick works better with a Witch casting it on their Familiar because the Familiar will be restored automatically the next day. Then you only have the moral quandary to work out.
It also works reasonably well on Summon spells, but it ends up taking two spell slot castings and nearly two rounds of actions to accomplish. You can do it more than once per day at that point though. And since the strength of the fireball is based on the Rank of Final Sacrifice cast, you can use low Rank spells for the summon as long as you can keep them alive until you can detonate them.
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Moral quandary aside, I question the mechanics of this idea.
You don't get to retrain the Animal Companion instantly once per week. That isn't how retraining works.
You take an entire week off of adventuring and spend that time Retraining your Animal Companion feat to get a new companion. You don't get to Earn Income during that time. You don't get to craft new equipment or consumables. You don't get to replace spells in your Repertoire. And you certainly don't get to go adventuring with your party.
The rest of the party is either going to go adventuring without you, or will have to also spend a week of Downtime finding something of their own to do (possibly while the world burns down around them). Or you are going to go adventuring with the party to save the world and will have to put off getting a new Animal Companion for a while.
Oh I like this take…I missed where you don’t get to do anything else but train the companion. That could make this naturally self-correcting.
The trick works better with a Witch casting it on their Familiar because the Familiar will be restored automatically the next day. Then you only have the moral quandary to work out.
Also, to add and correct some things:
With the Witch changes in the Remaster, this is a bit more costly.
You can't Refocus without your Familiar unless you have an archetype that gives you a different way of qualifying for the Refocus activity.
But more importantly, you are losing out on the Familiar's unique ability for the rest of the day. That affects some Patron themes more than others. Flamekeeper and Resentment Witch will be feeling that loss a lot more than Inscribed or Silence in Snow Witch will.
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This can be corrected on a mechanical level by not giving them as much downtime. As Finoan mentioned, getting one companion back takes a full week of downtime, during which you're doing nothing else. Even if they have multiple companions, once they're all dead, its one per week to get them back. That starts getting costly pretty quickly and without enough downtime just becomes nonviable.
As for Sarenrae... well back when she was Neutral Good this would probably be considered an Evil act and that would have worked. That's less of a thing these days, but it definitely doesn't feel like something Sarenrae would approve of. One of her worshippers doing Evil things and not repenting for it is still anathema to her.
However, Sarenrae isn't the only Deity in Golarian, and nothing says this character isn't angering another one. For example, this is against the Green Faith, and that has powerful adherents, including powerful animals. Maybe they take notice. The Grim White Stag comes to mind, who just also happens to be formerly worshiped as a Green Faith god and is now a follower of Erastil.
For that matter, there's Erastil himself. He has no problem with killing animals (he is a god of the Hunt after all), but there's a big difference between subsistence hunting and what this character is doing. He also happens to have a moderate curse that makes all animals react more negatively to the character, which definitely feels appropriate for this kind of behavior.
There's also a couple of Empryeal Lords this applies to (Uskyeria and Tanagaar from a quick search), and nothing says they can't get pissed off about it either.
You've got a pretty big toolbox here in terms of "either a faction hears about this and doesn't like it, the primal world itself doesn't like it and reacts, or another divine being doesn't like it and reacts."
(I also know in at least one of my games, the other players would react badly to what this player is doing. Animal cruelty is just a hard nope and it would turn into an out of character problem.)
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(I also know in at least one of my games, the other players would react badly to what this player is doing. Animal cruelty is just a hard nope and it would turn into an out of character problem
I know that behaviour like this would definitely drive me from a game.
The player is either treating her character as a cartoon with no feelings or like a psychopath. I've got better things to do than spend my gaming time with a scumbag like that.
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ReinerZufall: Talk to the player. Even if it were RAW (which others have pointed out issues with it RAW, it's clearly not RAI. and Yeah, that easily could make anyone uncomfortable. Talk to the player and explain your perspective. Having rules to back up your perspective is great and all, but always remember Rule 0: If a rule is getting in the way of fun, change it, it's your game.
Like I said, I think the best option here is to talk to the player and explain how uncomfortable this makes you feel, and how exploitative of mechanics this action is. And set the firm boundary, with a clear consequence for abusing that boundary(because that spell does have some use, I don't want to say they can never use it).
You've got this.
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While it's not explicitly against Anathema, I do agree that it's not something Sarenrae would generally approve of.
I could see Sarenrae accepting the heroic sacrifice of an animal companion in a pitched battle against the BBEG.
I would expect her to be displeased if someone started doing this regularly. It seems very out of character for what we would've thought of as good cleric of good god, before the removal of alignment rules.
In this case, I think it is actually appropriate for you as a GM to say no, Sarenrae wouldn't accept this behavior, and the cleric knows it.
Considering that Final Sacrifice is basically the fireball spell at 2nd level instead of 3rd (because you have to sacrifice a minion) and that Sarenrae grants the fireball spell...I just wouldn't let this happen.
All that said, the week of downtime where the character can't do anything else is probably going to stop this from being a tactic the character uses.
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Yeah, the edict to protect allies is probably the only "evidence" that Sarenrae wouldn't be okay with the player's plan to do this, but it's a pretty strong piece of evidence (in my opinion).
Still, it's possible the player may complain because it's not explicitly forbidden. But that's more of a player problem at that point.
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(I also know in at least one of my games, the other players would react badly to what this player is doing. Animal cruelty is just a hard nope and it would turn into an out of character problemI know that behaviour like this would definitely drive me from a game.
The player is either treating her character as a cartoon with no feelings or like a psychopath. I've got better things to do than spend my gaming time with a scumbag like that.
I've seen a lot of new players go through an initial psycho phase, and then settle into being normal fun players. I think it's part of figuring out just how free you really are in a tabletop RPG. So I wouldn't judge the player's entire personality on it.
But, that doesn't mean I want it happening in my real campaign because it's pretty disruptive to the story and can be immersion-breaking for other players: "why would our characters want to associate with this maniac?"
I feel like PF1's "We be goblins" adventures were a nice way for people to get stuff out of their system. Go play pyro psycho baddies for a bit and have fun, and after that we can talk about a campaign with more composed personalities.