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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 2569368" data-attributes="member: 259">My understanding is that there are not specific rules determining what tactics may be used by creatures acording to their mental stats.  This is more left up to the judgment of the DM.If it's a player-controlled animal (e.g., a companion or summoned animal), I'd encourage you to be very generous:  allow the player to play their animal as understanding good tactics.  If the animal consistently targets spellcasters and readies actions to attack if the spellcaster begins to cast, you might rule that they're going overboard; but if they're just charging, power-attacking, grappling, flanking, attacking from higher ground, etc., I think you should let it happen.Consider that most of the complex combat maneuvers are actualy modelling very simple behaviors.  The withdraw maneuver just means you back out of combat without turning your tail and ignoring your attacker; it doesn't take a brilliant intelligence to figure out that this is a good way to back away, and many animals should be able to do so.  If an animal ever needs to make a 5' step (e.g., to move in close to full-attack), there's no reason why it would have trouble figuring that out.For other maneuvers--tripping, sundering, flanking--it's probably a good idea to establish personalities for the animals that they'll do.  A wolf is likely to try to trip whenever possible, as this is an instinctive behavior; same thing with flanking.  The bear is likely to try to crush an enemy to death by grappling, but less likely to try to trip them unless they've been trained to do so.  And so on.Daniel</blockquote>

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