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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7034016" data-attributes="member: 6683613">You perform a ritual to summon it and you perform a ritual to resurrect it. Those are distinct active abilities, not passive. And while they're not technically spells, they probably ought to be treated as such, because any game that has to make a distinction between "magic ritual" and "magic spell" is really straining its unnecessary complexity budget. The passive features of the animal companion are not magical. They are (a) skill proficiencies; (b) hit dice; (c) ASIs; (d) Favored Enemy; (e) Coordinated Attack; (f) Beast's Defense; (g) Storm of Claws and Fangs; and (h) Superior Beast's Defense. None of these features would be out of place on a totally mundane creature. If I wanted to write a beast-tamer barbarian subclass, I could give its animal these exact features and I doubt you'd bat an eye (except, y'know, at my plagiarism).So yes, you can give the beast a magical passive ability and justify it because magic. It's magic, and it's a fictional game; you can do whatever you want with it. But a magical ability would be out of place in this collection of nonmagical features. If the animal companion already got features that let it shed light and levitate and speak in tongues, that would be a different story. Then the message being conveyed by the class features would be "you are turning this animal into a magical creature". The message being conveyed by these features, however, is "you have an animal buddy who does animal things". Throwing one explicitly magical ability into these features would be off-message.We've already had the conversation about ranger magic. Not interested.</blockquote>

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