Planar Ranger

[Yogibear41]

If a Planar Ranger has a celestial or fiendish animal companion, therefore increasing its intelligence to 3 and changing its type to magical beast, does the Ranger still need to perform handle animal checks to tell the creature what to do?

[rockdeworld]

Not in my campaign (though I've never had a druid try to teach tricks to their companion).

But more seriously, here's the RAW: Epic Handle Animal (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/skills.htm#handleAnimal)

To do the things that you can do with the Handle Animal skill, you effectively increase the DC by 40. Now a nice DM will say something like "the animal is intelligent and so knows how to do that." But a mean one will make you use the skill, and a very mean one will say "we're not using the ELH and you can't do that."

[Yogibear41]

I was more concerned with "handling" the animal in combat, by the rules a druid or ranger has to make a handle animal check to tell its companion to attack a creature.

[Troacctid]

Since the Handle Animal check is a free action, you can just keep making it until you succeed, so whatever.

But yeah, since the fiendish/celestial companion has an Int of 3, that means it understands a language, usually Common, so you can give orders to it with normal speech, making Handle Animal unnecessary.

[Curmudgeon]

Not in my campaign (though I've never had a druid try to teach tricks to their companion).

But more seriously, here's the RAW: Epic Handle Animal (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/skills.htm#handleAnimal)

To do the things that you can do with the Handle Animal skill, you effectively increase the DC by 40. Now a nice DM will say something like "the animal is intelligent and so knows how to do that." But a mean one will make you use the skill, and a very mean one will say "we're not using the ELH and you can't do that."
Looks like they dropped the ball here. In contrast, the Elf Ranger substitution levels (Races of the Wild, pages 156-157) explicitly lets the Ranger use Handle Animal with their Elven Hound companion even though it's a Magical Beast.

[Troacctid]

Looks like they dropped the ball here. In contrast, the Elf Ranger substitution levels (Races of the Wild, pages 156-157) explicitly lets the Ranger use Handle Animal with their Elven Hound companion even though it's a Magical Beast.

Yeah, but that's because the elven hound has 2 Int. The planar companion has 3 Int, which means you don't need Handle Animal, you can just give it instructions in ordinary speech and it will understand you.