Forgive me if this has been asked elsewhere already; the search feature is having a hard time searching all the topics for me atm.

My question, as the title implies, is can a Hermit with 4 ranks in Survival use Survival of the Fittest to permanently bond a Silhouette 2 animal, even though his Force rating is only temporarily equal to 4 due to the talent? What are various GMs opinions on this idea? It seems like a perfect, RAI use of the talent, especially given the Silhouette 2 requirements of Menace and Harass, but not sure if it is RAW or OP.

Thanks!

No. The thing about Survival of the Fittest (and Knowledge is Power) is that it doesn't actually increase your Force rating. All it does is let you roll a number of Force dice equal to your ranks in Survival once per session.

Trying to explain it another way, let's take an example character with Survival 4 and Force rating 1. All this talent does is say, once per session, when you go to roll Force dice, you roll 4 dice instead of 1. Your Force rating is still 1, you just roll more dice than normal on that one roll, because you have a talent.

Technically, you could commit your one Force die to something, like a Sense upgrade, and still roll 4 dice on the check, even though your Force rating is currently 0. But your Force rating STILL doesn't increase, it's still 0 because you've committed your only die to a power. As before, you're just rolling more dice than normal, on that one check.