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For my next Pathfinder session, the group might encounter a rat which mind controlled a child into his speaking puppet. However, when the group decides to attack the rat with a ranged attack I want the child to block the attack with his own body. I have looked around the wiki and googled multiple things but I haven't found any system for this situation.
Are there any rules/systems for this situation or ways how I can make this happen?
There is a feat called In Harm's Way, which allows the user to take the damage for an attack for an adjacent ally.
Prerequisite: Bodyguard.
Benefit: While using the aid another action to improve an adjacent ally’s AC, you can intercept a successful attack against that ally as an immediate action, taking full damage from that attack and any associated effects (bleed, poison, etc.). A creature cannot benefit from this feat more than once per attack.
Barring the child being trained in a specific feat or some specific magic being used, there's not a "the protecting creature is auto-hit instead of the targeted creature" by rules-as-written. However...
The cover rules include an automatic +4 to AC for another creature providing cover, giving a +4 to AC. Many GM's play this where a miss by 4 or less hits the cover, rather than the targeted creature, though again this isn't part of the rules-as-written. More importantly, the significant size difference between even a very young human and a tiny rat could allow you some room to declare the rat has either improved cover (+8 to AC, and you'd be in your rights to say misses by 8 or less hit the child) or even total cover and/or total concealment, making attacks against the rat impossible.
As a one-off effect, having the first shot hit the child as (s)he dives in the way is fine, although things like precision damage shouldn't apply (hopefully preventing the party from accidentally murdering the child in a single attack). If you can hint that this will happen ahead of time somehow, either generally or as the result of a skill check (Sense Motive or Perception, maybe), the players shouldn't feel they were cheated just because there's not a specific rule to cover it. That's the point in the GM after all - things can happen that aren't scripted like a computer RPG.
If they continue to attack despite the +4 or +8 penalty and kill the innocent child at that point, that's entirely their fault, and while I'm not usually a fan of "one-time" effects affecting alignment based classes, this could easily be an exception, in my opinion.
