Speak With Animals and animal training

mcbobbo · August 06, 2012, 12:04:38 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit;568102Its funny to me how often I have to remind players that trained animals are not magical supercreatures at their command, though. There's too many players for whom having an "animal companion" is really just an attempt to power-up their PC with a creature that gives them extra attacks or they think should flawlessly be able to detect intruders or traps.

Of course, fantasy fiction can be to blame for a lot of this. And naturally, there have been exceptions with quite a few of my players too, where they did the whole thing right.

RPGPundit

I would caution about this as well. Lots of players want to mess with rule constructs like action economy with companions like these. You need to decide what flies. E. G. If you have 3e style familiars/pets/companions, allowing other means of achieving that same result cheapens all of the normal choices.

RPGPundit · August 08, 2012, 02:28:51 AM

Quote from: mcbobbo;568713I would caution about this as well. Lots of players want to mess with rule constructs like action economy with companions like these. You need to decide what flies. E. G. If you have 3e style familiars/pets/companions, allowing other means of achieving that same result cheapens all of the normal choices.

Yes, well for starters I tend to point out to my players just how hard it is to both train and maintain training on animals, how much time it takes, etc. and then the results are limited to what trained animals actually did/do rather than what you imagine from certain fictional sources.

RPGPundit

AndrewSFTSN · August 08, 2012, 07:03:12 PM

For anyone wondering, the player understood the difference perfectly and told the dog to head back to the surface before the BBEG so it would be safe. After rolling to see if it made it, the culmination of the session was the party returning to the surface and having the bounding pooch leap all over them in delight. Yeah I'm a softy DM sometimes, nobody's perfect.

EDIT: Said player had already prepared their own houserules involving HP loss due to physical symptoms of grief if the dog had died. The rest of the party's eyes rolled so hard I thought they would pop. I was kind of impressed despite myself.

Speak With Animals and animal training

mcbobbo

RPGPundit

AndrewSFTSN