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I have a PC making a ranger for Kingmaker starting at 1st level. Anyways he wanted to start out with a dog at 1st level and then say prior to adventuring he had trained it per Handle Animal. If I let him do this I was thinking giving him maybe a max of 3 rolls to see if the dog is trained prior to the adventure beginning. Also if we do this what do you think a fair cost for a med sized dog puppy would be to purchase with starting funds?
He also said he'd be willing to take the pioneer trait instead, where you get the free riding horse, and say he has the dog in place of with a pack saddle. (His ranger is a trapper/mountain man type).
Does any of this sound fair? And no, as a human he doesn't want to ride it. He was hoping to train it for the hunting package.
If I do allow this how do I handle this dog down the road when the ranger gets an animal companion, obviously he would just make the dog the official companion?
The problem lies in the fact that when an animal becomes an animal companion they take on the template of an animal companion and lose all abilities and tricks, racial modifiers etc that they had before. i.e. A bird has racial bonus to fly, a bat on the other hand does not.
You are going to have to find a way to handle this yourself as... well there is no real delicate way of doing so, and simply applying the bonuses to the bestiary version is... well... just way to powerful.A guard dog costs 25g as per the PFC to purchase. It is reasonable to assume he had is from a child etc, but over its lifetime it would have inevitably cost him a certain amount to keep the thing fed, healthy and all that. A pack for a horse is 5g, so divide by 2 for half the size and you get 2.5g for a decent pack for a small size guard dog.
In terms of the tricks to teach it, I wouldn't bother limiting him from teaching the animal whatever tricks he wants. For as old as the character is they would be able to take a 20 on teaching it, for the time he would have. Just be sure that he only teaches it as many tricks as it is really capable of learning based off its int score.
In response to your pioneer trait, yeah that is MORE than fair to let him replace a dog for the horse, in fact he is trading DOWN if he wants to do that then.. by all means.