Hi everyone,
I started a new campaign today with some friends who had never played before, and one took a Druid with a Big Cat Animal Companion. Aside from familiars, I've never GM'd anyone with a, say, secondary presence on the Battlefield (No summoners, animal companions, and whatnot). He asked me how his companion would work in battle, and I couldn't find an answer in the book quickly besides the fact that he can give it a Trick order as a Free Action.
Anyone know how you're supposed to do this? In the interest, of moving the game along, I told him the following:
* Your companion takes his turn on your initiative result
* It has a move and a standard action, just like a character.
* To do a trick it doesn't know in the fight takes a Handle Animal check, as described urn the skill, which is a free action for your character. Tricks is does know require no check.
Does this look right to anyone? Am I overlooking something really obvious in the rulebook somewhere?
Thanks.
* To do a trick it doesn't know in the fight takes a Handle Animal check, as described urn the skill, which is a free action for your character. Tricks is does know require no check.
Does this look right to anyone?
This isn't quite right. To do a trick it knows is a DC 10 check, which should be trivial for a druid and her animal companion. So, many hand-wave this as quite often even a natural 1 will result in a successful check. DC 25 for a trick it doesn't know but is physically capable of.
Also, an animal companion doesn't need to have the same initiative, although in the vast majority of games I've played they use the same for convenience.
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Does this look right to anyone? Am I overlooking something really obvious in the rulebook somewhere?
Other than Tim's correction, that looks about right. The general rule of thumb is that all creatures get actions, so the "secondary presence" creatures get them, too.
A lot of animal companion use comes to gaming style as far as whether your group sees an animal companion as just an animal with specified differences or something more than that. This can become an intensified distinction if the animal is given bumps to intelligence. (This has an area of considerable discussion in some circles over the last month or so.) Aside from that, it is not uncommon for druid PCs to vector a lot of their activities through the animal by buffing the critter and/or equipping it heavily with magical goodies.
As a point of advice, if everyone is new, you may want to implement a procedural rule that PCs can only have a limited number of "secondary presences" on the table at a time. This is a matter of players getting used to the rules and such. If this doesn't seem like a big deal now, imagine it with the druid summoning a dozen wolves over the course of several rounds. Players can learn to deal with all the actions, but doing so while learning the game as well can be overwhelming. The result can be turns in combat that take 15-20 minutes for the player with all the critters down.
As a point of advice, if everyone is new, you may want to implement a procedural rule that PCs can only have a limited number of "secondary presences" on the table at a time.
This is a good point. I did kinda do a double-take when I saw Druid and first-time player together. Druids aren't the easiest to run as they have so many options: companion, summoning, and wild shaping. The other reason for limiting this is that other players may get bored when the druid takes the spotlight and moves multiple creatures with multiple attacks.
"Your turn fighter."
"I swing my sword."
"Five. Sorry, you missed.
"Your turn druid."
"My three summoned eagles attack. They each get three attacks."
"Four hits, roll your damage."
"Now I will pounce with my cat.
"Two more hits, roll your damage."
"Ok druid, now its your turn.
"I cast a spell to summon more critters."
This is assuming the druid player is amazingly prepared and has all the to-hits and damage dice ready to go. I would make the player have a character sheet for his companion plus stats for when the animal has different buffs cast on it.
One reason our group always has the druid's animal companion roll their own initiative is to keep the move flowing so that it's not one person going for a long time, which tends to cause other players' minds to wander (and their feet too).
The summoning situation is not unique to druids, but a summoning druid can end up with a bunch of critters. I play the druid in our current game and I deliberately play her as being reluctant to summon animals since the animals may not truly "die" but they do feel the pain of combat. So it's usually a fairly dire situation before she will summon animals to fight for her. Her animal companion is seen as a special case, an animal who lives to fight and doesn't mind the pain.
Our last new player to join is now playing a summoning cleric, which is fine with my druid, and makes it less, not more, likely that she will summon animals since the cleric is already clogging up the battlefield.
Summoning is a powerful tactic, especially with metamagic rods and augment summoning...
Thanks for the answers and the advice, everyone; it's greatly appreciated.
My players are not optimizers in the slightest - their party consists of a Monk, a Druid, a Bard, and a Sorceress. I also had them randomize ability scores with the 4d6 method, so few of them have abilities above 17, even after racial modifiers are applied.
All this to say that they're more concerned with the fun that they have at the table than min-maxing the game itself. I don't expect my Druid to start stacking the animal summonings, but I'll keep an eye on it all the same - thanks for the warning.
(It occurs to me that in one of their first fights he summoned a dire rat to help out, and even though he was at that point controlling three creatures, the others at the table were ecstatic, because they seemed to be enjoying the team success.)
The idea of having all of his summoned creature stats prepared ahead of time, as well as his animal companion statted out for several different buffs is a good one though, Tim. I'll suggest that to him before our next session.
One thing i would recommend in addition to what is actually in the rules. Have another player at the table control the animal companion. So the druid can give commands as normal but they cant have perfect control over it. I find this provides something of a more organic interaction between druid and AC. It even allows some roleplay without adding to the dm workload. Ofcourse it requires a player being interested in doing this.
I also roll his attack d20 and damage d6 (color matched), and trip d20 in the same shake. So his attack action is fully resolved in one handful of dice. Everyone in our group rolls attack and damage dice concurrently to save time.
This is the biggest tip for keeping combat moving. I routinely roll a dozen or more dice at once for mid-high level PCs. Three or four attacks, with a d20 attack, 2d# damage and #d6 (sneak attack, elemental, whatever) for each swing.
Color-code the ones that go together and make sure you tell at least one other person the order you parse them in before rolling the first time. I also tend to line them up in the same order as the attacks appear on the sheet between turns.
Most Dms have the critter go with the character just for ease of play.
The trick is to get your handle animal up to +9 (+11) if the critter is hurt. That makes the tricks it knows automatic, so you don' tbother rolling.