Capturing and Training Monsters

Do any of you guys capture and train monsters to serve as your allies? Gelatinous cubes as garbage disposals? Fire elementals for central heating? How does that tend to work out at the table?

Relevant comic for reference.

I have put a black pudding into a wizards tower with a small teleport circle leading into the room with the black pudding. This was the wizards garbage disposal. Other than that, I have a player that has trained a hell cat to be a companion.

Sometimes I do allow them to become temporary allies, but pets and companions, never. I find it just makes balancing encounters tougher. And if the PCs are supposed to be the stars of the campaign, having a powerful monster with them will likely eclipse them. At that point, heck, I should be awarding all the XP to the monster, not them.

Also, 90% of the time, it's never something reasonable, it's always something munkin-y like a Behir, or Red Dragon.

Passive monsters that can be contained and watched/used without training are just a matter of capture, transport and securing. I've seen PCs do this several times.

On the other hand, if training is involved, as would usually be the case if this is a companion, it is a huge investment to train - and generally a huge risk as training is never perfect. I've seen multiple attempts to train dragons... they never pan out.

Out of the Abyss has a few opportunities to get a "pet," including (limited) rules for raising and training basilisks and even a red dragon. I ran with it after the party hatched some basilisk eggs and trained them around 8th level. Was cool in principle, but when you're up against beholders and demons, these poor CR3 bastards didn't last long.

Trained pet monsters might be more interesting in an adventure where the party is away and players run the monsters defending their stronghold against thieves, invaders, etc.

Ralif Redhammer said:

Also, 90% of the time, it's never something reasonable, it's always something munkin-y like a Behir, or Red Dragon.

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I would like to feel self-conscious about my behir bro as a bonus action.

I do not allow intelligent speech and tool using monsters to be trained. No dragons for example. My players once considered the costs of having exotic steeds. However the additional upkeep, having to have separate corrals and stalls that may not always be available turned them off the idea.

As a DM, I give out pets, which the players can choose to accept. It is a little companion, which levels up with the players. The DM controls it in roleplay, and they control it in combat. Because I control it in roleplay, I make sure it becomes everybody's friend. It becomes a member of the party, not a buff for one player. And the players rotate who controls the critter.

All it takes is to tell the group that after combat, as initiative stops and they loot the room they find a baby monkey. Guaranteed that at least one or two of the party will want to keep it. They currently have a little L3 monkey with about 18 HP, AC 11, two unarmed strikes at +2 on attack, and 1d4+1 damage, and a +5 on acrobatics and a climbing speed of 30 ft. It understands common, but does not speak it.

As a DM, I can override any decision of the players regarding the monkey (says so on the stat-sheet of the monkey). They must roleplay their pet, which has a rather low intelligence. If they start playing too strategically (i.e. flanking maneuvers, or otherwise smart moves) then I sometimes override. However, if the players deliberately train the animal, which they started doing, then I will start allowing strategic moves later.
I heard them talking about getting some armor for the monkey, so it is going well.

I would never consider giving out regular monsters from the monster manual. These do not level up, so they are overpowered initially while the players are low level, and become irrelevant later as the players level up. Or even worse: they become a problem because they die too soon, so as a DM you can no longer use powerful AoE spells out of fear of killing the beloved pet outright... Ugh.

The red dragon I was thinking of came from the very same egg in Out of the Abyss. There was a whole lot of stuff in-between, but towards the end, the dragon ended up being slain and corrupted by Juiblex. They then had to fight the homebrewed ooze-dragon.

toucanbuzz said:

Out of the Abyss has a few opportunities to get a "pet," including (limited) rules for raising and training basilisks and even a red dragon. I ran with it after the party hatched some basilisk eggs and trained them around 8th level. Was cool in principle, but when you're up against beholders and demons, these poor CR3 bastards didn't last long.

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Ralif Redhammer said:

...They then had to fight the homebrewed ooze-dragon.

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Nice.

I didn't want to rain on the parade of the player who invested in training the basilisks, and they made excellent guards/scouts to justify not dealing with several random encounters.

We deal with temporary "pets" all the time, from summoned elementals to conjured animals, but the former are considered expendable. Permanent pets bring headaches whether they should get an XP share, how to run them without bogging down combats (and ensuring one player doesn't dominate table time in combat), and so on. Plus, players, in my experience, have this gut feeling the DM is going to "off" the pet to get rid of that headache for everyone. It may even be subconscious.

My suggestions for players, to avoid DMs killing off your pets (unless you're a ranger), is to apply for non-combat benefits, or come up with a creative benefit (that makes them more like a magic item, such as 1/combat providing advantage, that makes it easier to manage what they're really offering you and avoid having to deal with separate initiative, attack rolls, etc.).