Animal Companion

[tennyson]

Hi Everyone,

In our campaign, our party rogue (level 2) has aquired a new friend in the form of an attack dog as a companion. I know this is a feature normally reserved for druids and rangers, but I worked it into the story anyway.

Anyway, my question is how do I figure the dog into the fomula when calculating combat XP?

1. Does the dog gain XP just like the PCs?
2. What CR is the dog considered? (It has 2 hit dice).

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[kengar]

IIRC, the dog does not gain XP since it only learns through being taught by a trainer. (I may confused on this point though)

As far as the CR of the animal, if it is a 2HD dog like the Riding Dog (see back of MM), then it is a CR1 creature.

 

[whatisitgoodfor]

Creatures of the "Animal" type are too dumb (Int below 3) to gain levels, and therefore never gain XP. Under normal circumstances (ie. unless it gets Awakened, bonded as an AC...) the animal will never gain HD in any way, not even through normal critter HD advancement (not that riding dogs have any to begin with).

As for affecting the party's average character level (which I assume is why you wanted to know its CR), the dog won't have any effect on it at all. It counts as gear, not an individual entity. (just remeber that the character should have slightly less funds because of the dog).

You might want to look at the Animal Companion sections of the DMG and (if you have access to it) Masters of the Wild. Those two sources explain the types of tricks that can be taught to animals. (Mostly just simple stuff like attacking, defending, and fetching. But MotW does have the "assist" series of tricks that actually are useful.)

The Handle Animal DC to teach basically any trick is going to be 20, with the only exceptions being tricks that are within the animal's nature anyway (ie fetch or attack for a dog).

The book is pretty ambiguous about this, but it takes two months to teach an animal its full allotment of tricks, not two months per trick.