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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kobold Stew" data-source="post: 6348447" data-attributes="member: 23484">I understand your desire here, and the approach you take has to fit with your DM and the rest of the table. I think the "henchman" idea is likely unfair to the other players -- I think they are working hard not to give any one player that opportunity. But separate initiative, etc. is pretty powerful.  yo also need to think about what happens if your buddy dies. Is it magical and can be replaced? Or is it going to be sucking back healing potions etc along with the rest of the party.(all this is assuming you have a dM and a four-or-five person party, and you care about others' feelings;  some games are one-on-one, or with smaller groups, and the DM may actually welcome the presence of an additional target.)Going from the play test materials, I'd suggest you have two approaches: official or unofficial.Official. There's going to be a way to get familiars, and there's going to be a way to cast the find familiar spell. Have a human druid that takes a feat to cast rituals or wizard spells, and then -- poof -- you have a special animal friend who may not be a wolf, but could be a wolf cub with cat statistics. Or a raven or whatever.  The animal friend will have the same ability to interact with your spell casting as the familiar does for the wizard. That also covers the question of replacement.Or, as has been suggested, take a three-level dip in Ranger, which could actually be pretty cool.Unofficial. If there's a beast master Ranger subclass, it may be possible just to cut and paste it into the druid -- instead of taking a druid specialty at level 2 or 3 you get the ranger one. I expect that at least will provide you a better starting point for achieving balance. than trying to squeeze out a distinctive Ranger feature. My sense, though, is that you need to decide what you are prepared to give up of the druid in order to have an animal buddy. All shapeshifting? A lot of spells? Whatever it is, it has to be the equivalent of an entire Ranger subclass -- and so I'd start by looking at a druid subclass.  If a player came to me looking to pursue either of these approaches, I'd be pretty sympathetic.</blockquote>

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