Coidzor
2014-10-12, 11:30 AM
So normally Animal Companions have to be bog-standard critters of their kind without templating, sure, but Warbeast is fairly popular despite the controversy as to whether it's inherited or applied and there are specific creatures selectable as Animal Companions that have the Magebred or Horrid template applied to them that come to us by way of Eberron.
Similarly, enough people have liked the idea of Awakening their Animal Companions over the years that even the Giant has referenced it in OotS.
So I thought, well, why not come up with a way to do so? Naturally I'd prefer to do so without making it a clear cut case of "STACK ALL THE TEMPLATES" or at least make a cost to pay for the benefit of stacking all of those templates. Since Awaken changes type to Magical Beast, I figured I'd open up to looking at templates and pseudo-templates like Awakening that can change the type of the Animal Companion to Magical Beast as well, and maybe Plant and Fey, too. More so for Magical Beast and maybe Plant than the maybe Fey, of course.
My first thought was that since Warbeast and Awakening an Animal both give HD, then a delay in gaining bonus HD from the master's effective druid level would be appropriate, even if all it does it make the amount of HD the Animal Companion has stay about even with the untemplated Animal Companion of an equivalent level Druid.
So since Awakening adds 2 HD, about on par with hitting the next level of benefits for an Animal Companion, then a reduction in effective druid levle of 2-3 would be about the baseline cost and then Warbeast only adding a single HD would have its cost in effective druid level be either 1 or 2 depending upon which cost I went with for Awakening. Possibly a combination of reduction in effective druid level and a GP cost of some sort.
Woodling and Greenbound for adding some Plantishness or just straight up Plant Type to an animal companion also caught my eye, though I'd probably gut them of the SLAs. Since they don't add HD, I've been slower in sussing out a ballpark for how much plant immunities (which I'd also consider tweaking into a sort of fortification for certain things such as precision damage instead of outright immunity) and ability score boosts are worth.
Other templates such as Celestial are so weak, after you afford that you have other ways to make an Animal Companion have Int > 2, that they're not really worth any reduction in effective druid level, but probably shouldn't really be scooped up en masse for free, either, making me at least initially favor some sort of flat GP cost of around 1K each for the weaker ones and maybe a scaling GP cost for the more interesting/borderline ones.
Opening up Celestial and other intelligence-boosting templates like that would cause Exalted Animal Companion to lose its place as the only gateway to having a VoP Animal Companion and thus degrade in value, though. (Perhaps have Exalted Companion give VoP benefits to one's companion with this rules change in effect?)
So. Is the only reasonable cost a reduction in effective druid level/increase in required effective druid level to select it for Animal Companion benefits in exchange for applying the template, as seems to be the case from what I recall of the specific examples for Magebred and Horrid Animal Companions, or do some of the templates have benefits which are only worth a simple gp(+xp?) cost?
Does anyone have any proposed alternatives aside from adding a feat tax for the PC master to be able to more freely template their Animal Companion or making some templates take up a feat slot either on the master (as Exalted Companion) or the Animal Companion (I can't think of any examples here, other than a pseudo-template like Troll Blooded)?
What templates would you believe appropriate given the premise that we're allowing templates and also allowing templates that change type to Magical Beast at the very least, maybe also Plant or even Fey? What templates would you believe are inappropriate due to power-to-cost-you-can-charge or fiddliness, without altering the template until it was unrecognizable? What templates do you think would be borderline and require tweaking, such as removing or reducing SLAs?
I've already got a tentative houserule to try out with my homebrewed Awaken-as-Template+ template Magical Creature (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=16297690&postcount=3) and Warbeast, having them cost -3 and -2 to effective Druid level respectively, but it's this thread and its list of templates, (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?372681-How-do-template-stacked-Animals-compare-to-more-common-corpses-for-necromancy) that got me thinking about this subject again and more expansively.
TL;DR: What templates would be good to open up to Animal Companions and how much of a reduction in level benefits from Druid and/or gp(+xp?) cost are they worth? Is there another sort of cost you'd propose?
Similarly, enough people have liked the idea of Awakening their Animal Companions over the years that even the Giant has referenced it in OotS.
So I thought, well, why not come up with a way to do so? Naturally I'd prefer to do so without making it a clear cut case of "STACK ALL THE TEMPLATES" or at least make a cost to pay for the benefit of stacking all of those templates. Since Awaken changes type to Magical Beast, I figured I'd open up to looking at templates and pseudo-templates like Awakening that can change the type of the Animal Companion to Magical Beast as well, and maybe Plant and Fey, too. More so for Magical Beast and maybe Plant than the maybe Fey, of course.
My first thought was that since Warbeast and Awakening an Animal both give HD, then a delay in gaining bonus HD from the master's effective druid level would be appropriate, even if all it does it make the amount of HD the Animal Companion has stay about even with the untemplated Animal Companion of an equivalent level Druid.
So since Awakening adds 2 HD, about on par with hitting the next level of benefits for an Animal Companion, then a reduction in effective druid levle of 2-3 would be about the baseline cost and then Warbeast only adding a single HD would have its cost in effective druid level be either 1 or 2 depending upon which cost I went with for Awakening. Possibly a combination of reduction in effective druid level and a GP cost of some sort.
Woodling and Greenbound for adding some Plantishness or just straight up Plant Type to an animal companion also caught my eye, though I'd probably gut them of the SLAs. Since they don't add HD, I've been slower in sussing out a ballpark for how much plant immunities (which I'd also consider tweaking into a sort of fortification for certain things such as precision damage instead of outright immunity) and ability score boosts are worth.
Other templates such as Celestial are so weak, after you afford that you have other ways to make an Animal Companion have Int > 2, that they're not really worth any reduction in effective druid level, but probably shouldn't really be scooped up en masse for free, either, making me at least initially favor some sort of flat GP cost of around 1K each for the weaker ones and maybe a scaling GP cost for the more interesting/borderline ones.
Opening up Celestial and other intelligence-boosting templates like that would cause Exalted Animal Companion to lose its place as the only gateway to having a VoP Animal Companion and thus degrade in value, though. (Perhaps have Exalted Companion give VoP benefits to one's companion with this rules change in effect?)
So. Is the only reasonable cost a reduction in effective druid level/increase in required effective druid level to select it for Animal Companion benefits in exchange for applying the template, as seems to be the case from what I recall of the specific examples for Magebred and Horrid Animal Companions, or do some of the templates have benefits which are only worth a simple gp(+xp?) cost?
Does anyone have any proposed alternatives aside from adding a feat tax for the PC master to be able to more freely template their Animal Companion or making some templates take up a feat slot either on the master (as Exalted Companion) or the Animal Companion (I can't think of any examples here, other than a pseudo-template like Troll Blooded)?
What templates would you believe appropriate given the premise that we're allowing templates and also allowing templates that change type to Magical Beast at the very least, maybe also Plant or even Fey? What templates would you believe are inappropriate due to power-to-cost-you-can-charge or fiddliness, without altering the template until it was unrecognizable? What templates do you think would be borderline and require tweaking, such as removing or reducing SLAs?
I've already got a tentative houserule to try out with my homebrewed Awaken-as-Template+ template Magical Creature (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=16297690&postcount=3) and Warbeast, having them cost -3 and -2 to effective Druid level respectively, but it's this thread and its list of templates, (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?372681-How-do-template-stacked-Animals-compare-to-more-common-corpses-for-necromancy) that got me thinking about this subject again and more expansively.
TL;DR: What templates would be good to open up to Animal Companions and how much of a reduction in level benefits from Druid and/or gp(+xp?) cost are they worth? Is there another sort of cost you'd propose?