Expansion of Animal Companion

[Milo v3]

Since pathfinders rules for animal companions basically allow you to have anything for an animal companion that's: an animal and equal or greater in strength to a wolf. I was planning on making a class that used the animal companion rules but for creatures of any type as long as they have low-intelligence, aren't small, and are strong enough.

Is there any problems I will probably run into? I mean, obviously humanoids wouldn't be appropriate but would it make sense to have outsiders on the list as long as they have low-intelligence?

[avr]

There's a dwarf paladin archetype which gets an earth elemental companion IIRC, so sure.

[Urpriest]

Since pathfinders rules for animal companions basically allow you to have anything for an animal companion that's: an animal and equal or greater in strength to a wolf.

...what? That seems completely contradictory to what I've seen of Pathfinder's animal companion rules. From what I remember, animal companions only come from a specific list, and don't necessarily have any traits in common with the animals they resemble.

[Milo v3]

...what? That seems completely contradictory to what I've seen of Pathfinder's animal companion rules. From what I remember, animal companions only come from a specific list, and don't necessarily have any traits in common with the animals they resemble.

The "don't necessarily have traits completely in common with the animals they resemble" is why you can have a giant amount of animal companions that normally wouldn't be viable because of how they restated the animal companion version normally reducing size and removing overpowered abilities, I mean on that specific list it goes from wolves and horses to kangaroos to elephants to ankylosaurs to roc's to tyrannosaurus.

[Urpriest]

The "don't necessarily have traits completely in common with the animals they resemble" is why you can have a giant amount of animal companions that normally wouldn't be viable because of how they restated the animal companion version normally reducing size and removing overpowered abilities, I mean on that specific list it goes from wolves and horses to kangaroos to elephants to ankylosaurs to roc's to tyrannosaurus.

But in that case, in principle, there's no way for there to be a problem. For example, if you wanted to introduce Hell Hound companions, you'd just need to say "as wolf" and there'd be no possibility of a problem.

Now, if that doesn't work, it's because you want specific mechanical abilities on these new companions. But in that case we should be looking at the balance of those specific abilities, not the concept of making companions for new types of creatures by itself.

[Coidzor]

Either you're homebrewing it up to keep in line with the general balance point set by published animal companions or you're setting a new balance point and either making a separate class which is balanced against the others in other ways or you commit to upping at least some of the existing animal companions up to the new balance point.