Animal Companions

[Harrysonford]

Other than familiars, find steed, and beast master ranger, what ways can you have an animal companion or other companion?

[Arcangel4774]

Befriend a druid

Edit: More seriously: repetitive use of animal friendship. Gnomes communicate with small animals (if you find an animal friendly enough). Same goes for a bunch of successful animal handling rolls. True polymorph could also work but at that point you have a tone of other options anyway

[Naanomi]

Train one via animal handling and downtime? Be a forest gnome/firbolg? Buy a trained war horse/hunting hound/etc?

[jas61292]

By visiting a breeder with a bag full of gold.

There may not be any other way, by the rules, to get a superior creature, with special abilities, but there is no reason you can't just have a normal creature as a pet or companion. Whether you befriend it or buy it, it can be yours. Just don't expect something to act skillfully in combat unless it is trained for it, like a warhorse.

[Saeviomage]

I would bypass animal friendship and go straight to speak with animals.

[Kane0]

In theory Dominate Beast is also an option.

[Naanomi]

Also bags of tricks, wonderous figurines, and other magic items

[smcmike]

At higher levels, Awaken is the way to go.

[hymer]

I would bypass animal friendship and go straight to speak with animals.

The one does not preclude the other. Quite the contrary, they work well together.

@ OP: You could also consider straight Conjure Animals. If you fluff it so you conjure the same animal(s) every time, you can have quite a bit of up-time over an adventuring day as you advance in levels.

[Sigreid]

Our party druid used animal friendship on a lion and kept renewing that while making animal handling checks over the course of weeks to tame it.

[Marvnmartian]

During one of my games we had a barbarian who didnt really have good animal handling but chose to try anyway by just continously go into the woods to the same group of dire wolves (we were level 11 and he could easily kill them all so wasnt in any real danger) and just everyday would go out with a halve of a cow on his shoulder and sit down and chop it up and feed the wolves.

After about 2 weeks of his downtime the wolves slowly started to come closer and closer to town seeing where he came from and eventually just sat on the tree line waiting for his daily visits. and this time he brought barding which he had made from a bulette he had killed a while back which he cast his speak with animals ritual and talked them into letting him put it on them to protect them.

This basically allowed him to gain trust with the wolves by giving them something for nothing for a long time and got the alpha of the pack to join him as long as he kept feeding his pack.

So you dont really need animal handling to get the companion just think how man would have started to domesticate wild animals in the past and rp it out.

[Maxilian]

You can buy a companion from a stable (a Mastiff is only 25 gold).

Also i believe there is a feat that helps you with Animal Handling.

[Easy_Lee]

It's all DM dependent. Don't expect anything to work in AL, because they want to keep everyone under control. If it's for a home campaign, chat with the DM about what you'd like to do.

It shouldn't be unreasonable to, with an investment of gold or other resources, train an animal to act as a familiar as per the Find Familiar spell. Plenty of fantasy characters have animal companions. One of my favorite, Ryudo from Grandia 2, has a talking falcon / parrot / unnamed bird that doesn't help in combat, but can scout for him and fulfill similar tasks. Another, Vladimir Taltos from Steven Brust's Dragaera novels, has a pair of flying poisonous lizards that sometimes help in combat.

It should be perfectly plausible to have a non-combat pet for your character. Having the thing act in combat, even if all it does is take the help action, can slow things down and cause some balance issues (arcane tricksters with families catch the ire of many DMs).

Talk it out with your DM, tell him what you're going for, and see what he says.

[Tanarii]

Buy Mastiffs. Lots of them. Ask the DM what kind of action is needed to vaguely control them in combat.

As a DM, I regularly use Mastiffs, and sometime Wolf-stat 'huge Mastiffs', under control of the NPCs. The dogs are typically aggressive, and fight on their own, so no special control actions just to have them fight.

Same goes for PCs, unleashing the hounds takes no special action. Calling them all off, or trying to direct one dog against a particular target, takes an action and a DC 10 Animal Handling check. Getting them to stay in a fight once they flee generally isn't possible. Although generally speaking they'll die before fleeing if the PCs are fighting too.

Also I've occasionally had a few NPCs get bent about PCs who are willing to let dogs die. Given how fragile they are it's not exactly uncommon if they're used. They're basically single use items at a certain point. Which requires a pretty brutal mindset, if you think about it.

[Desteplo]

Basically you can buy combat animals. But they don't scale
-they're the same at lvl1 as they are at lvl 12
-so they will die But they're nice turn one fodder later

[TundraBuccaneer]

The urchen pet mouse is also an option

[Saggo]

Worth noting the animal figurines in the DMG. Not as much uptime as other options and you increase risk of losing the magic item, but you reduce risk of permanently losing the companion from dying.