Reasonalbe EXP price to bend some rules? Speak with Animals vs Handle Animal?

[arkieNork]

Situation arising from following scenario: playing a module, there is an encounter there which on victory rewards the group with a dire wolf pet.
Module text:
>Development:If the dire wolf is cured and offered food and water it will bond with any character doing so and can become a faithful animal companion. Even if its presence is not wanted, if healthy it will attempt to follow its benefactor at a distance only stepping in if the benefactor is badly injured or incapacitated.

None of the players have an animal companion.
Solution suggested to me elsewhere - give one of the players the Wild Cohort feat
https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/feat/Wild_Cohort
That solves it - some of them are close to leveling up.

I would also like to offer them an opportunity to have that Wild Cohort feat a bit more useful to them because the Dire Wolf (especially the nerfed pf1 version) is pretty weak - https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/canines/wolf/dire-wolf/

so I want to hint at the Planar Familiar spell as a way to improve it to something that a ~10th level party could use.

https://archive.ph/NEf3n

However there is a mismatch to 2 clauses with our situation.
1 - blocking clause
"acquired as a class ability."
2 - to make the benefits scale with the PC's level rather than the creature's
If the target creature is your familiar,

I was thinking of giving them the option to cast it despite clause 1 for a significantly increased XP cost, and a second option of letting them bypass clause 2 for another XP cost.

Is 10,000 per clause too much, too little?

Having trouble deciding what XP payment would be reasonable for negating these restrictions.
We are using PF1 Medium character experience track https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/character-advancement/
and PF1s normal experience rewards. Aside from that the PCs are playing 3.5 progression of feat gain.

Secondary question:

as a DM, would you allow a PC with very low Animal Handling to hire a druid or ranger for a couple of days to use Speak With Animal to give a set of direct instructions about general behavior, including things like 'prioritize your own safety, if you get more than mildly hurt, get out of the fight and wait until we can heal you'?

I never quite understood how Handle Animal skill was supposed to mesh with that spell that both Rangers and Druids get. The biggest problem humans have with 'handling' animals is inability to directly communicate. Most dogs for example want to please their owners and just have trouble understanding what the command is.

I bet that if you could plainly tell a dog - 'I want you to do X when I make Y sounds at you', that would be the beginning and end of teaching that dog the trick... I can understand limit to the number of tricks if one considers animals unable to keep too many different instructions in mind, but in general if you can spend a few minutes each day directly communicating with your animal companion, what's there left to 'handle' with the skill?

[Telonius]

Honestly this sounds like the module's version of a "story reward." It's their animal companion now if they can otherwise get it as a class feature; if not, it's just a friendly animal that will follow them around and not give them much of a mechanical advantage. Wild Cohort would be the cleanest way to turn it into a real mechanical advantage, and personally I'd handwave it to allow Planar Familiar to work on a Wild Cohort. (I'm guessing they either weren't thinking about Wild Cohort, or the feat didn't exist yet when the spell was printed). One feat plus a bunch of XP to tame a cool wolf you already took a risk to rescue, seems like a reasonable price to me.

[glass]

It is not explicit, but I think from the description, you are using PF1 but allowing (at least some) 3.5 content, is that right?

If so, that's fine (I do the same thing myself), but there are two issues. The first is that PF1 does not really do XP costs. But that does not matter too much, because it also does animal companions rather differently from 3.5. Therefore, when importing Wild Cohort (which is pretty much "Animal Companion Light"), it requires slightly more than the usual amount of adaptation IMO. The simplest way to do it would probably be "Wild Cohort gives you an Animal Companion with an effective druid level of your character level -X" where X is somewhere in the 2 to 4 range. That way the animal companion should scale somewhat relevantly, and neither the other feat nor the XP costs are needed.

Regarding the bonus question, there is a vast difference between telling someone to do something and training them to do something. I have just come from a dance class, where we all speak English (not spells required) and we are considerably smarter than the average wolf. Still, it takes a more than the teacher telling us what to do for us to be able to do it. A lot more!

It's late here and I cannot be bothered to track it down right now, but I am pretty sure that there was an FAQ to the effect that being able to speak to animals did not need the actually use Handle Animal to train them. I cannot remember if it specifically addressed the spell, or if it was just talking about increasing their Int and then teaching them a language, but either way the principle should hold. I do not always follow FAQs, but this one I happen to agree with.

[ciopo]

You could award the pathfinder "Animal Ally" feat then, ignoring prerequisites

[glass]

You could award the pathfinder "Animal Ally" feat then, ignoring prerequisitesGood catch! I did no know (or had forgotten) that Animal Ally (https://www.aonprd.com/FeatDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Animal%20Ally) existed but it pretty much is Wild Cohort, preconverted (and it pretty much exactly the way I suggested).

There does not appear to actually be a specific "dire wolf" animal companion statblock in PF1, but the regular wolf (https://www.aonprd.com/DruidCompanions.aspx?ItemName=Wolf) should cover it - it will quickly scale past the innate capabilities of either.