WodenKrait wrote:
Firstly, I think we should be careful to avoid the D&D/World of Warcraft etc assumption that all professions need to be perfectly balanced. An animal trainer may not end up being as powerful as most of the other professions, or have as many bells and whistles, but for a game that tries to concentrate on the role playing aspect of the game, this is not a fatal flaw.
This I agree with too - "balance" in most RPGs just means that they have equal capacity to contribute to combat, which kinda misses the point of RPGs. What I was referring to about being a fully fledged profession is that it has somewhere to go as the character develops, not that it can compete with the other professions in combat. I'd also be wary of overloading any new profession with hundreds of skills (knave, hunter, priest, etc.), as they almost feel like they're in a different game to the stalwart knights and barbarians. I blame the assassin - possibly the worst-fit profession of the original series...
WodenKrait wrote:
Anyway, it doesn't need to diminish anybody's scope. Just like a sorcerer can pull out a sword and fight if he wants, so to can another profession train an animal. Its just that they won't be particularly great at it.
Good analogy, and I like what you're suggesting - whereas an animal trainer profession could train multiple animals, the other professions would only be able to train common animals indicative of their profession/background (dogs, horses, hawks, ferrets, etc.) with simple tricks (fetch, guard, attack, hunt, etc.). It would require specialist (and time-consuming-to-learn) skills to train a snake or a monkey or whatever to do complex things.
WodenKrait wrote:
I don't see it as a simple companion animal a la Torchlight though; a skilled animal handler would go on campaign with a regular menagerie of beasts. He would have several fighting dogs to tear apart his foes and guard the campsite while everybody sleeps, a pigeon for carrying messages, a fighting falcon that can strike Deaths Heads out of the sky, a trained weasel to steal a key from the other side of some locked bars, a clever monkey that could climb a wall and drop a rope to the party or pick a pocket like the world's best Assassin, a grey parrot that can listen into conversations and fly back to repeat them to his master, or even a trained snake that can be thrown onto an enemy's helm where it will slither into his armour and bite his vulnerable parts. A trained bat or owl could help navigate in a lightless underworld and the elevated senses of a trained (oh I don't know, let's say) shrew perched on the shoulder would make surprise by an enemy impossible. Many trained animals can catch food and bring it back for the party to keep them alive in the countryside. The animal handler knows the ways of wild animals and can help the party avoid, befriend, or defeat those they encounter. The list of things the animal handler could do is endless.
Yes, these - some good examples (some, as you say, stretched quite far, but for top-of-your-head examples, a good list) and would definitely fit well with the Hunter profession. As a standalone profession, it still doesn't feel like it would be enough - a dog that anyone could train could warn against surprise, catch food, attack/defend, fetch, etc. - but some of these more advanced examples might fit into the Hunter profession. I think there'd still need to be a scalable and flexible resolution mechanic for each of the kinds of activities you mention that would also have to work for animals trained by other professions and it would need to be careful not to stray too far into cinematic/high-fantasy territory (which it could do quite quickly...) unless it resorted to supernatural traits to explain the preternatural rapport the profession has with animals.
Some good ideas there. I like it and would be interested to see how they could be developed into a profession. I'd also be interested to know how the animal handler would replace his dogs lost in combat - if he loses a dog or two per adventure, say, and they take umpteen months/years to breed/train to an elevated standard, how long before the tolls of adventuring reduce the animal handler to the level of a hotblood? I think I read somewhere that it takes a little over a year to train a guide dog for the blind, and it seems reasonable that the advanced skills we're discussing imparting to an animal would be comparable.