Quote from: WillInNewHaven;978276

The topic of the usefulness of a dog or dogs on an adventure is probably as old as gaming. I can remember a Dungeon Master getting all bent out of shape because my friend wanted her character to bring a dog along on early OD&D adventure. He finally told her that she could but “I will kill it the first chance I get.” It turns out that he had nothing against dogs but he was afraid that he would not be able to handle the complication that would ensue.

Like all of us in that game, he was a beginner and there were no rules for dogs that he knew of. I would like to start a discussion of the use of a dog in a fantasy RPG. I have been playing and running RPG since 1979 and trained dogs professionally. I trained and owned dogs that would have been very useful on the right sorts of adventures but the dogs I have now, Samantha Shi-Tzu and Sophie Iguana’s Bane would not be useful, unless chasing iguanas away from your mangoes is a big part of your campaign.

The primary advantage of having a dog along on an adventure lies in its senses, which can give warning when the characters suspect nothing. The problem with this advantage is that an untrained dog will tend to give warning when nothing more alarming than some deer browsing nearby or an iguana strolling near your camp is going on. This can lead to the loss of sleep and the loss of confidence in the dog’s ability to warn. The answer to this is training. Training dogs can be a skill in a skill-based system. If one of the characters has it, he or she can invest some time and effort into training the dog. Another way to wind up with a trained dog is for the character to be someone of a high enough social class that her or his family has a dog-trainer on their staff or have enough cash to hire someone to train the dog  or to buy a trained dog.

The character will still need to pick up the skill to handle the trained dog. The training can be focused on giving the alarm only when certain specific menaces are detected or on not giving the alarm when a fairly large number of harmless beings are detected. The flaw in the former approach is that a menace other than what you trained the dog for may appear. The problem with the latter is that there will always be some harmless critter that the dog doesn’t know not to bark about. However, either of these methods will give you pretty reasonable alarm dog.

If it is well-trained, a little floof dog that can ride in a saddle-bag can be about as good at this job as a mighty boar-hound and a lot easier to conceal and feed.
Then there is the question of what you want the dog to do if and when it detects a menace. The default action is barking and that is what you will get if you don’t train for something else. A dog can be trained to make a little chuffing noise and make eye-contact with its handler if the handler is awake or to go to the sleeping handler and wake him or her up. Alternatively, the dog could be trained to get the attention of whoever is awake if the handler isn’t. This is extensive training but well worth it.

So how good is a dog at detecting a menace?  I want to keep this system-independent as far as possible so I will just say that a dog that is awake is a bit more likely to detect a menace than a sentry when it is light out and nearly half-again as likely if it is dark. And that is presuming an alert sentry. A sleeping dog is half as likely to detect a menace in daylight as a sentry who is awake and almost as likely if it is dark.
There are other uses for a dog on an adventure and I will be talking about them later.

Hopefully when you talk about them later you might try some actual spaces between paragraphs, like in the quote, so it's not a wall of text that is difficult to read and therefore unlikely to be read by as many folks as you might want.

I allow war dogs in OD&D, but they are a mixed blessing. They need a handler to be fully useful. Otherwise, its the PC who can't handle the animal well and it will die easily. In OD&D, I give them 1D6-2 HP, +0 bite that does 1D6-2 damage. So, great sense of smell and tracking, but probably gonna die in the first blow.