Quote from: Coffee Zombie;979706Precisely.

So having a dog companion is about setting and agreeing to the expectations. Or, like I suggested, game it up. Dogs are darned clever, a lot smarter than most people give them credit for, and they can be intelligent and caring companions, adept protectors and be trained for a wide variety of support tasks. But they just can't do some things, and training certain concepts into dogs is very difficult. Not to mention many of the "tricks" we can train dogs for do not necessarily work when you add martial combat to the mix. War dogs trained to stay in combat need handlers, they can't understand "attack the weakest kobold, but leave the ogre to the paladin". They can understand "attack the foe I'm pointing at!".

Noticing where you are pointing is one thing that dogs do very well. You can raise a wolf from puppyhood and it will never notice that you are pointing. The subject of dogs in combat brings up the most important thing you can teach a dog, which is not to close with the enemy. Envisioning war dogs that rush in as soak-off troops is all very well, if you have an unlimited supply of dogs.

If you don't, you have to look at alternatives. While some types of dogs were trained to close with game animals and either kill them themselves (terriers with vermin, otterhounds, coonhounds, staghounds, wolfhounds) and others closed and then kept the animal occupied while humans killed it (boarhounds, possibly ridgebacks) several types avoided contact and managed to keep the animal distracted and occupied. Norwegian elkhounds are a great example. They bounce around a moose like they were on springs until the hunter can finish the job. My friend's Airedale would do this with a cow, although we didn't want him to, as we were not hunting the damn cow, and it was very risky for the dog.

If being difficult to hit (as opposed to being well-armored) means anything in a game's rules, it is fairly easy to model this style of fighting.

Quote from: WillInNewHaven;979775... While some types of dogs were trained to close with game animals and either kill them themselves (terriers with vermin, otterhounds, coonhounds, staghounds, wolfhounds) and others closed and then kept the animal occupied while humans killed it (boarhounds, possibly ridgebacks) several types avoided contact and managed to keep the animal distracted and occupied. Norwegian elkhounds are a great example. They bounce around a moose like they were on springs until the hunter can finish the job. ...

I did not know the last!

It backs up a thought I've had before, though.  Given we manifestly have bred dogs to face boars, bears and elk in our world, what would we have bred them to face in a fantasy world?  Orc dogs, zombie dogs, owlbear dogs?  Using boars for scale, I think any of those are possible.  So dogs in combat may not be implausible, but channeled more through specific dog breeds for specific monsters than "2 HD wardog".

Quote from: WillInNewHaven;979677That's why dogs trained to give the alarm without barking are so valuable, as I mentioned before. It isn't that difficult a job to train them to do that. The problem comes when you need the dog to bark because you aren't right there beside it and you've trained it not to.

"What that, Lassie? There are some orcs in the next room and the door is trapped? Good girl!".

Quote from: Dave R;979862It backs up a thought I've had before, though.  Given we manifestly have bred dogs to face boars, bears and elk in our world, what would we have bred them to face in a fantasy world?  Orc dogs, zombie dogs, owlbear dogs?  Using boars for scale, I think any of those are possible.  So dogs in combat may not be implausible, but channeled more through specific dog breeds for specific monsters than "2 HD wardog".

If you can bring down a Bull with a dog, then you can bring down most D&D-style creatures.

However, what happens when you have brought your owlbear dog and face a shadow mastiff instead?

Quote from: soltakss;980505"What that, Lassie? There are some orcs in the next room and the door is trapped? Good girl!".

I had a player in a Savage Worlds campaign who picked the Edge "Animal companion" and got his character a dog, and I would totally have allowed something like that - at least the orc part if the dog had passed his perception check.
That's even the example I gave when the player asked what the dog could do: "You spent an Edge on it! It's Lassie!"

If a character had simply bought a dog, he would have got a simple dog.

Quote from: WillInNewHaven;979676Moved to south Florida when I retired last May. We have a mango tree in the yard that produces and _embarrassing_ number of mangoes. I was thinking of running a session like Hitchcock's "the birds," only with mangoes. But I couldn't give figure out what attacks to give them and making them into chutney and salsa solves the problem.

Just borrow heavily from
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1219[/ATTACH]

(made right here in San Diego)

Pass the ketchup.