What are some tips you guys have for implementing hunting pets into your games.
So I’m about to head into week 4 of the new campaign I’m running for my friends 2 of which are totally new to any kind of table top rpg but for the most part have been doing really well. One of them plays a hound and tends to be a bit more of a mechanics driven player, he’s got a great sense of character backstories and acting his character out but still seems to gravitate towards actionable mechanics. So far the biggest instance of this is with the trained hunting pet. Mattias (player character) is an orphaned Akorosi raised by monks of his faith to be their holy weapon, found as a baby cradled only by his hellhound Thane with who he has a mysterious bond. Fictional lyrics there’s an important and deep bond there, it’s cool I support it.
The problem comes out when it’s time for jobs to start rolling around and Thane doesn’t do anything. Ever really. And this is a complication I’ve found myself watching other games and when I’ve played a hound myself. I’ve spoken to the player about it and the common thing is “I don’t know how to use the dogs mechanics” . I’ve explained and offered the reiteration that, it’s about fictional positioning, if you wanna track someone down you can say Thane is helping you with your hunt roll, if someone’s rushing you down have Thane jump in and skirmish them for better effect than trying to shoot them at close range. But all of these still to him (and occasionally me) feel slightly forced as opposed to the character just doing the actions themselves.
So what do you think the hunting pet best practices are? How do you make the pet work functionally, is it just another item of load only to sometimes be used as the situation calls for it or since it’s a “no load freebie” does the hunting pet have a chance at a greater more story involved role, and not just some kind of impending doom clock and consequence bait all the time? I’ve already found myself thinking of consequences and potential story hooks i can use but I also know I’m probably prone to punishing the player for ignoring the pet, last session Mattias went and hid somewhere after we established Thane was on the roof kind of sun bathing so when two thugs came up on the roof Mattias had to decide to bolt and leave Thane, fight for Thane or try to signal Thane to flee with him. Is this appropriate or punitive?
TLDR
What are the best practices for players using hunting pets and what are the best practices for GM’s involving (or ignoring) them in the story.
/subbing for a pet-class-loving friend.
Make the pet an NPC, but give the player first say as to what they’re doing. If the player doesn’t have anything, give the pet their own agenda (even if that’s as simple as “I’m hungry”, or I’m bored”). “And what’s [name] doing?” should be as common as “What do you do?” when it comes to your Hound.
This partly depends on how useful a pet the Hound dreams up. If it is a wolf, or dog, that’s somewhat limiting in the claustrophobic spaces of Doskvol.
In my games, we’ve had a small songbird with a cacophonous cry and the ability to project a horrific hologram. We’ve had a small snake that has immediately lethal venom. We’ve had a hunting bat with a wide wingspan that can ride the thermals above the city. I wrote a story with a land octopus for a pet.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/the-gallows-tower-heist/
Anyway, pets best serve people who have an idea for how to use them when they pick one out, and who have bought into the flexibility of flashbacks
If I were to play a hound, this is what I would want.
* Position. Adjust position based on the contribution of the pet. If I’m springing an ambush that would be risky, have my bat buzz the group first, changing the attack to controlled, with the understanding a complication could apply to the bat. Or, climbing a tower, make it controlled by having my songbird perch on usable handholds visible from above. Etc.
* Assist. Use Command to have the pet do an action to assist a roll that I or someone else is about to attempt. That gives increased effect.
* Quality or Potency. Try using the pet as a quality item (“Look at the plumage!”) in social situations, or in negotiations for stud rights in exchange for a favor. In a fight, if the pet has any combat leanings, add in potency for having a flanking trained monster. It’s worth a try, even if it doesn’t work every time!
With all that in mind, another useful tip is to keep the location of the pet ambiguous. Use flashbacks to position the pet. Have the pet enter the compound independently and show up when most needed, or start a distraction elsewhere in the compound to aid in your escape, or be in the process of carrying a message to someone because that was part of the plan all along. Don’t say “The bat is hanging from its hook on the nape of my neck” unless you’re sure you wouldn’t rather have the bat elsewhere.
Now, an important point comes up here. Is the animal a trained animal? That limits what you can do. I’ve treated the hound’s pet as a familiar with a low-grade empathic connection and a significant level of intelligence, so they can communicate somewhat over distances and exchange information in a basically reliable way.
(Actually, in the hack I did I separated the pet from the hound and made that empathic connection a special ability any of the playbooks could take, because it doesn’t seem intuitively tied to an urban sniper gunman to me–at least, not more than any of the other character types. I wanted to let lurks take ferret helpers, spiders take brooding crow spies, faces to take cuddly and calculating kittens. Since there’s no special ability for that animal bond, only the hound can get it RAW. Your mileage may vary.)
Ben Morgan I like this idea, give the pet its own range of instincts and reactions and then filling in the blanks if it doesn’t fall into one of those immediately.
Andrew Shields this is interesting to me, one of the few things I put a bit of focus on when we were doing character creation was that I didn’t think the system really implied anything supernaturally mechanical about the pet. I did liken it more to a familiar than a pet and we treat it that way in our game too but specifically despite it being a dog/wolf with some kind of mysterious demonic ties I let him do things like flaring up fiery fur for flavor text but I didn’t mechanically want it to be able to generate fire or burn people or things like that. At least not from the get go.
Chris McDonald The level of supernatural power available to pets will vary from table to table, I am sure.
One thing you might want to consider is collaborating with the player to come up with some special traits to add to the pet, and then engaging in long term projects to “level it up.”
You could think up some suitably unpleasant things the hound would have to do, like bathing in a kerosene blood mix with ichor from a real demon in it, or murdering specific bloodlines or cultists and eating organs in order, or whatever. Use it to drive heists! =)
Or you could focus through the bond between the pet and the hound and let the character buy upgrades that apply to the hound, as it draws strength from the character.
A fire-breathing hound does a few things for your game. One, it introduces fire as an ever-present potential complication, making your life easier. Two, it creates a distinctive and desirable pet that people would murder the hound to acquire, so that’s fun. Three, you’ve got a demon connection, so the creature is of interest as a status symbol, source of parts, or oracle as they deal with their demons or Forgotten Gods.
Just some thoughts. =)
I had a Hound PC who took the Ghost Form ability for their pet. The potency is basically to level the playing field when dealing with ghosts. The hound decided his pet was a the ghost of a hound dog inhabiting a komodo dragon.
It was only later that we realized this would make it a vampire lizard… Which we just ran with. Basically, complications galore happen where the lizard has to feed off life force and so goes off the reservation.
If you’re looking for mechanics, I would take the pet through the cohort creation rules. Give it an edge and a weakness. This will let you know if its capable of acting on its own, or if the PC has to roll command often. A fine trained hunting pet would probably be a quality of 2. The Hound could also lead a group action with his hound, but the usual stress rules apply.
Our Vampire Lizard has a quality of 3, and is independant and savage. I also make the Hound carry food if he wants to keep Ole’ Pugsly quiet.
Chris McDonald one opinion especially for pets with more “magical” properties like your fiery demonic hellhound is to treat it like a ritual. Ask variants to the ritual question so that it does have powers like the power to have real flames come off it but then ask what is needed to make that happen and what the downside is. This would definitely give the dog more story interest. The player could do a long term goal to have the dog gain this power or if you want just give it to them now to make the dog more interesting.
(For the record, any character can take Ghost Hunter with a Veteran advance. Same as any other special ability. It’s not ‘locked’ to the Hound. The Hound is the playbook that starts with the pet ability because they’re a hunter, and hunters traditionally use pets to help them.)
Yeah, that’s just a case where the ambiguity apparently hits me differently than others. I’m not saying the setup as it exists is bad, I’m saying that it doesn’t work very well for me. I’m reluctant to agree that the Ghost Hunter ability answers the question of others getting animals as the Hound has them. I guess I’m just itchy around the hound pet issue, and here’s why.
I guess you could make getting a trained hunting pet with a supernatural empathic connection (like a familiar) a long term project. There’s no special ability for that. Nothing in the hound playbook makes such a connection explicit; the pet is EQUIPMENT.
Ghost Hunter is about adapting a pet you already have to fight ghosts, pretty explicitly. It allows for mind link, but not independently from affecting ghosts. And, the mind link is one of several options, so unless it is taken, does that mean there is no usable link between the character and animal save training?
The game may assume that without taking Ghost Hunter and choosing Mind Link there is no familiar style empathic link for Hounds and their pets, which is totally a legit call.
Just because I grant the Hound and pet an empathic familiar connection doesn’t mean that choice is rules as written; there are lots of sliders to use to affect how pervasive and strong the supernatural is from table to table. That seems intentionally vague. Reduction to trained animal status does make a pet that much harder to use on the fly.
As for using the Ghost Hunter special ability. There is no project associated with it, or fictional condition besides “your hunting pet” so you could theoretically walk up to a vendor, buy a pet, and make it a ghost hunter without training it or giving it a mind link–but it would be connected to you because it was your special ability.
As long as you have enough experience saved up, with or without the flimsiest of justifications, you can buy that special ability off the Hound book and grant supernatural power to a pet that you do not posses yourself. (Now your character gave Fido the ability to step through walls, but unless you’ve got Ghost Veil from the Lurk, you can’t. I have no idea how your character did that.)
If it ran off or died, could you retrieve that ability and put it on another pet? Or apply it to more than one at a time if you made the training a project? Or would you have to buy it once for each pet? Does this ability make the pet any more obedient than it would otherwise be? If you buy Ghost Hunter three times to get three abilities for one pet, and you do a long term project to train another pet and give it those abilities, do you have to train it once per ability or once to get in under the umbrella of what the ability covers? Are there costs involved in such training? Do they differ from animal to animal? These questions are left to each game table to answer as they see fit.
I understand the original reasoning that hunters use animals. I just didn’t find it very thematically connected, since the playbook is as much bounty hunter and gunman as hunter, and the environment is urban.The playbook has no nods towards stealth or knowledge of animals. There is no suggestion they hunt Rodent of Unusual Size menaces in the city, or do any sort of interaction with prey animals, or have any proud animal huntsman tradition (the world broke over 800 years ago); there are no wildernesses for animal hunting. Prey animals are really not part of the so-far explicit setting anyway–the only thing Hounds are reliably hunting is people. People who hunt people use people as their hunting animals of choice.
Again, a matter of perspective, mileage may vary, I may lack the whole picture, my preferences are my own and are not normative, etc.
I guess I find it odd that your assumptions about the setting are such that a Hunter and their pet doesn’t make sense.
Why not take the Hound and their pet seriously, then base your assumptions about the wider world on that, instead?
The text doesn’t say “… and there are no places to hunt animals, so hunting doesn’t exist.” You just decided that. It clearly does say that one of the core character classes has two dots in Hunt and has a trained hunting pet. Why would this exist if there’s no animal hunting anywhere, at all? Weird, huh?
Also, regarding Veteran advances, Andrew, you said:
As long as you have enough experience saved up, with or without the flimsiest of justifications, you can buy that special ability off the Hound book…
Right, this is true of every Veteran advance. I know you haven’t seen the full text about advances, and you haven’t played Apocalypse World, so maybe the method here is unfamiliar to you.
Essentially, when you spend an advance to add something to your character, you say how they get it. Just like every other contribution by a player in the game, this statement can be really dumb and weak, or it can be cool and awesome. It’s not about “justifying” how you have the new ability. It’s about contributing interesting fiction. Players have the freedom to do and say stupid things. No game can stop this. Blades challenges the players to take some responsibility for the fiction and come up with something cool when they get new special abilities, rather than shirking that responsibility because “I have enough xp so I just get it.”
The way I make sense of it is to have Hunt have lots of applications against people. Even with the expanded example on page 27 of the quickstart, it seems focused on people in examples and so forth (though of course if you were to use it to go after animals you could.) I don’t see “Hunt” and “animals” as naturally linked.
I’ve treated Hounds as more people with aristocratic pretensions with pets as a status symbol. That’s a reasonable interpretation of the playbook, from my point of view.
To create hunting spaces would take more dramatic license with the setting; adding vast underground spaces warded by ancients or by death rituals using magic they had when the world broke, but since lost. And have things down there to hunt, and make a whole culture around it.
Or to tone back the deadliness of the outer world, and use the hound class less as aristocratic and more as supernatural rangers focused around protecting communities from ghosts and monsters. Then build communities around a central monolith, and if its protective power wanes, they have to move; that’s how the hounds of failed villages get drained into the city. (I would call them rangers or guardians in that case.)
To take the title “Hound” seriously I would say the tradition came from vampires who infused certain supernatural powers into their huntsmen and used them to hunt monsters and people in marked off preserves, and some fell out of that tradition (or escaped it) to offer those supernatural hunting services to criminal organizations.
Um, yeah. There are lots of possible backgrounds for a Hound. It’s not a singular job in the game world — it’s a slang term in the underworld that people use to refer to “that type of guy”, just like the other character playbooks.
You don’t have to “tone down the deadliness of the outer world” if you want to say your Hound was a hunter in the deathlands. The deadliness of the deathlands isn’t explicitly stated anywhere. (The overview says that ghosts hunt “every living thing” in the deathlands… so we know that things live out there). That’s a cool background. Nothing ‘canonical’ in the game shoots it down. You don’t have to create an entire sub-culture to support it, either, if you don’t want to. Maybe your Hound was the only one.
Or maybe your Hound was a sniper in the Unity War. Or maybe they’re an aristocrat who learned falconry on their father’s estate in Severos. Or, or, or…
It seems like you’ve made certain assumptions that rule out some possible backgrounds or forms of the Hound, but — as usual — I don’t think those assumptions are required or unavoidable, given the game material. If a given assumption leads to something being less cool or troublesome, then let it go. Try a different way that is cool, instead.
Regarding picking up veteran abilities, sure, I get that it is up to the game table to choose to go an awesome route or cheese out.
The world-building at my table suggests that all the characters in Doskvol are half dead and saturated with the Ghost Field, so they can work their will on supernatural energies in peculiar ways.
Once you ground expectations there, then you can see how people figure out how to walk through walls, punch ghosts, and pour ghost-fighting weirdness into animals. It’s because these characters are half dead and saturated with the Ghost Field.
As you point out, I cannot assume that MY table interpretations hold elsewhere, so I try to hold what happens at my game table and what’s in the quickstart separate in my mind. I can speak to how I have handled some things, but that doesn’t speak for the game’s default setting!
I sorted out how people get supernatural abilities in my game, but in somebody else’s game maybe elementary school education requires a level of necromancy instead of arithmetic.
And as I make decisions in my worldbuilding, often on the fly, some things come in and some things go out. There may be roads that others would like better, but as the world is shaped by play certain things are set in as precedents.
Once I’ve built the village of Carrow, that’s my model, for example.
The upside of being vague in description is that tables can run with the setting and make it their own. The down side is, game groups will make their own interpretations of the game material, and their versions may not match the original design idea.
Moving from one game table to another is likely to require significant adjustment of expectations. Really, that matters most to people who run open table (like me.)
To come back around to the point, I just feel it would be easier if getting a pet with an empathic connection was a special ability, and upgrading it to a ghost hunter was a special ability like the ones on page 96 of 7.1. Not that that’s the only way to do it or even that I think it’s the best ever, but that just makes it neat and tidy in my head. With the standard caveats, your mileage may vary, etc.
Anyway, I don’t want to come across as oppositional. I apologize for causing any consternation.
On a tangent, the best thing about the Hunting Pet is that our Hound is a pirate with a monkey that has an empathic link.
So, at the table, when something exciting happens, I get to yell out “Boss! Boss! You just got hit in the head with a brick! Boss!” and play my version of an excitable, pirate monkey.
“Boss! Boss! She’s pickpocketing you! Get my money back! Chee Chee Chee!”