Classes&Cogitations: Pet Afterthoughts

I was surprised by how much Baldur's Gate 3 downplayed combat pets and creature summoning. On one hand, cRPGs always had a problem with disposable summons replacing your party's front line, but then again Larian's obsession with teleportation obviates tactical positioning anyway, so I doubt that was on their minds. Maybe it stems from some push to minimize paperwork in D&D's latter versions (more characters = more attack rolls to tally) but if so it's a woefully misplaced concern in computer adaptations because... well, y'know, "processor" and all that. And they certainly had no problem letting me pile a dozen redundant zombies and ghouls into fights. At least some of the summons they did implement move beyond mere damage soaking.

The dryad not only has a moderately useful crowd control spell but her own summon, the fallen lover, is a decent bruiser with a shitty attack roll... which can be mitigated by the dryad's own staff knockdown, letting the power duo dogpile one target rather satisfyingly. Like weapons or other specialization choices, it's nice when "different" means more than cosmetically different.

As my playstyle gravitates away from optimization and toward support roles with lots of tricks up their sleeves, I've often encountered the "pet class" problem: at which point does the class' pet become more important than the class itself? Balance concerns multiply with every mook you summon, especially in systems with relatively low damage/health numbers like, say, D20. Summoning something with baseline 1D6 damage at low levels can amount to doubling your damage, but lowering attack rolls can easily overcompensate into uselessness.

 

Practicality aside, even aesthetically the coolness of your beeping robots or clattering skeletons can draw attention away from your actual player avatar. Animal pets especially steal the show faster than Anthony Hopkins, to where you'll find yourself playing a large bear with a small druid attached. Hell, if you've ever walked a dog around the neighbourhood you can guess how encountering a ranger with a tame magic super-wolf would play out:

"Oh, hey, nice to meet - OMG is that a big pooch that does tricks!? C'mere boy, aren't you cute, whozzagoodboy, whozzagoodboy! ... Wait, I'm sorry random schmoe with a bow standing next to the GIANT ADORABLE FLUFFY PUPPY, who the hell are ya again? - whozzagoodboyyy!"

I mean, I liked Sagani from Pillars of Eternity well enough, but I still learned Itumaak's name before hers and now remember it more easily. 

So there seems little middle ground. You either have to downplay the pet into an utterly forgettable bonus attack per round... or, and call me druidically biased, but you could also lean into the pet personality dynamic and express pet classes' characteristics through these walking, flying, floating, crawling, burrowing, hopping extensions of themselves. RPG necromancers already fall into that pattern by maintaining the undeath theme. So why not force a bit of thematic specialization and pet focus elsewhere? City of Heroes' "mastermind" villain class is often cited as great fun for exactly that reason, as each of its subclasses ran with a specific theme, be it zombies, ninjas, robots, whatever, with most of the mastermind's own abilities revolving not around direct attacks but around resummoning pets as they dropped, ordering them, buffing and debuffing.

It may be better to start thinking of summoner classes as gestalts, with the main summoner/tamer being merely the most expressive and constant embodiment of that personality. Play into summoning different goons for different purposes, like wolves for combat and foxes for sneaking, or swapping out golem arm attachments for mining/hauling/sniping or an Artful Dodger summoning different pint-sized rogues for the heist at hand. Give the various pets the odd interaction or encounter of their own, give the pack or squad or murder of bots a shifting personality based on its currently dominant composition (much like One of Many from Mask of the Betrayer.) At the same time, stick to the theme! Unless generalism itself be my theme, my wizard's summons shouldn't read like the start of a weak joke: a succubus, a dire pangolin and a zombie walk into a bar...

If nothing else, it would also be a minor step toward personifying your roleplaying avatar in terms of what it does instead of how it's dressed. And come on, don't tell me you can't think of any cute, poignant or clever ways in which pets could spice up a roleplaying campaign.

 

ey, ocupado!