K9 enemies...

Black Leviathan · 07-09-2019, 10:42 AM

We've got a couple of dogs in our current game and I've had dogs for my characters before a lot of the time either as familiars or as companions. But overall we don't have a lot of dog representation. In fact we've probably dealt with more felines that canines overall. From a my-table perspective we use dogs infrequently for two reasons.

They're ordinary. Wolves make a good encounter early on for an adventuring group, but become less exciting as players advance. You can make them bigger but ultimately there's little that can be done to make dogs a good enemy in most systems once players grow more heroic. Meanwhile most fantasy or post-apocalyptic games have a rich tapestry of exotic beasts you can deal with.

And we don't tend to use them as allies in games because they're easily overlooked. They represent a lot of NPC management for the PCs to have them and they're again underwhelming threats a lot of the time for the NPCs to use, espeically since you could have another bandit or gunman for the same amount of record keeping.

07-09-2019, 10:42 AM	#23
Black Leviathan Join Date: Sep 2018	Re: K9 enemies... We've got a couple of dogs in our current game and I've had dogs for my characters before a lot of the time either as familiars or as companions. But overall we don't have a lot of dog representation. In fact we've probably dealt with more felines that canines overall. From a my-table perspective we use dogs infrequently for two reasons. They're ordinary. Wolves make a good encounter early on for an adventuring group, but become less exciting as players advance. You can make them bigger but ultimately there's little that can be done to make dogs a good enemy in most systems once players grow more heroic. Meanwhile most fantasy or post-apocalyptic games have a rich tapestry of exotic beasts you can deal with. And we don't tend to use them as allies in games because they're easily overlooked. They represent a lot of NPC management for the PCs to have them and they're again underwhelming threats a lot of the time for the NPCs to use, espeically since you could have another bandit or gunman for the same amount of record keeping.