Puzzler (companions and familiars)
 

So I was working through the remaining Races of the Wild material, and ran across a PrC feature I can't figure out how to implement, or even where to start.

The Arcane Hierophant has a class feature called companion familiar where the druid/ranger animal companion gains the int score and derived abilities of the familiar, while retaining all the benefits of being an animal companion.

as HL does companions and familiars as separate entities with thier own derived templates, I'm at a loss as to how to integrate the 2 as a single entity.

the final companion familiar gains the following combined effects:
Arcane heirophant level + druid/ranger for animal companion effects.
- Bonus HD, str/dex, and natural armor derived from animal companion table
Acrance hierophant level + spellcasting level for familiar effects
- int bonus, special abilities derived from familiar table.

help would be greatly appreciated, if it is not possible to implement I would not be greatly surprised, as it is one of the most complicated class features I have encountered.

I looked into this a while back. I don't have a real solution, but what I did was create a template to add to the animal companion the familiar effects. I was working on it Pathfinder, and I was still learning how to do scripts at the time so it's probably incomplete. The only other thing I could think of would be to make new Animal Companions that have the familiar benefits, but I haven't looked into doing that, and it seems like a lot more work since you'd have to create an all new set of companions.

For reference, here's the brief dialogue I had with Mathias about it:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthrea...ane+heirophant

thanks, I'll give that a dig and see if I can get anywhere with it, though hopefully that won't stop others from chiming in with ideas.

after working through the idea some more, I agree that a template is probably the best way to go instead of creating a new minon.

the thing I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is how the minion system works and how the animal companion/familiar inherits its effects, so that I can possibly reference this in the template, and also have a better idea of how to apply the template automatically from the class. (digging through the SRD source hasn't yielded much insight)

Yea, I never did figure that out. I'm pretty sure it's buried deep in the code somewhere. Not sure how to automatically add a template. Presumably that's something you would put in the class special Familiar Companion.

A template can be bootstrapped like anything else.

(Although this might require adding a template from the master to the minion, which isn't possible)

Is it possible to add a special ability to a minion from the master and then have that special ability bootstrap a template?

Bootstraps in general can't be added from one hero to another hero.

So, the only way to do it automatically is if the minion did it based on something that happened with the master, which of course brings us back to creating all new minions. Too bad.

Couldn't you ReplaceID something in the minion that checked a tag on the master and if so, performed the task?