Animal Companions

[chiefweasel]

When you go to level an animal companion it requires you enter ina class for it, like fighter or monk. I havent been able to find a way to increasse the animal companion without assigning a class to it. Am i missing something on how this works? thanks.

[Mathias]

Please describe what you're doing to get to this point - Animal companions seem to be gaining HD properly with their parent's level.

[chiefweasel]

On the animal companion page, there is an option to "Cleack here to add class levels or hit dice" all it allows you to enter is a class, the same ones used to create characters with. I dont see a way to adjust the hit dice of the animal companion.

The problem I am having is when i use a prestige class called, halfling Outider, it allows the halfling Outrider level to stack with any Ranger levels. Now trying to do that is one thing, but i dont mind raising the animal companion seperately, I just dont see how to do it without assigning a character class to it.

[Mathias]

The "Click to add class levels or hit dice" really needs to be removed for animal companions.

If you add a few levels of ranger (enough to have a companion), then on the ranger panel, click the add an animal companion button, you can then go to the develop menu, floating info windows, show selection fields, you'll see three things named "Animal Companion" - select all of them so you can see some details.

One has the unique ID "cRgrAComp" - that one's only function is to display the animal companion special in the list of ranger class specials, so don't worry about it.

Looking further, you'll see that "cAnimComp" has a lot more fields to work with than "cAnimClass" - so lets take a closer look at that. "CompLevAdj" is actually the field that stores the adjustment for high-level companions (the ones you can't take at first level). What you want is simply "CompLevel". Your halfling outrider class needs to add to that.

Now, close all these windows and go back to the develop menu and floating info windows. This time, select "Show Selection Tasks", and then select "cAnimComp". Looking at their scripts, you'll see that this is one of the cases where some of the scripts have been named (eventually, we want to name most of the scripts - that's just a time-consuming process). Note that the script on cAnimComp named "Companion Level Calculated" happens at First/499.

So, what you want to do is to add something to hero.childfound[cAnimComp].field[CompLevel].value, before First/499. Unfortunately, xTotalLev isn't calculated until PostLevel/0, so you can't put this on a class special, you'll have to put it on the class itself.

You should still add a class special to your class that tells the user your halfling outrider class is adding its levels to ranger for the purpose of calculating animal companion level.

Okay, for the script on your class (at First/100):

 
var level as number
var rangerlev as number
var bonus as number
var rangerbon as number
 
level = field[cTotalLev].value
rangerlev = hero.tagcount[Classes.Ranger]
 
~get the total effective druid levels we'll have from both our levels and ranger levels
bonus = (level + rangerlev) / 2
bonus = round(bonus,0,-1)
 
~now get the bonus we'd get from only our ranger levels
rangerbon = rangerlev / 2
rangerbon = round(rangerbon,0,-1)
 
~our bonus is the total, minus whatever the ranger levels are providing (so that we take into account situations where both classes have odd levels - on their own, each won't add an extra level, but added together, they will)
bonus -= rangerbon
 
hero.childfound[cAnimComp].field[CompLevel].value += bonus

I haven't tested this, so please tell me if you run into any trouble using it.

[chiefweasel]

I loaded it up and it seem to work fine. it has aded 4 levels to the companion. sure saves me a bunch of time. thanks.

[DarokinB]

Ok, here is a tougher one to try to do:

How do you add animals to the list of animal companions?

For instance, the exalted companion feat allows you to choose a couple different animals for the animal companion, or allows your animal companions to take the celestial template at -1 to their level.

[Mathias]

You add animals by making new races in the editor.

You add the celestial template on the class levels list.

[DarokinB]

Well I did that temporarily, but the celestial template is supposed to lower their effective level by 1 if their animal companion has it.

I made the feat handle that, but the problem is that the feat always lowers their effective level (i dont know how to reference the animal companions race from inside the druid), and so if they choose a different non-celestial race their level is still dropped.

[Mathias]

Getting that information is possible, but it'll take me an hour to work out the details.

Will it work to create two versions of this feat, one that is only supposed to be paired with the celestial template, and applies the -1 effective level, and another copy that doesn't apply the effective level?

[DarokinB]

Certiainly. My thought was perhaps trying to do a drop down like weapon focus where one is a celestial template and one is a different race, but im still trying to figure out how to do those.