Druid animal companions and HD

[Nightwish5121]

I'm trying to recreate one of my players' characters in HL for ease of advancement in the future. She is an 8th Level Druid with Nature Bond (Animal Companion - Tiger). At Druid Level 8, her tiger companion should be 7 Hit Dice according to the chart on pg. 52 of the Core Rulebook. The HD entry on pg. 51 indicates this is supposed to be the total amount of the companion's HD, replacing the creature's normal hit dice from the bestiary, not additional hit dice. But when I enter the animal companion on the druid's dashboard, it shows the tiger's natural bestiary hit dice (6 HD) and is prompting for seven additional hit dice, making the animal companion a 13 HD creature. Is this a glitch, or am I missing something?

 

[Thazar]

I just made a quick level 8 druid and selected animal companion. You then hit the quick link from the druid class tab to go to the animal companion tab and select tiger and it gave the correct hit dice.

Did you try an load the tiger from a template manually or anything? I am not sure how the error you have came about otherwise.

 

[Nightwish5121]

I just made a quick level 8 druid and selected animal companion. You then hit the quick link from the druid class tab to go to the animal companion tab and select tiger and it gave the correct hit dice.

Did you try an load the tiger from a template manually or anything? I am not sure how the error you have came about otherwise.

I tried it again from scratch. Made a Level 8 Druid, selected Animal Companion as the Nature Bond, clicked on the animal companion quicklink to bring up the dashboard, made the minion the active character, and selected Tiger on the minion tab ... same thing - 6 levels of tiger and 7 levels of "Additional HD."

Now that I think about it, though, I've also been getting periodic error messages about missing "things" from various files, often relating to packages I haven't yet upgraded to, so I'm thinking something might have somehow gotten corrupted in my HL install. Maybe reinstalling it will correct the problem.

 

[Mathias]

Make sure you don't have "Don't Restrict Companion Race" selected among the optional rules for a character. For an animal companion, that lets you select the race as listed in the Bestiary, then add the animal companion benefits onto it. If you do, you'll need to re-select the race after you turn it off - you've selected the wrong Tiger race.

 

[Nightwish5121]

Thanks Mathias, that did the trick! I had selected that as a default to allow druids to choose alternate animals from just those in the core rulebook.

 

[Mathias]

They're already allowed the races from the Bestiary/Bestiary 2, if that's what you were trying to achieve. (If you've got those packages, although the Bestiary animal companions may be in the core package.)

 

[Nightwish5121]

They're already allowed the races from the Bestiary/Bestiary 2, if that's what you were trying to achieve. (If you've got those packages, although the Bestiary animal companions may be in the core package.)

I do have those packages. But this is the first time I've tried to make a druid character in HL, so I didn't realize the alternate animal companion choices were already allowed.

 

[Jae]

I was having a similar issue and, thanks to this thread, have it licked. In case someone is searching for this related quirk, my GM also made the observation that Wounds and Vigor was being miscalculated with the "Don't Restrict Animal Companion Race" option checked. It seems that animals taken from the Bestiary default to adding the CON modifier per Hit Dice regardless of whether or not you are using wounds and vigor.