I am a DM and one of the PCs in my group bought five guard dogs. This has produced a couple of problems:
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Gameplay: I'm handling the dogs' turns in combat since PCs don't get direct control over their animals. In our last session this led to the PCs waiting around for more time which they admitted they found a bit boring.
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Game balance: The group is 5th-level. The dogs played a key part in combat, dealing extra damage and soaking up some hits.
How do you suggest I manage this situation?
Here are the solutions I have considered:
- Make a sort of "Guard Dog Swarm." I could try to design the "swarm" so that it has better game balance and doesn't take as long to control as five separate dogs. My concern with this is that such a thing would still probably consist of four squares not tied together and thus still take a little while to move. Also, I want the "swarm" to be at least a bit consistent with being five dogs so game balance may still be an issue.
- (From My ranger has tamed an absurd number of Animal Companions with Handle Animal) Make an appeal to logistics and tell the player he's only allowed two dogs or so. However, that question refers to many different and more exotic animals. I'm guessing that keeping five dogs around is still somewhat reasonable.
- Do a better job of dealing with these dogs. Plan encounters where they will be ineffective or a hindrance. This alone doesn't cover how they slow down gameplay though.
- In the name of the fun of the group, tell the player he can't have five dogs. This is the least desirable solution as I don't want to ban something without a decent in-world reason.
Additional Info
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Game Balance: As to how the dogs are even surviving, for one, I mistakenly made them Riding Dogs (HP x2 over a normal Dog). For two, they have thus-far only been in a handful of (admittedly not well-designed) encounters. Finally, I admittedly have had a bad habit of babying my PCs.
It would seem I must curb that habit.
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Gameplay: I am already grouping the dogs' initiative but moving each token (using roll20) and tracking HP, conditons, etc. takes some time.
Coupling the dogs more in general sounds like a good idea. Increased familiarity with roll20 (to find some good grouping features) would also likely help.
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Logistics: We haven't been tracking logistics though I've mentioned that were it to matter we would (i.e. we're not tracking food but would if they went a long time without visiting a town).
I could argue that more than two dogs will be too difficult.
Best Answer
Enforce the Handle Animal Rules
Getting those dogs to do what they want requires a Handle Animal check (DC 10 and a move action if it's a trick). Each PC can only do that to one animal at a time. Otherwise, the dogs will just generally do whatever you as the DM want them to. That might mean they all swarm something, or it might mean they find the target frightening and run away from it.
Remember, animals will only normally attack other animals, humanoids, monstrous humanoids, and giants. The animal has to be specially trained and use two tricks to have an attack command against anything else.
Kill The Dogs
Unless these are advanced animals with bonus HD, Dogs have 6HP. At 5th level, one Fireball will wipe them all out (the Riding Dogs you gave the party have 13 HP, so their survival chances are better but it should still kill some of them and make the Handle Animal checks harder on the others due to being wounded), and since Dogs are pack animals and one PC can't direct five dogs to attack five different things in one turn, they're likely to not be that far apart.
A Barbarian with Cleave could make short work of them as well. I'm not saying to go far out of your way to kill them, but they're low HP targets in combat, and they make a good target to even the numbers in a fight for certain types of enemies. If none of them are dying in combat at this level, it would be pretty strange.
You could pretty easily make an encounter that would eliminate the dogs in a turn or two, at which point the party will have to decide if it's really worth spending money to buy new ones.
Alternately, you could kill one or two of them in an encounter (which should happen normally in EL 5+ encounters), and see if the party decides that having dogs that aren't up to higher end combat around is a good idea. Any animal lover characters wouldn't want to put animals in harms way that aren't up to it, and the more frugal characters wouldn't want to have something die when they could sell it for gold and get more value out of it.
Initiative Shortcut
When this happens in my game, I roll one initiative for all of a given type (all the Dogs in this case), and have them all move at the same time. That cuts down the annoyance a little bit.
I also don't put much thought into what they're doing. Dogs are animals, not tacticians. They will either do exactly what they're ordered to do, or they'll attack, or they'll not attack. They're not going to get fancy figuring out how to reposition themselves for optimum protection of the PCs. (The PCs would have to use Handle Animal commands to do that.)
As they only have one attack, the rolling should be pretty limited and so you can keep the pace up by acting quickly without thinking about what they're doing.
Party Logistics, As You Mentioned
Is the party carrying enough food for five dogs? Are you enforcing that? Caring for five dogs in real life is actually quite a lot of work, make them deal with that.