GENERAL: Combat/Summoned Pets & Combat Mounts

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Combat/Summoned Pets & Combat Mounts

This thread covers the stance taken on combat pets/summoned creatures.

 

Combat Pets/Summoning

Combat pets are animals/creatures that exist without summoning, often index entries that have been tamed by a character or “befriended” by something like a druid. Summoned creatures are a variant of combat pet that a magic has summoned, which typically can be done wherever/whenever (e.g. naz demon summoning or druidism’s call to nature).

 

Combat Mounts

Combat mounts are either combat pets designed to be a mount or a larger summoned creature with the same intention. Historically, these have been rather large and when it comes to horses, they far surpass them with different combat abilities.

 

Independent vs Dependent

The primary issue with having combat pets or summoned creatures is when they are independent to the caster. This means that they do not need to be sustained by the character and are able to act without the character’s constant direction. For example, if Bob summoned a creature, that creature could be able to go fight John while Bob casts new magic to fight Eve. This essentially turns any situation into a 2v#, granting the character a bonus emote via [!]. It gets worse when a person is allowed to have multiple combat pets/summons available to them.

 

A dependent creature/mount is one where the character needs to sustain them in some capacity that eats away at their concentration and/or energy. For example, a conjurationist making a standard conjuration of a wolf will be unable to run around and continue to fight as long as the wolf is running around doing things. This prevents it from being a 2v#.

New Guidelines

These are the new guidelines that are being implemented for the animals/creatures. A character may only have 1 combat pet (either summoned or a combat pet, unless using a swarm [detailed below]) and 1 mount in a combat encounter. These guidelines do not apply if you are doing non-combative rp.

 

Independent Combat Pets/Summoned Creatures

Independent pets/summoned creatures are capped at the size of a golden retriever. Pets should be based off of regular IRL animals that make sense to tame or index creatures of a similar nature. Claiming you have found/tamed an IRL variety of creature that is normally rare should be refrained from.

 

Dependent Combat Pets/Summoned Creatures

Dependent summoned creatures are capped at the size of a grizzly bear. Having a dependent summoned creature fight for you should have some kind of negative impact on the character while the creature/animal is still present, whether it be eating their focus so they are unable to fight themselves or draining their energy so they are incapable of doing much besides moving around.

 

Summoning creatures should make sense to the magic and should not be an asspull. For instance, if you are rp’ing a druid in the middle of the woods and call for aid, you shouldn’t pull a bear out of nowhere. Similarly, you shouldn’t pull a super specific creature that is rare IRL.

 

Combat mounts

These will need to be essentially horses with a different skin on. So no giant claws or bites that can kill someone in one go or things of that nature

 

Swarms

You can have up to 5 rat sized creatures or 10 bumblebee sized creatures summoned together that act as one. These should deal relatively light damage when described in your ability description and can be more of a distraction-esque technique. Due to the size and weak nature, these can count as independent.