Post/Author/DateTime	Post
dragynson1 04-18-07, 09:54 PM	Is there anyway to domesticate full grown animals and train them? The campaigns i am in ussually dont have years of time involved, the longest so far was 5 years. Rearing/raising an animal from infancy is just not a practical option. Can something like "breaking a wild horse" be done for other animals?
kubelick 04-19-07, 03:21 AM	i'm having the same problem, with a dire wolf. apperently the prereq is that it is dometsticated or tamed. here a table for teaching it tricks, after it is tamed. as you will see, there are certain trainee programms, if you will, packages of sort. there is a section in the dmg and phb about this. http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/handleAnimal.htm look for my post down below about taming wild beasts. maybe it will help. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/rg/20070109a
dragynson1 04-19-07, 07:15 AM	yeah but none of that covers capturing an adult animal. the only thing it says is some obscure reference to calming the animal or gaining its trust. which as far as i know only wild empathy can diplomasize animals
Guan 04-19-07, 01:28 PM	Why not??? Have the DM look at the rules for rearing animals from young, place some modifiers in there for circumstances, then go nuts with Handle Animal checks for several weeks. (taming intelligent animals in the MM have good guidelines)
BW0222 04-19-07, 01:55 PM	Guan, Why not??? ... Because the rules say you can't. PHB, p75, Handle Animal "Rear a Wild Animal: To rear an animal means to raise a wild creature from infancy so that it becomes domesticated." Unless your DM will houserule that certain animals may be domesticated at adulthood... the rules say No.
dragynson1 04-19-07, 04:26 PM	that is the way i read it , but that doesnt seem to make sense. Horses in real world were captured as full grown adults and broken to a saddle. Hell that was normal stuff all throughout history.
tyrecian 04-19-07, 05:22 PM	For horses yes. I am sure that capturing a horse and thrownig a saddle on it was far far far more difficult than it is today, back when they first started to use horses in that way. Even wild horses were once probably from a domestic background, honestly, give the use of the horse for so long. but yes you are right. HOWEVER, the horse (and perhaps the elephant) are the only examples of this outside of maybe monkey, dog, and house-cat. To think that you could take a 14 year old black bear and teach it to run in circles and jump through hoops and ride a tri-cycle is a bit much. What i do, normally, when my players are taking that skill, i let them know about circuses. Since its a skill in the PHB core material, it means that there are places where those experts are. Might sound dumb, but if there are thousands of alchemists working to invent and distribute alcemists' fire, then there must somewhere be a trainer that is training wild animals for pets and mounts. Otherwise how would a paladin ever get that griffin mount? I suggest talking this over with the DM and finding a circus or a farm where an old ranger lives. Chances are you might find a place where someone has raised a Dire Chocobo (wolf, bear, boar, etc.) and be able to purchase that item from them. I personally as a player have sold all manner of animals and magical beasts as babies (when i murderred the parents) to random experts about town. There must be an option like that. If there isn't and your DM is adamant about it, then i would try coersion, as in charm and trance like spells until the animal's mind is such mush that it cant remember a time it didnt gush over you. When all else fails, there is always the drunk option. Give it (the animal, or the DM) mead until it realizes that you are taking care of it (the Indians used loufas and a cage to take elephants to battle). This was an age old and respectable way of both angerring and calming animals that were too big to handle. having worked in a zoo, i can tell you in reality though, if the animal doesnt have a bred history somewhere, good luck. Especially from an old age. An adult in the wild is just too distant from our thoughts to ever make even 1 trick possible (in terms of what each trick is, a grown puma isnt ever going to "stay").
ClementWillowbreaker 04-19-07, 07:53 PM	You do realize the only difference between wild and domesticated is that you can't make untrained Handle Animal checks on wild animals and they start off one step less liking-you, right? It doesn't matter in most cases whether a creature is wild or domesticated, since if you are going to train it yourself, you need to reliably make a DC20ish Handle Animal check. If you can't make that, you will have to just buy a pre-trained animal (and most likely domesticated) anyways.
kubelick 04-20-07, 04:07 AM	i agree with tyrecian. if one tries to handle a wild animal, the dc must be adjusted. horses, have been bred for thousands of years, which would make them more or less tame. since i had the same problem this week, we discussed this subject for quite some time. of course: Never apply real world (physics) logic to DnD. nevertheless, i think the rules in this matter reflect real life quite a lot. i would also differentiate between domesticated and tamed. since domestication entails years of breeding, whereby only the traits which are beneficiary are kept and the rest bred out. like laying more eggs or giving more milk (eg milk cow). and horses, whose breeding is a great art, rely on their characteristic alone through breeding (race horses, labor horses, etc.) yet i doubt greatly, that a real bond can be established between a wild animal, even a tamed wild animal. it will still retain its wildness and remain fickle. i think it is reflected pretty well in the rules, cranking the dc up for tamed wild animals. i think one is better off going to the city pet store and investing in a domesticated aninmal. or the county zoo, for that matter. cubs and such are good too, though they will require some time to grow up and time for schooling.
jeffepp 04-20-07, 02:47 PM	the horse (and perhaps the elephant) are the only examples of this outside of maybe monkey, dog, and house-cat. Cheetah. They have been used as hunting animals for thousands of years, to the point that they are more like dogs than cats.
TygerTyger 04-20-07, 02:51 PM	Guan, Because the rules say you can't. PHB, p75, Handle Animal "Rear a Wild Animal: To rear an animal means to raise a wild creature from infancy so that it becomes domesticated." Unless your DM will houserule that certain animals may be domesticated at adulthood... the rules say No. Except of course that you are talking about two different things. "Rearing" an animal and training an animal are different concepts entirely. To rear an animal is to bring it up from infancy. To train it implies that you are conditioning it to perform certain actions upon command. One can rear an animal and never train it at all. So there is nothing in the RAW that says you can not train an adult animal. I think that the best interpretation is likely the proposed increased DC on your training checks, assuming that you have some way to get your animal less than hostile to you in the first place. And there are many examples of qualified professional trainers training adult animals, most notably animals that have been injured and helped back to health. Which of course, would be a nice example of the "getting them non-hostile" in the first place.
tarkin 04-20-07, 03:28 PM	The real question is what should the DC increase be? I can see solid arguments for +5, +10 and +20. +5 is basically "hey, he is not young, but it is still the same thing." +20 is "That is why they call them WILD. As in people don't try do this for a reason." Still usefull for epic games. +10 is "This is not easy, he is wild, but I think a non-epic, high level guy could be able to do it."
dragynson1 04-24-07, 05:24 PM	bump