There’s a preview for some upcoming books on the WotC website at the moment. Down near the bottom of that page is the section for The Adventurers’ Vault, which appears to be an equipment supplement. Included in the preview is the Bag o’Tricks magic item, which might be giving a glimpse at how all these pesky, but helpful, animals in D&D are going to operate in 4e.
The animals pulled from the Bag of Tricks are minions that only last for an encounter, which I suspect is how other summoned animals will work. But I’m more interested in how they operate.
- They go on the summoning character’s initiative.
- They can only do the standard allotment of actions (one minor, one move, and one standard), but . . .
- . . . Each action they do costs you a minor action to command it to do so.
- If you don’t use a minor action to command them on your turn, they stay put and perform no actions.
I rather like this. It’s far and away better than how my cleric used to command his lizards in 3.5, which required a standard action to command and then required the DM and I to figure out what it meant to follow those commands. This seems much clearer, and keeps the player with character and animal from having taking up as much game time as two complete characters.
What do you folks think?
P.S. I think it’s adorable that the tiny kitten gets the ability to knock it’s opponents prone. One can only assume this is power has the keywords fuzziwuzzizacutems and yesheis-yesheis.
The Game Table 