Dogs in Inquisitor

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

The difficulties with bull-sized terriers and elephant dogs (despite the sneeze command) are manifold...

Watching an elephant roll for example suggests that it's not going to be a worthwhile combat tactic against aware and mobile hostiles - or those with a strong enough pointy stick...
A bull's strength comes primarily from the piledriver effect of a tonne or so of beef impacting the target...

In both cases the advantages of dogs are lost. (Assuming a more or less human sized target - Ambuldogs are another matter).

A dog the size of a bull would be attacking more or less at head level. It has only one weapon, its jaws, and its one very vulnerable to a counterstrike. It can use its mass to attempt to knock the target to the ground but its claws are not designed for gripping the target to allow a more effective attack.

By contrast a dog perhaps three or four feet at the shoulder attacks from a position normally in the periferal vision of its target, from a direction it is more difficult to defend and is able to hang its (not insignificant) mass from its target in such a way as to impair its movement, to drag it down.
Dogs are evolved to a certain method of hunting after all and tend to work best when they are not so much the weapon but when they can harry their prey to near exhaustion.

[Dolnikan]

Of course such huge dogs aren't very efficient at what they do, but they have one thing going for them, they are very impressive. Added to that they willbe very useful for crowd control, someone might know that he could kill it, but would he risk his life for that?
And there of course are plenty of planets where there will be quite larger prey, such as ogryns or huge animals.

[MarcoSkoll]

I'm not very keen on those pouncing rules. That gives a Chihuahua a 20% chance of knocking over a Space Marine Terminator!

It'd be better for it to work from the knockback rules - roll X dice based on dog size (almost certainly not the same as the damage, although it might be four times the damage or something), then comparing it to the character's knockback value as normal.

After all, it seems a bit daft that my characters (even excluding the Marines) range from a petite 42 kilos up to 135 kilo masses of muscle and metal, but they could be knocked down just as easily as each other - the game already includes rules for this, so it's worth using them.

[Dolnikan]

I was thinking about counting double damage for knockback but instead of knocking back the character he will instead be prone with the dog on top of him.

[Draco Ferox]

A dog would really be more for intimidation value. After all, a slavering brute which can easily outrun a human would make almost anyone think twice about trying to take on the character who was on the other end of the leash.

I would still just go with the AOH rules to keep it simple, but maybe have a strength bonus to bigger dogs, but make them easier to hit. Add some basic commands, and you'd have an easy way to use a dog in =][=.