Controling of summoned creatures

My personal favorite, or favorites, among these classes are the ones that use firearms, fencing swords or animal summoning. I think the reason for the former is that I just pushed through David Gemmel’s Ravenheart, the 3rd book in the Rigante story, and there is a lot of heroic gun fighting and sword fighting in that book. I will start reading the 4th book, Storm Rider, tomorrow for that matter, perhaps I will find even more inspiration. Speaking of inspiration I found a book on weapons and armor over the centuries when I bought the Gemmel book today, it is a bit too pricy for me at the moment but I’m considering buying it for inspiration when I got some more cash.

This post however is not about inspiration but more about summoning and in particular animal summoning. Summoned creatures will be controlled in a few different ways depending on what they are and who is summoning them. For instance:

• Beasts summoned by a druid will not be controlled at all but rather randomly pick one hostile unit and start beating. Perhaps that can be controlled by the druids in that they chose who is hostile.
• The big summonings from mages will be controlled directly; as the mages actually possess the elementals or dragons they summon and thereby are in nearly full control.
  The reanimated courses raised by a necromancer will simply have a target picked by the necromancer when he is raising them, this can of course fail if the necromancer is trying too hard (trying to raise too many or too powerful creatures) and the creatures might pick any random target, even friendly and likely the necromancer.
• I haven’t decided exactly how to control demons (and devils?) but an idea is to set up probability or priority tables with the warlock who summons them, or a list of things to do. When the demons reach the end of that list they warlock will lose control and they will go for revenge, so it should be banned before that happens. More powerful warlocks will gain a longer list but summoning stronger demons will make the list shorter or a stronger demon will make the tasks quicker. Example list of three positions: attack creature A, attack creature A, attack creature B. A weak demon will keep attacking creature A for 10+10 turns and then attack creature B for 10 turns, giving the warlock a lot of time before it needs to be banned. A strong demon however might only do each task once, attack creature A twice then creature B once, this might still do more damage than the weak demon but it will occupy more of the warlock’s time too.
• Finally to the original idea for this post, trained animal summoning: First the trained beasts will gain skills (not anywhere near the extent of human player characters) when they grow stronger, the amount of skills they can have is decided by their level or job/class. To implement this I think it is likely I will use the job class and create a trained beast class which is allowed certain skills. The skills are given by the trainer and could well be interchangeable.
  Control in combat can be done in two ways; either the trainers directly command the beasts, thereby using up their own turn for a combat, or they set up logical rule system for how the beasts should act. The former idea is taken from Final Fantasy 12’s gambit fighting system. A lot of RPG games have automatic fighting systems where one rule is chosen, for example attack weak target or attack strong target. Other simple gambits can be attack target’s target or defend target. To this it could be introduced logical properties such as, defend target if target is attacked (very logical since it wouldn’t have anyone to defend against), defend target is target is attacked and life is lower than 50% (percent or absolute values). Then with simple priority the beasts might very well be able to take care of themselves throughout the battle.
  However the amount of gambits one character can set out is limited, and this limit applies to all beasts in his control, and I mean both the length of the priority list and the gambits are limited. For example the controller has only 2 attack target and three beasts. Then he will have to use something else, like defend target or attack target’s target. Also the controller might only have 5 priorities, he can then chose to give 3 to one beast and 1 each to the other two, or 2 to one and control the last beast directly.
  Finally with this idea and these limits it could be allowed that one controller can control all trained beasts in the battle, ergo a beastmaster summons 4 beasts and a ranger summons 2, the ranger who is more or less completely specialized in his range weapon only has enough power (e.g. gambits and priorities) to control 1 beast, the beastmaster however has more than enough and doesn’t fight himself so he can use his extra power to control and help control the rangers pets as well as his own. With this idea you could create a rather big team with several beasts and still specialize your characters in their weapons of choice instead of pet-control.