Animal Companion Integration

[MosBen]

I emailed Fantasy Grounds customer support for some help incorporating animal companions into my games and got some good tips. I was also able to find a community made mod to add animal companion character sheets here:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?50278-Animal-Companions

Still, it would be nice if this was easier. I'm not sure what the best implementation would be, whether it was part of building a class which gets animal companions, or if there was a separate animal companion class that you could select when building a character. Regardless, right now as far as I can tell it's just not a feature in Fantasy Grounds, which is tough since animal companions are such an important part of the game for a few classes and are in the Core Rulebook. Anyway, the person I talked to in Customer Service suggested that making a post about it might be a good idea to see if integrating them into the Pathfinder rules is possible/planned, so here it is.

Thanks for your thoughts and help. And thanks in general to SmiteWorks. I've asked for customer support on a few different occasions, and each time they've been friendly and helpful.

[Trenloe]

There are plans to look at better incorporating animal companions in the future. But not in the short term. The approach I take is to build them as a character second character - so that all of the base FG functionality (character selection, combat tracker, tokens, movement, actions (attacks, damage, etc.) operate correctly for the player.

[Zidahya]

I always wonder why the integration of an animal companion should be so complicated. Wouldn't it be the easiest way to write a class mod with the class being the animal companion?
It has been done for every other class, and the companions doesn't seem to be so complicated.

[Trenloe]

I always wonder why the integration of an animal companion should be so complicated. Wouldn't it be the easiest way to write a class mod with the class being the animal companion?
It has been done for every other class, and the companions doesn't seem to be so complicated.
Fantasy Grounds has a lot of automation and we're expanding that with every release. To fully implement animal companions is a lot of work - both code in the base ruleset and then coding for all of the different animal companion data in all of the official products.

Complicated? It depends what you mean by complicated. It's certainly many hours of work for a team that works on this part time (i.e. aren't full-time employees of SmiteWorks). We're constantly working on ruleset updates and DLC conversions and so we prioritize what we work on - based off a number of factors (upcoming products, defects, updates, key functionality that doesn't have work-arounds, what we personally want to work on, etc., etc.). The first step towards a coding framework for animal companions was made with the recent eidolon code (for Secrets of Magic), that still needs to be ironed out before we look at animal companions, familiars, etc.. Details on what we plan to work on is available in this thread: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?72732-Pathfinder-Second-Edition-Ruleset-plans-for-2022