Woof!
I did something a little nutty the other day. I was watching John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and enjoying my favorite part of the movie, which is when Sofia Al-Azwar and John Wick shoot the hell out of the mint in Casablanca with an assist from Sofia’s dogs, and thought, “How can I do this in a game?”
Sure, I could go the Wushu route and hand-wave it, but lately I’ve wanted to play Classified, so I started thinking about how to do this thing with the Classified rules. A couple of hours later, I had it.
Making the dogs like individual characters would be a bookkeeping nightmare, so that was out. But turning them into a force multiplier that someone like Sofia could deploy? Perfect. Which meant boiling down options to a set of simple commands — Attack, Pull Down/Distract, Guard, Recall — and creating an Animal Handling skill. With that, you have what amounts to a second action by a PC that needs a simple roll, and that’s it. With modifiers for having more than one dog, but essentially this.
Classified is not the lightest ruleset in the world, but it’s far from the heaviest. And opening up combat options turns out to be pretty straightforward, even if there’s a bit of crunch to the process.
And then, just for the hell of it, I made Sofia and John Wick in Classified terms. I may share them with you at some point. I guess we’ll see.