Blink dog as ranger companion?

Sup Veeky Forums. One of the players in my 5E campaign is lobbying for a Blink Dog as their companion for a Beast Conclave Ranger. It falls pretty much within all the standards laid out in the Unearthed Arcana revised Ranger (media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/UA_RevisedRanger.pdf), but I can't help but feel like that blink ability is going to be broken at the table. Any thoughts/advice?

PS, stats-wise, the only thing that doesn't fit with the class guidelines is that it's listed at 22 HP, but given that a few of the companion options written in the PDF break their own rules, I'm not sure how big a deal this is.

Blink Dogs have 10 int
Bro has to persuade the damn thing to do anything

How do you mean?

Haha, that's not a bad idea.
"Your companion seems to consider your offer, then sits down where it is, refusing to budge."

Something like this. I ran a 5e party once with a blink beagle mascot. He was occasionally useful for finding a direction or recovering an item, but mostly he just popped into their bags to fuck with their stuff, bark incessantly at interesting smells, and act too adorable to get rid of.

As fun as that sounds, though, it seems like it would also get into sticky territory with the DM asserting control over PCs (if we're considering companions an extension of the PC). It also seems like it would be more hassle than it's worth to keep track of as the DM. How did you find it to be, bookkeeping-wise?

>Kobold Wizard because this thread needs more images

That Ranger obviously needs more Pokebadges.

One of my PCs wanted a blink dog for his ranger. I set up a quest in the feylands where the party had to help a god with his great hunt and they were given one of his hounds as a reward

And did that blink dog end up making the ranger overpowered compared with the rest of the party or the monsters you were throwing at them?

No clue. One of the other players sperged out about how revised ranger is OP so the Ranger ended up rolling a new cleric before we got to the quest. Blink Dog is a pretty weak monster thougu

> "Your companion seems to consider your offer, then sits down where it is, refusing to budge."
Sounds like my two whippets.

My rule of Thumb is if it's more fun for everyone then allow it. He should justify with his backstory, tell him to sell you on it and you'll get a better backstory first of all and a reasoning for the other players. Plus if the beast ever dies you can incorporate quests to the fey to return it. Its spirit is not as easy to return etc. etc.

I mean the whole point of picking beast master is a sick pet. Maybe just adjust hp to that of a wolf. As the party gains more levels no one is safe from death anyway....

>Ranger
>overpowered
>Beastmaster ranger
>overpowered

Even with the unearthed arcana revisions, are you fucking memeing me user?

Yes, it's a dog that can teleport short distances and is intelligent. But beyond that it's just a dog. It can't shit fireballs or shoot lasers from it's eyes. It's a dog.

Your player chose to accept the suffering of playing a ranger. Let them have this.

Only thing that could potentially be broken somehow is the action economy.

With 10INT the damn thing could read or write

Can Blink Dogs speak? Use a wand or drink a potion?

No. Could probably be taught how to read and understand though. Pretty sure they can understand elven.

Off the top of my head I think they were able to speak telepathically to other blink dogs in their pack at least in one edition. They were always portrayed as amazing pack hunters but otherwise pretty flimsy, probably a result of being smarter than the village idiot.

Probably smarter than the half of the party that dumped int.

>the party has to call in the dog for every int test they make
>eventually they just have it lead them in battle

That seems legit. Looking back over the ranger, all the beastmaster abilities only require line of sight between ranger and companion, which doesn't rely on tactical positioning with quite as much precision as I was worried about. And the idea about tougher quests to revive it is a good one that I'm definitely going to steal. Thanks!

>companion figures out the duke is a doppelganger
>companion sets up clever ploy to out the impostor
>party sits back and watches while blink dog saves the day, is given a parade in the city square in its honor

Out of curiosity, because I haven't kept up with these sorts of discussions, what do you think is underpowered about playing a beastmaster ranger with the UA revisions?

Your animal companion is not an extension of your character, it's an animal.

Mechanically, the access to an animal companion (in this context) sacrifices a huge number of other features and without it you would be playing with half of the cards in your deck. So yes, it is an extension of the character mechanically.
Additionally, the ranger has a magical bonded link to their companion. It isn't a random ordinary animal. It even has its own personality traits. This enough makes it explicitly an additional character under that player's control, and it's pretty clear that given the bond necessitated and the history most characters have with their animal companions that they are extensions of each other as characters as well.

This isn't the rogue buying a mastiff or the fighter winning a horse.

>Your animal companion is not an extension of your character
Yes it is.

Ranger has always, and I do mean always, been massively underpowered. The animal companion was one of the only things they had going for them, and then UA gave a better version to the Druid class. Because Druids have always been a tad broken, at least in my experience.
Ranger isn't a bad choice if a campaign is going to take place almost entirely outdoors, but they're outclassed easily. Besides the Druid thing above, they aren't even the best archers. UA gives two different archer variants to Fighter, both of which offer better damage output.

Well, if he has 10 int, he's smart enough to shape his shit up when the situation really demands it. Such as when people would die otherwise.

Well I guess it's lucky, then, that we are indeed playing a majority wilderness campaign and that the only UA material we're using is the ranger update. Thanks for your thoughts. I'll definitely have a look at the druid and fighter variants to compare.

The UA fighter archers aren't even good though.
You're thinking of literally just PHB options. Battlemaster with Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter feats has the best ranged martial DPR.
And I'm assuming that you meant they've always been massively underpowered in 5th. They were gold-star strikers in 4.

Is that Dionysus, God of Rebirth, Growth, and Wine at he top there? I'm all for alt interpretations of classic monsters, but that one might be a bit much.
4E tried too hard to take things in a different direction. Like, in their attempt at making martials relevant beyond level 3, basically incorporated Weaboo Fightan Magic as a core book. It was basically a video game in tabletop form, and not even the right kind. If I wanted to play World of Warcraft, I'd have taken that plunge already.

>tried too hard to take things in a different direction
But it succeeded. It wasn't a retroclone, it wasn't a continuation of the festering 3.5, it was an attempt to make a high-flying tactical fantasy TTRPG. It did just that.
"Weaboo Fightan Magic" is the only thing that makes sense if you have Weaboo Castan Magic. If your martial PCs are down to earth and bound by reality, your mages aught to be grounded in superstition and ritual and not be able to instantly conjure fireballs. Likewise, if you have wizards and clerics casting spells throughout battle, your martials need to be similarly superhuman.
>Videogame
This isn't an argument. Nothing about it is more "video-gamey" compared to editions before or after except that it actually had formatting that was easy to read instead of each page being a clusterfuck of half-assed Di Vinci knockoffs and parchment print with rules obscured in fluff text.
>WoW
There are video games you can compare 4e to. Namely, a few tactical wargames. Muh Warcraft isn't one of them.

On that note, in 4e there's the Fey Beast Tamer theme that allows any class to have a (not amazingly strong) fey companion such as a blinkdog or young owlbear/displacer beast.

It wasn't really bad, despite what it's detractors might say. It just had a completely different feel from everything else, in every way. Drastically different lore, different mechanics, different feel. It was too much change, too fast, so the purists despised it. And that's where Pathfinder comes from.

I will admit, it did come closer to fixing the martial/caster balance issues than any other addition, and I loved some of the new class ideas.