Negative Hit Points for Pets and Familiars

[Dead Greyhawk]

Should Familiars and Pets get negative hit points? As it currently stands, characters and intelligent creatures go to negative 10 before dying, but unintelligent creatures would only go to 0 before dying. Intelligent in this sense is orcs, goblins and the like.

Animal pets seem to be unintelligent and would only go to 0 (though I did make an exception to this rule with Ash, the wolf) before dying.

Familiars would seem to be intelligent and might go to negative 10, since they are "special" creatures.

What do you all think?

[Dell]

I think it's clear that familiars don't take any damage at all.

Looking at the familiar table, I'd say that regular familiars would die at 0, or if you're feeling generous, -5. Special familiars would be able to go all the way to -10, however.

As for animals, I could go either way. I'd like to see some kind of modifier based on hit dice, so tougher animals can go more negative, but that may be too fiddly to bother with.

[liato]

I would say that pets are intelligent but animals in general don't have to be. There are lots of ways to rationalize this but for gameplay reasons it's pretty important that pets don't die at 0.

Pets are really hard to use in 1E. First of all, you have to find them. That's around a month commitment it seems like. Then you have to train them. That's up to a 2 month commitment. Then, once you have trained pets you have to take care of them. Liato is 2 days behind the party because of his pet.

Plus, even the best armored pets are pretty squishy. Most animals AC is around 6. If pets just died at 0 hp it would be impossible for druids to have pets under the rules we use for getting pets.

I, personally, don't think it should take as long to find a pet as it has been. If I told a zoologist to take me to a bear, crocodile, or wolverine it would't take him a month and he doesn't even have magic spells.