Animal Trainer & Training Times

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1

Eh. This is tripping me up again.

Ok, I have some characters who have stumbled upon 3 wyvern hatchlings. They want to train them for riding / war.

I have an exotic trainer that can do this for them. He charges 250gp per month, based on the trainer rules.

However, since commissioning is supposed to incorporate the trainer’s fees, does this mean exotic trainers go faster than the 1gp per day for animals?

Let’s say I set the price of a trained riding wyvern as 1000gp (just making that up). Typically, by the commissioning rules, it’d cost 1000 days (1gp/day) to train the wyvern to ride. However, 1000 days is like 30 months. The fees for the trainer would then be 7500gp if charged 250gp for each month. So, the riding wyvern suddenly has a training value of 7500gp vs. the listed value of 1000gp… Which, is out of sync it seems.

I guess my real question is, how should I handle exotic mounts being trained? How should I set prices of the training, the value of the mount, etc. And, how does this work with the 1gp per day animal training time?

2

Great question. The 1gp/day for animals was based on the price of a common animal trainer (25gp/month). Exotic animals can be trained at 10gp/day, but they cost roughly 10x as much as a comparable mount to train, because the skills of the trainers are so rare and expensive.

For example, a heavy warhorse costs 700gp. It's a 3HD monster. A griffon or pegasus is probably comparable in training needs, but is rare, so trainers will be hard to find. So set the cost of training a griffon at 7,000gp, occuring at 10gp per day. So it will take 700 days.

 

3

Awesome. That gives me a good starting point. And knowing that exotic trainers can train faster gives me a better grasp on how it works.