Animal Training

A character with the animal trainign proficieny can train animals given enough time and animals have a certain number of tricks which they have the potential to know. This number is not known until after training has been attempted normally, so what happens if the character starts training an animal as a guard, which has a fairly high trick requirement and the creature does not have the required number of tricks? Is all that time wasted? Can the animal's training be swapped to something that requires less tricks like hunting? or could it be treated as being trained in hunting since many of the qualities in an animal trained for guarding are shared with hunting? 

Is it possible to break "Guarding" down into  individual pieces so that an animal with less than the required number, but still with a good number of tricks can be taught most of what makes a guard dog a guard dog? Is there a difference in what you can teach an animal with 2 tricks and 4?

 

My apologies if I have been sort of vague on details(numbers) I am not sure the forum policy on mentioning specific values. 

I believe this is covered in the upcoming Lairs & Encounters book, which should be out soon. I didn't pay extremely close attention to the training animals section though so I could be wrong.

FooBot - you can discuss details as much as you'd like. All of the game mechanics are made available under the OGL - we don't try to keep them secret. :)

I'm reminded I've had an overlapping question.  Are Guard and Hunter the sum of 8 and 2 particular tricks, or do they run off their own descriptions, and those descriptions just happen to cost 8 and 2 tricks?

Hunter is of particular interest to me, as I let a player buy an Attack Tiger, and now the party wants more.  I'm making reaction rolls for the tiger at certain points, which I trust will be a balancing factor in the long run.  But even distinguishing between guard and hunter types it still looks powerful.