As a suggestion about how pets could be implemented; having never played a game with non-automated pet training (ie charm once then it attacks what you attack and you do what you like) before, this might be a stupid idea, but I'd like to think that it is at least vaguely sensible. (note, anywhere I refer to "your level" or the level of the pet master, I mean the homin's level in pet training or whatever it would be called)
Firstly the "capturing" the pet - some kind of "charm creature" skill, or a completely new implementation of "immature" mobs which you have to go and capture before they grow up. Either way it should be very very hard to capture a big scary mob (whether or not you would allow people to capture any mob they like is a point of contention, but the theory remains the same... high level or just plain powerful mobs should be dang hard to get). At any rate, it should take a long time to do because I wouldn't want it to be the case that someone just runs around without a pet and then when they get attacked they grab the nearest mob, instacharm, and use it to deal with what attacked them.
Controlling the pet -
I think a nice way of doing this would basically be to force you to maintain an affliction-like link on your pet at all times if you want it to do what you want. This would mean people would basically either use their pet as their sole means of attacking, or not use their pet at all. It also restricts to one pet, and I think kind of fits into the SoR style of gameplay and lore (we can already make mobs attack themselves, run away, go to sleep etc, so other things shouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination).
When attempting to control your pet by casting one of these "control spells" you would have to test to see if the pet resists or you fail to cast (same as casting an affliction). Maintaining the link would also suffer some broken links if you're trying to control a mob that is a much higher level than you - I think bsically taking the current affliction rules and making it easier to maintain links would work here (since you've already got some kind of passive hold over the mob).
If you fail / don't try to control it for whatever reason (eg you decided to start nuking the guy who ran past your pet to hit you), the mob reverts to a toned down version of its wild behavior - it only attacks stuff that attacks it (or maybe it runs away because your passive hold over it tells it that attacking random people is bad), if its a herbie then it wanders off to munch some grass, if its a predator it goes to attack its natural prey (excluding homins as per first point here, and so that people don't just get it into combat and then ignore it and let it munch its own way through the opponents), or maybe it just sits down and waits for you to tell it to do something.
Since its a "only use or don't use at all" choice, some way of storing pets that you don't plan on using atm would have to be devised... maybe a "zoo" in all the cities (like a stable but for combat pets)? Or possibly you can tie them up inside appartments/GHs.
People are likely to form an attachment to their pets, and most mobs are easy enough to kill if you have the right levels and numbers on your side, so to make things a little fairer, I think mobs that are being controlled by homins should be tougher (but not stronger) than normal mobs of that species/lvl. There'd be nothing worse than running into an OP battle thinking "Yay, my max lvl ocyx pet is going to do some serious damage
" and having it killed in less than 5 seconds by all the nukes flying around. This could be a big problem with pets... while mob vs mob balancing isn't bad, when you have a lot of homins in one place mobs die a lot faster than homins do, especially if mobs can't get healed.
Possible balances for the "mobs die fast in pvp" issue would be to apply the fact that damage is halved (or whatever) in PvP to the pets, and also to allow some way of healing them. I don't think it would be a good idea to allow pets to be healed by normal heal spells because anyone with a "steroid herbie" would have the perfect tank
but maybe have another "control spell" that allows you to increase someone elses' pet's regen by some significant amount while it continues to do what they want. This effectively would mean pet users would have to work in pairs, one with a pet and one without, but I'm not sure this is a totally bad thing - I'd have to see it in action to work this one out I think.
When not in combat, the pet should follow you around and not attack anything you don't tell it to, because of the passive hold you have over it from when it was "charmed" (see 2nd paragraph). Its natural predators would attack it even if they don't attack you, (though I fail to think of anything that attacks mobs but not homins by default) and its natural prey would run away from it even if they don't run away from you.
I can see a sort of contradiction here between the pet behavior when just walking around, and when in combat but without you controlling it... I'm in two minds whether or not to just make it so that if you don't have a control spell on it it will do its "default behavior" combined with following you (ie attack its natural prey if its sees it/munch grass when you stop, but otherwise follow you). This would probably have to be combined with allowing a "follow me and play nice" control spell that you can maintain while moving, but still have to test against (albeit its very unlikely to fail unless the pet is much higher lvl than you) which would let you take it around with you, but would mean it would act like a semi-wild mob if you're forced to ignore it.
Pet lvling - two possibilities... either they gain xp and level like homins do, or they don't level at all and you just upgrade your pet when you need something that does more damage. The first could be thought of as some kind of link between the pet and master, so that it gains the xp you do, while the second would stop people pushing species of mob past their natural limits (uber yubo of doom anyone? it would be entertaining but worrying to see a yubo one-shot a raging varinx)
