Treat Your Pets Right

[Kurasu]

My YASD luck with troll farmers seems to be good/bad. This time it was a random that pulled up a troll farmer. I took him and his dog to the Puppy Cave, headed in. My HP are high, so I'm not overly worried about my usual way of handling doors: destroying them.

"You kick the door and succeed in activating a hidden trap... Kaboom! The door was booby trapped..."

It happens. If I lost anything, I'd be able to regain ground. However, the message didn't stop there...

"The large dog growls in anger. You are engulfed by the roaring flames!"

At this point, I figured I'd have to kill the dog and keep going. My hit points were, naturally, a lot lower but livable. But there was a [MORE] prompt.

"The large dog decides to fight to the death in a blind rage! The large dog hits you. The large dog hits you. You die..."

Ended up at exactly 0 HP due to my own ticked off dog.

[Blasphemous]

Reminds me of one of my favorite chars: dwarven bard. Taking Heir, Starting with 7LB, with lucky roll on music skill, ready to tame killer bugs off the bat.
So here's my char, lvl1, 2 killer bugs tamed at my side, plowing through CoC. Enter D4 or D5, "you step on a loose stone" - fireball trap.
"The killer bug does not seem to be amused" followed by only one "hits you" message, then death. Such an overkill.
Once they are extremely experienced, no bard is really safe when they get angry, I lost very high level chars to this too many times.

[Frankie]

Can you still tame killer bugs like that in p20? I tried with L1 90+ music skill hurthling bard, and couldn't even tame a single greater claw bug..

[Blasphemous]

Haven't played a bard in pre20. In fact I haven't played a bard probably since pre5, but it was always tricky.
Half the bards died with instruments in their bloodied hands as bugs were already pulling their entrails out.
I believe there was an RFE somewhere around that suggested taming bugs was too easy, but I can't be sure, I probably just ignored it.

[ethical]

Haven't been killed by any angered companions yet, but it is always sad to have to put them down when they go rabid. I recently had a stone statue go hostile on me when i mistakenly cast acidball, up until that point I had never once seen it use a firebolt attack, after going hostile, it was spamming them every other attack and took many magic missiles to put down.