Hey Ejo, what about a feat to let their dog be a riding dog or some other means of boosting it? You could also say that the companion is a coyote and to use the stats for a dog...
I've been pondering this, actually... But I'm not sure how awkward it would be to allow a medium creature to ride a medium creature, especially when I'm not sure how to balance the riding dog versus the standard...
Well, just because something is a "riding dog" doesn't mean that it can be ridden. It's just a particular breed of dog.
The standard dog was chosen because it is strictly inferior to a wolf that a normal Druid gets, but not by a margin that would matter in the long run. The riding dog is superior to the wolf by the same margin, and while the difference between it and the normal dog stands out a bit more, I'm not sure if it's enough to warrant a penalty to the effective Druid level or the cost of the feat is enough of an offset.
Well, if you change the fluff to a "coyote", then you can upgrade to a wolf and still call it a "coyote", just a bigger more muscley-armed one.
Given that one could just get a wolf or riding dog with Wild Cohort, I would say the feat penalty is enough.
I was also considering, as a follow up feat, giving the ability to ride them and allowing it to count as special mount or familiar, making it an alternate entry into super mount type characters. This would be, to those that could make use of it, quite strong imo for a single feat, but I don't know if I would want to reign in the power of the first feat to alleviate this...
Well, you don't need a feat to ride an animal companion, as long as it's big enough. However, you could make a feat that lets it count as either a special mount or a familiar instead of an AC... I dunno if that would be worth it, though. Basically it would let you trade away the original class feature and still keep one. And the supermountness is still not useful since as a Coyote you can't take levels in Halfling Outrider
I'm thinking too much.
Always a problem... lol.
EDIT: By the way, here's the character if you're interested.
Very interested, and quite like how you adapted it to fit into a general setting. I also like how you summarized all the character specific pieces of the general information.
As the creator of the nullcraft template, do you feel that property counts as mundane or magical in nature for being incorporated into the animal form?
Well, I think the templates in general are supposed to be mundane. You don't need an item creation feat for it, so I think that decides it.
Holy crap, I just read this over and I used the word "Well" way too much.