I was skulking around the Den area with my first teammate, Myron, when a dialogue asked me if I wanted to have an encounter with a lone surviving dog. I clicked "Yes".The next screen showed me an area with bodies strewn about, most notably a Deathclaw corpse. In the middle of this bloodfeast was a starving dog. Instinctively, I put the arrow over the mutt and clicked to get some information. The following text: 'This dog has taken a liking to you - this can't be good'.

My quesion: Is this Dogmeat? I thoughtlessly saved, and now when I move the pointer over the dog the message says 'it's that damn bad luck dog again.' And I can't get rid of it or tell it to stay like a normal companion, so he must be part of a quest. Does he, indeed, lower my luck in some passive way? I have not gone into combat yet, as I don't want to risk Myron dying before I can find a place with women for his new temporary 'home'.

That isn't Dogmeat. That's Lucky - the Unlucky Dog. And yes, he lowers the luck all around, making you critically fail almost all the time.

That's the Pariah dog encounter. As the previous poster said, he lowers your luck to 1. You should kill it ASAP although be sure to do so in the wastelands so that you don't accidentally hit any townsfolk with your now terrible aim. Running into the dog is actually one of the worst things that can possibly happen to your character considering that while killing him at low levels you could very easily lose your gun, lots of health, or a ton of ammo just through critical failures.

To kill the dog you should run up to it, enter combat, stand 1 space away, fire at its legs to cripple it. Then stand 1 space away and fire an SMG burst into the thing each turn. The thing has hundreds of HP and with 1 luck its hard to get the crits necessary to really hurt it.

Oh my goodness, that sounds aweful. It's not as bad as my encounter with , where I ran out of ammo and had to chase them all over with a while quicksaving / quickloading to conserve ammo, but Pariah Dog still sounds really, really bad. I'd rather just reload to before I got Myron as a companion. These developers are sick! I don't recall anything as infuriating in the first game.

Actually pariahs dog is sometimes a fun thing to get. As long as you are solo it doesn't matter, because all your enemies with critically fail too. It is basically the same thing as Jinxed.

My step father made a funny character that was all hand to hand damage, with super +crit perks, so that he actually had great crits, but everyone around him failed. It was funny as heck.

Myron is a serious pain in the ass, the only time I would use him is if you have evil Karma OR you need lots of Antidotes made up for floaters or other poisonous creatures. I still haven't figured out how to unlock his ability to make Super-stimpack. And I am pretty sure he wont make jet for you. I have tried to scoop up Brahmin crap with my shovel but they don't go in your inventory, they just disappear from my screen. Might be a bug.

You can scoop Brahmin crap? D:!

I only knew about doing it like for the caravan dude in Broken hills.

Pariah Dog ruins 2 of the best perks in the game, Jinxed does not. If you have 10 luck and Sniper or Slayer perk, you can then get crits on every single shot that hits without even aiming or you can almost guarantee a crippling shot on each aimed shot. With the dog, you only have 1 luck and only a 10% chance from these two perks.

On top of that, lategame enemies have ridiculously high weapon skills and usually burst weapons so they don't critically fail often even with 1 luck.

Not a bug. Jet would requipre the fumes of the crap, you you'd need to stick it in a big pot and harness the gas... Not a viable thing to do in a CRPG. He makes antidote, sims and super stims.

Myron is awesome!

Also:

Pariah Dog is avoidable. If you run into that encounter just immediately exit the screen. He doesn't give you the nega-perk unless you walk up to him.

to make him make super stims you have to have a high smarts lvl lol and you might have to be good at the docter skill.

I don't care how useless Myron is at this point. I wiped out the Desperado by myself while he ran around frantically saying things only Myron would say. If things get too risky I can always tell him to wait in another area. Besides, Myron and so he can hang around me all he wants. His new 'home' is now the upstairs of Desperado. There is even a hoker in one of the bedrooms for him!

Eventually, Myron is going to have to learn to use a weapon and wear armor. The first thing I'm going to get him is some Leather Mark II, and maybe a Desert Eagle.