No. They're one of those nonfunctional kitchen sink elements that got shoehorned in because they exist in popular imagination, but don't mesh with the rules very well.
Yes but running around a dungeon with a 7 hp owl perched on your shoulder wasn't a good idea, dies in a fireball if you fail your save. The cost for a familiar being killed was too great back in 2e which weighed the risk-reward ratio so much that having one became more of a liability. For those of you unfamiliar with 2e familiars: has to be within 1 mile of wizard for empathic link to work; loses 1 hp per day if outside this range (at least that's how we interpreted it being separated); when it dies wizard loses 1 Con and also dies on a failed save throw. The occasional spying was okay but the DM never played to my familiar's strengths, don't remember it ever flying anywhere to steal a magic ring or distracting anyone or hunting rats that led to the enemy's secret encampment. While remotely useful everything probably would have gone the same basic way and it didn't seem interesting so I largely agree with .
I think you're right. 2e was nice and old school like that. We played with 1e cavaliers and only rarely.
The only two 2e methods that come to mind are Wish and a few single person only one use per lifetime magical books that raised a stat upon reading and doing the daily exercises for a month. (Manual of Bodily Health, I had to look it up in the DMG, p174.)
The book never would have helped me. A DM willing to give you a magical tome that raises Con after you suffer a Con loss sounds about as compelling as a comic book story where a character dies and everyone's sad only then the character comes back a few issues or year's later. Certainly, my DM at the time wouldn't have stooped so low as to sugarcoat the loss and most of the other players would have laughed. The one who wouldn't have laughed would have had his PC try to steal the book.
Yes, having an invisible scout with opposable thumbs so it isn't stopped by a shut door has proven useful in numerous situations.
I'm in another game where a player has a cat familiar that has been completely useless though.
I had a player that by some means (I forget exactly, I think he was a warlock) pretended to be his familiar the entire game and his character was back in his castle doing more important things. The other players just thought that his Imp familiar was the character.
Was very fun for the one shot game.
He did a bunch of touch attacks and shit.
Had a sorceror with some little bird familiar that could talk. They used him as a scout constantly, and had him flying overhead looking out for shit. Was honestly kinda op utility-wise, but it's the only time I've seen someone invest resources in a familiar, so it seemed fair that he got lots out of it.
The faft that a frog or scorpion I can hide in a pocket gives me passive bonuses and the DM usually forgets it exists and doesn't kill it is the reason I like them. If I want something attacked by a thing smaller than my wizard, I'd point the halfling at it.
The once a week commune is actually pretty useful. Great hide skill combined with at will invisibility is fantastic. Good charisma means he can UMD wands.
Yea, I use the little guy regularly.
I played a warlock once who used his familiar like a stealth drone. We were playing what was essentially a dungeon crawl style campaign, and we were always going down tunnels and into caves where we didn't know what might be waiting for us. It was very effective for scouting ahead and revealing ambushes and traps. So effective that the GM decided had it decide to "return to the infernal realm" one day with no explanation.
But that's what it's role is in a party: survelliance and recon drone. Unless the GM puts extraordinary effort into giving it a personality then it's essentially just a piece of equipment to be deployed.
not at all. Familiars can use magic items, can be the recipient of action spells like Dragon's Breath, can be a constant source of advantage (in dnd advantage means roll 2 die when attacking and take the better), can provide line of sight for sight-based teleport spells like Misty Step.
Op might just have a limited imagination. But DnD is a shit game for idiots so I don't blame him.
Yeah, they're fricking incredible if you abuse them to get two rolls for every skill check, get matching teamwork feats so you never provoke AoOs for moving, let the familiar use wands, or play one of many familiar-focused builds.
Yes. I very regularly use my familiar for scouting. It is also good for leaving in one place as in innocuous sentry.
Having an intelligent animal is very useful.
In 5th edition dungeons & dragons familiars are overpowered
the problem is you have to play an evil character (ideally of an evil race) to get any interesting or useful familiars.
So only edgelord tieflings and drow, etc... get to enjoy familiars, for everyone else it's a liability that ties you down playing babysitter.
What the frick are you on about? There's so many options that you can't possibly be this moronic. Hell, in many systems, the possible familiars aren't even listed; you're free to take whatever you want, as negotiated with the GM.
well honestly, only ever used them a couple times and they always get used as scouts that invariably die, which brought penalties if i remember correctly, depending on edition, so they fell out of favor rather quickly among us.
the best times were becmi dnd when it all was new, and people legit named their characters "son of conan" "metalord" "rock stoneman" and "the edge", and most would die before 5th level, very few going on to get all those marvel-esque custom magic items with x powers of this or that y times per day...in those days i cannot remember anyone using familiars, the big thing was trying to survive abusing the shit out of wish spell.
Living Greyhawk, D&D's "flagship" organized play campaign for 3e and 3.5, had some very specific rules implementations. Polymorphing your resident Fighter willy-nilly was deemed too powerful, so "as Alter Self but" was interpreted in the tightest way possible. You were restricted to: >creatures with a Monster Manual entry (no advancing the hit dice); >same creature type (Humanoid); >one single size up (or down); >most abilities of the new form weren't gained; >any gear that couldn't be used by the new form melded into it instead of enlarging.
For melee party members, the list was essentially giants. I think Annis Hag was the best choice because of massive natural armor, since you also got to keep gear due to the hag's body shape / gear use as described in the Monster Manual.
However, these specific restrictions meant that a familiar, which was a Magical Beast by creature type, could be Polymorphed into Magical Beasts 1 size larger than itself. And if you happened to pick up a Large familiar, like a Hippogriff, suddenly Huge Magical Beasts were on the table. Like a 12-headed Hydra, which had its own printed stat block - and, importantly, the ability to attack with all 12 heads at the same time even after moving.
This was not my cheese. I found it online and realized my character was already almost ideally suited for it. I had a dwarf wizard with tons of HP (which the familiar got half of) and a habit of casting False Life (which the familiar could share if adjacent). From there it was just a short leap to stack ALL THE BUFFS on the familiar the moment an adventure gave even half an opportunity to prepare. In this instance, party was supposed to take out a Giant Chieftain, and got a minute to prepare outside his room. Once all the buffs were up, I used Dimension Door on the now-Hydra and the Giant exploded into rapidly burning flesh confetti.
Ah yes, the creature with at most 4 HP and an AC somewhere from 10-14 that takes a full hour to summon back after it takes its 1d4 of HP. Definitely makes sense to have that on the frontlines of a combat.
Using Help to give advantage on an attack roll requires you to be within 5 feet of whatever you're making easier to hit, not just within 5 feet of whoever is getting the advantage. All it takes is pretty much any creature with any multiattack using one attack to swap at your familiar, and it's gone.
You'd probably want the armour to expose the face and ears so the cat still use it's senses, the visor will probably scar it and it'll walk backward and paw at the helm to get it off and in terms of being functional for combat the cat will want to be able to bite.
It is interesting just how many people decide to use their familiar for spying/scouting. Not a lot of people sending their familiar out to fish for them, or dress their wounds, or sell their loot.
I think it has to do with the fact that scouting is dangerous. We don't want to be the one scouting because if it goes poorly then we could be captured or killed. So we send in a disposable scout. If it were more viable then we would likely be using our familiars for all sorts of high risk tasks like disarming traps and fighting. A lot of game designers seem adverse to letting familiars be too useful across all areas, but I'm sure if the game was designed around it then it would be interesting.
Yes. My GM let me use them for all kinds of stuff the rules disallow or don't cover.
They ended up being material in creating some of my servants, and in one the CPU and remote transponder for a seal I killed and turned into a biological ROV.
Used one to prevent a resurrecting elder god from taking another PCs body as their vessel and incubator. I lost the familiar but trapped the elder god in the form of a mutated sea slug, which I then used as a power source for a sending and scrying array so my evil mage could call her parents and check up on them.
Her family's monstrous evil and twisted ambition is only surpassed by their genuine love and healthy relationships with each other.
During the campaign she set time asside to try to source presents for them and was trying to figure out how to work out a method of user friendly immortality for them since they wouldn't be able to use the body surfing method she came up with reliably enough for her liking.
That was also the campaign where in the last session she turned the Bounty Hunter into a Dragon because she asked nicely and agreed to not holding against her if it went terribly wrong.
The psionic equivalent in 3.5 and Pathfinder, called a Psicrystal, is outstanding. It's a size Tiny construct with Hardness like a material, so it's hard to hit and surprisingly survivable against both melee damage and debilitating effects like poison/sleep/any kind of mind control. But the real takeaway is that it's a creature with an Int score, which means it gets feats as it advances in Hit Die with you. This leaves you with a ton of options for customization, rather than psionics just having a menu of prebuilt creatures to pick from.
There's an entire book by Dreamscarred Press called Psicrystals Expanded that details options for turning your psicrystal into different things, like embedding it in your body, to turning it into or fusing it into a weapon, to morphing it into a crystal effigy of a creature picked from a given list that includes plants and constructs. There's also Legendary Games' setting, Arcforge, with heavy sci-fi integration. It has templates for psicrystals, my favorite of which is OS. Instead of a physical crystal, it becomes an entity of sentient code that literally lives rent free in your head. It can leap from you to other technological devices or constructs within a certain range, acting like a virus.
One trick I really like is taking advantage of the Psionic Talents system in Pathfinder. If you know a level 1 psionic power, you also get the level 0 Talent (cantrip) version of that power. So you give your psicrystal the feat that gives you a single level 1 power and a single power point to use it, and take Energy Ray, which is a ranged touch attach that you can choose to deal Fire, Cold, Electricity, or Sonic with. But merely having it also gives the crystal Energy Splash, which is the same thing except short range and it only does a single point of damage. But it's also free to cast. So now you have a size Tiny flight-capable scout capable of dealing 1 point of sonic, drilling through locks and hinges.
>Dreamscarred Press
These dudes were fricking amazing. Legit once ran a 3.5 campaign solely as an excuse to play a psionics game exclusively usdng their material.
DSP is my favorite game development studio, bar none, including videogames. Their takes on 3.5 psionics and turning Tome of Battle into Path of War were god-tier in flavor and function. My main/signature class among my groups has become their Vitalist, and I don't see it ever changing.
Apparently they dropped off the radar because the main guy's life decided to shit all over him all at once. Like two or three family members died within a few months of eachother, he and multiple staff got hit real bad with Covid, plus a bunch of other shit. And he's still over there on Kickstarter offering refunds and to finish the Starfinder content he had to drop, like 3-4 years later. He seems like a stand-up guy and I wish him all the best.
If you're reading this, Jeremy, I still want Chimera Soul real bad.
Yes, but only because Anima Beyond Fantasy's familiars are insane. ESPECIALLY the Sheele(Fairies).
Relevant to thread, my Warlock's fire sheele had an ability that doubled in AoE and gained 10 damage each turn she kept it up at a cost of my Zeon(MP). I used it twice to wipe an enemy military encampment, and then the setting's Totally Not Raccoon City.
Our Warrior Summoner had a Nature one, that could shapeshift into any natural creature. This included: >A T-Rex, who utterly BODIED at least two bosses >A Young Storm Dragon, to mop the floor with a few demonic assassins. >The Gurmah Garus, a SEVERAL MILE LONG SANDWORM that she then had roll over an entire army.
I once played a wizard who kept a frog familiar underneath their comically large hat to peek out and attack enemies with surprise spells, often casting Dragon's Breath on him so he could act as a wizard-mounted flamethrower sentry or just having him jump onto weak enemies and zap them with touch spells.
If you count 'regular' pets that aren't strictly spellcaster bound summons, I'm currently playing a dhampir whose housecat was afflicted with vampirism alongside the rest of his family ~150 years ago (also technically making him a higher vampire than my PC, which has been the subject of some slight ribbing) and is powerful enough to contribute in combat. He more or less has a toned down displacer beast statblock with shadow magic flavoring his abilities and tentacle attacks- think Shadows from DMC who can use them to hide or shape them into spikes and spear things from a distance.
All the time, familiars are borderline OP in 5e, they can:
- deliver touch-based spells
- act as remote viewing devices
- trigger traps
- distract enemies in combat
- carry messages
- be transformed into dinosaurs
I cast invisibility on my owl and argued that the owl holding onto another creature would also make them invisible. This combined with being able to use my action to control the owl almost allowed me to break a party member out of jail.
Have your threads ever been remotely related to your own games, instead of just asking other people about what they're doing?
yes
*meows in medieval latin*
Maumo, I meow
I once used a familiar to make a touch attack.
This. Its useful to have small, fast familiars that can channel touch spells, specially for healing your party members
No. They're one of those nonfunctional kitchen sink elements that got shoehorned in because they exist in popular imagination, but don't mesh with the rules very well.
Yes but running around a dungeon with a 7 hp owl perched on your shoulder wasn't a good idea, dies in a fireball if you fail your save. The cost for a familiar being killed was too great back in 2e which weighed the risk-reward ratio so much that having one became more of a liability. For those of you unfamiliar with 2e familiars: has to be within 1 mile of wizard for empathic link to work; loses 1 hp per day if outside this range (at least that's how we interpreted it being separated); when it dies wizard loses 1 Con and also dies on a failed save throw. The occasional spying was okay but the DM never played to my familiar's strengths, don't remember it ever flying anywhere to steal a magic ring or distracting anyone or hunting rats that led to the enemy's secret encampment. While remotely useful everything probably would have gone the same basic way and it didn't seem interesting so I largely agree with .
Permanent -1 Con is nasty, iirc 2e had very few options to restore or raise stats.
I think you're right. 2e was nice and old school like that. We played with 1e cavaliers and only rarely.
The only two 2e methods that come to mind are Wish and a few single person only one use per lifetime magical books that raised a stat upon reading and doing the daily exercises for a month. (Manual of Bodily Health, I had to look it up in the DMG, p174.)
The book never would have helped me. A DM willing to give you a magical tome that raises Con after you suffer a Con loss sounds about as compelling as a comic book story where a character dies and everyone's sad only then the character comes back a few issues or year's later. Certainly, my DM at the time wouldn't have stooped so low as to sugarcoat the loss and most of the other players would have laughed. The one who wouldn't have laughed would have had his PC try to steal the book.
Yes, having an invisible scout with opposable thumbs so it isn't stopped by a shut door has proven useful in numerous situations.
I'm in another game where a player has a cat familiar that has been completely useless though.
I had a player that by some means (I forget exactly, I think he was a warlock) pretended to be his familiar the entire game and his character was back in his castle doing more important things. The other players just thought that his Imp familiar was the character.
Was very fun for the one shot game.
He did a bunch of touch attacks and shit.
Had a sorceror with some little bird familiar that could talk. They used him as a scout constantly, and had him flying overhead looking out for shit. Was honestly kinda op utility-wise, but it's the only time I've seen someone invest resources in a familiar, so it seemed fair that he got lots out of it.
Every time we did this the familiar got shot eventually
If I recall correctly, a frog familiar gives you 3HP. That is useful.
Yea, that's supposed to make up for the fact that it can't run, can't fly and can't attack.
The faft that a frog or scorpion I can hide in a pocket gives me passive bonuses and the DM usually forgets it exists and doesn't kill it is the reason I like them. If I want something attacked by a thing smaller than my wizard, I'd point the halfling at it.
The once a week commune is actually pretty useful. Great hide skill combined with at will invisibility is fantastic. Good charisma means he can UMD wands.
Yea, I use the little guy regularly.
I played a warlock once who used his familiar like a stealth drone. We were playing what was essentially a dungeon crawl style campaign, and we were always going down tunnels and into caves where we didn't know what might be waiting for us. It was very effective for scouting ahead and revealing ambushes and traps. So effective that the GM decided had it decide to "return to the infernal realm" one day with no explanation.
But that's what it's role is in a party: survelliance and recon drone. Unless the GM puts extraordinary effort into giving it a personality then it's essentially just a piece of equipment to be deployed.
My character has a familiar Inuse like this. It gets old saying "I send my pet in first". So I pretend to forget about it, to not overdo the scouting.
Are familiars in 5E useless or something? In ACKS they're extremely useful.
not at all. Familiars can use magic items, can be the recipient of action spells like Dragon's Breath, can be a constant source of advantage (in dnd advantage means roll 2 die when attacking and take the better), can provide line of sight for sight-based teleport spells like Misty Step.
Op might just have a limited imagination. But DnD is a shit game for idiots so I don't blame him.
if op is talking about DnDogshit, it's quite easy to weaponize familiars.
Yeah, they're fricking incredible if you abuse them to get two rolls for every skill check, get matching teamwork feats so you never provoke AoOs for moving, let the familiar use wands, or play one of many familiar-focused builds.
That’s fun.
Yes. I very regularly use my familiar for scouting. It is also good for leaving in one place as in innocuous sentry.
Having an intelligent animal is very useful.
In 5th edition dungeons & dragons familiars are overpowered
>has your UAV drone ever been useful
I wonder
>woman
>having $4000 of credit available
???
Yes. I used my cat to scout out areas and record the environment. I also tossed her across a canal once to see what was over there. Good times.
the problem is you have to play an evil character (ideally of an evil race) to get any interesting or useful familiars.
So only edgelord tieflings and drow, etc... get to enjoy familiars, for everyone else it's a liability that ties you down playing babysitter.
What the frick are you on about? There's so many options that you can't possibly be this moronic. Hell, in many systems, the possible familiars aren't even listed; you're free to take whatever you want, as negotiated with the GM.
well honestly, only ever used them a couple times and they always get used as scouts that invariably die, which brought penalties if i remember correctly, depending on edition, so they fell out of favor rather quickly among us.
the best times were becmi dnd when it all was new, and people legit named their characters "son of conan" "metalord" "rock stoneman" and "the edge", and most would die before 5th level, very few going on to get all those marvel-esque custom magic items with x powers of this or that y times per day...in those days i cannot remember anyone using familiars, the big thing was trying to survive abusing the shit out of wish spell.
I mean, it's a devil that is willing to reward me with more spell casts if I'm willing to sell my soul further to the Devil. So abso-fricking-lutely.
Stats, for reference.
based SotDL enjoyer
Living Greyhawk, D&D's "flagship" organized play campaign for 3e and 3.5, had some very specific rules implementations. Polymorphing your resident Fighter willy-nilly was deemed too powerful, so "as Alter Self but" was interpreted in the tightest way possible. You were restricted to:
>creatures with a Monster Manual entry (no advancing the hit dice);
>same creature type (Humanoid);
>one single size up (or down);
>most abilities of the new form weren't gained;
>any gear that couldn't be used by the new form melded into it instead of enlarging.
For melee party members, the list was essentially giants. I think Annis Hag was the best choice because of massive natural armor, since you also got to keep gear due to the hag's body shape / gear use as described in the Monster Manual.
However, these specific restrictions meant that a familiar, which was a Magical Beast by creature type, could be Polymorphed into Magical Beasts 1 size larger than itself. And if you happened to pick up a Large familiar, like a Hippogriff, suddenly Huge Magical Beasts were on the table. Like a 12-headed Hydra, which had its own printed stat block - and, importantly, the ability to attack with all 12 heads at the same time even after moving.
This was not my cheese. I found it online and realized my character was already almost ideally suited for it. I had a dwarf wizard with tons of HP (which the familiar got half of) and a habit of casting False Life (which the familiar could share if adjacent). From there it was just a short leap to stack ALL THE BUFFS on the familiar the moment an adventure gave even half an opportunity to prepare. In this instance, party was supposed to take out a Giant Chieftain, and got a minute to prepare outside his room. Once all the buffs were up, I used Dimension Door on the now-Hydra and the Giant exploded into rapidly burning flesh confetti.
In the 5e D&D vidya game Solasta, you can use familiars to give advantage to allied attacks
can you really do this in 5e? Sounds OP
Yes, any familiar can use the help action to give advantage to a friendly target in 5ft
Ah yes, the creature with at most 4 HP and an AC somewhere from 10-14 that takes a full hour to summon back after it takes its 1d4 of HP. Definitely makes sense to have that on the frontlines of a combat.
Using Help to give advantage on an attack roll requires you to be within 5 feet of whatever you're making easier to hit, not just within 5 feet of whoever is getting the advantage. All it takes is pretty much any creature with any multiattack using one attack to swap at your familiar, and it's gone.
I never said it was a good idea outside of a video game
You'd probably want the armour to expose the face and ears so the cat still use it's senses, the visor will probably scar it and it'll walk backward and paw at the helm to get it off and in terms of being functional for combat the cat will want to be able to bite.
I used my wizard's crow familiar to conduct aerial recon in Pathfinder
I abused the mechanics a couple times. Otherwise he was the adorable team mascot.
Yes. Mostly to spy on shit for me.
It is interesting just how many people decide to use their familiar for spying/scouting. Not a lot of people sending their familiar out to fish for them, or dress their wounds, or sell their loot.
I think it has to do with the fact that scouting is dangerous. We don't want to be the one scouting because if it goes poorly then we could be captured or killed. So we send in a disposable scout. If it were more viable then we would likely be using our familiars for all sorts of high risk tasks like disarming traps and fighting. A lot of game designers seem adverse to letting familiars be too useful across all areas, but I'm sure if the game was designed around it then it would be interesting.
Bruh, how the frick is a spider going to sell my fricking loot or fish for me. It's a tiny animal, homie, not a goddamn torchbearer.
Give it a note for the shopkeeper?
Having a bird flying around outside is objectively less dangerous than having a person try to sneak about on their own
The solution is just to make your familiar a 12 ton metal machine of war.
Yes. My GM let me use them for all kinds of stuff the rules disallow or don't cover.
They ended up being material in creating some of my servants, and in one the CPU and remote transponder for a seal I killed and turned into a biological ROV.
Used one to prevent a resurrecting elder god from taking another PCs body as their vessel and incubator. I lost the familiar but trapped the elder god in the form of a mutated sea slug, which I then used as a power source for a sending and scrying array so my evil mage could call her parents and check up on them.
Her family's monstrous evil and twisted ambition is only surpassed by their genuine love and healthy relationships with each other.
During the campaign she set time asside to try to source presents for them and was trying to figure out how to work out a method of user friendly immortality for them since they wouldn't be able to use the body surfing method she came up with reliably enough for her liking.
That was also the campaign where in the last session she turned the Bounty Hunter into a Dragon because she asked nicely and agreed to not holding against her if it went terribly wrong.
Maiesta 2e can be a hell of a drug.
The psionic equivalent in 3.5 and Pathfinder, called a Psicrystal, is outstanding. It's a size Tiny construct with Hardness like a material, so it's hard to hit and surprisingly survivable against both melee damage and debilitating effects like poison/sleep/any kind of mind control. But the real takeaway is that it's a creature with an Int score, which means it gets feats as it advances in Hit Die with you. This leaves you with a ton of options for customization, rather than psionics just having a menu of prebuilt creatures to pick from.
There's an entire book by Dreamscarred Press called Psicrystals Expanded that details options for turning your psicrystal into different things, like embedding it in your body, to turning it into or fusing it into a weapon, to morphing it into a crystal effigy of a creature picked from a given list that includes plants and constructs. There's also Legendary Games' setting, Arcforge, with heavy sci-fi integration. It has templates for psicrystals, my favorite of which is OS. Instead of a physical crystal, it becomes an entity of sentient code that literally lives rent free in your head. It can leap from you to other technological devices or constructs within a certain range, acting like a virus.
One trick I really like is taking advantage of the Psionic Talents system in Pathfinder. If you know a level 1 psionic power, you also get the level 0 Talent (cantrip) version of that power. So you give your psicrystal the feat that gives you a single level 1 power and a single power point to use it, and take Energy Ray, which is a ranged touch attach that you can choose to deal Fire, Cold, Electricity, or Sonic with. But merely having it also gives the crystal Energy Splash, which is the same thing except short range and it only does a single point of damage. But it's also free to cast. So now you have a size Tiny flight-capable scout capable of dealing 1 point of sonic, drilling through locks and hinges.
>Dreamscarred Press
These dudes were fricking amazing. Legit once ran a 3.5 campaign solely as an excuse to play a psionics game exclusively usdng their material.
DSP is my favorite game development studio, bar none, including videogames. Their takes on 3.5 psionics and turning Tome of Battle into Path of War were god-tier in flavor and function. My main/signature class among my groups has become their Vitalist, and I don't see it ever changing.
Apparently they dropped off the radar because the main guy's life decided to shit all over him all at once. Like two or three family members died within a few months of eachother, he and multiple staff got hit real bad with Covid, plus a bunch of other shit. And he's still over there on Kickstarter offering refunds and to finish the Starfinder content he had to drop, like 3-4 years later. He seems like a stand-up guy and I wish him all the best.
If you're reading this, Jeremy, I still want Chimera Soul real bad.
Rats can scout most areas and not even raise an eyebrow, if they are noticed at all.
Yes, but only because Anima Beyond Fantasy's familiars are insane. ESPECIALLY the Sheele(Fairies).
Relevant to thread, my Warlock's fire sheele had an ability that doubled in AoE and gained 10 damage each turn she kept it up at a cost of my Zeon(MP). I used it twice to wipe an enemy military encampment, and then the setting's Totally Not Raccoon City.
Our Warrior Summoner had a Nature one, that could shapeshift into any natural creature. This included:
>A T-Rex, who utterly BODIED at least two bosses
>A Young Storm Dragon, to mop the floor with a few demonic assassins.
>The Gurmah Garus, a SEVERAL MILE LONG SANDWORM that she then had roll over an entire army.
Yeah. Ravens can speak and fly, which makes them great for scouting.
>$4000 cat armor
totally worth it
I once played a wizard who kept a frog familiar underneath their comically large hat to peek out and attack enemies with surprise spells, often casting Dragon's Breath on him so he could act as a wizard-mounted flamethrower sentry or just having him jump onto weak enemies and zap them with touch spells.
If you count 'regular' pets that aren't strictly spellcaster bound summons, I'm currently playing a dhampir whose housecat was afflicted with vampirism alongside the rest of his family ~150 years ago (also technically making him a higher vampire than my PC, which has been the subject of some slight ribbing) and is powerful enough to contribute in combat. He more or less has a toned down displacer beast statblock with shadow magic flavoring his abilities and tentacle attacks- think Shadows from DMC who can use them to hide or shape them into spikes and spear things from a distance.
Situationally.
I once used a familiar to gain flanking bonuses. We later learned that this wasn't allowed though.
I believe it is, they’re allied creatures who occupy their space. Your DM must have houseruled it.
Which is dumb, because familiars are extremely fragile & take time to re-summon.
All the time, familiars are borderline OP in 5e, they can:
- deliver touch-based spells
- act as remote viewing devices
- trigger traps
- distract enemies in combat
- carry messages
- be transformed into dinosaurs
Use your frickin’ imagination OP.
I cast invisibility on my owl and argued that the owl holding onto another creature would also make them invisible. This combined with being able to use my action to control the owl almost allowed me to break a party member out of jail.
1. Play D&D 4E.
2. Get familiar Floating Weapon.
3. Perform ritual Familiar Mount.
4. Congratulations, you've got a hoverboard.