Familiar rules

[Kzach]

Feel free to comment or make suggestions as long as they're constructive

http://kzach.wdfiles.com/local--files/miscellaneous/familiar.pdf

 

[Kzach]

*bump*

 

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

It seems a nice enough way to deal with the balance issues, and has some flavor, but basically makes the familiar into an Achille's heel with hardly any benefits.

Capture a familiar and you can blackmail a mage into doing anything, since you have a simple way to reduce him to 0 HP just by locking kitty in a box with a bottle of poison.

I'm leaning towards something more like having familiar/companion as an additional item slot where you get some bonuses when you have them around, but if they're lost or killed, it's like losing a hard-to-get magic item.

 

[Kzach]

Heh, this is almost thread necromancy.

As far as 'hardly any benefit' goes, for a feat you're getting a power that is more powerful than what it is replacing, plus the benefit of a feat's worth of bonuses, plus the ability to increase the power of it over time.

And capturing a familiar wouldn't be very easy. Even if it's by itself, it has the master's defences and the ability to attack and escape. If it's with it's master, then it's not targetable, so you'd have to kill the master or capture him to get at the familiar, at which point you have the power to kill him anyway.

 

[Liminosse]

I like this version of summon familiar. It takes feats to make them great. Which i don't really like most of the heroic feats for my wizard anyway. Perhaps you could add something along the lines of "The connection between the familiar and the master can be severed as a standard action" at which point the familiar disappears back to wherever it came from and can maybe be summoned back by the same or a separate ritual used to bind it in the first place. Just a thought, great addtion

Liminosse Starstone

 

[Kzach]

Hmm... although I like the idea, it would pretty much eliminate the chance of it being used to harm the master. Part of me says that's probably a good thing, but then again I kinda like that there's an inherent risk associated with having a familiar.

Maybe it can be a last ditch manoeuvre that costs a healing surge for him to reconstitute the familiar. Hmm.

 

[Kzach]

There, changed it.

Also changed the recovery of healing surges to the normal mechanic.

 

[Liminosse]

awesome, great work and thank you