Fighting Familiars!

[frankthedm]

Familiars have great synergy with cleave. Sadly the familiar is what gets cleaved.

 

[Evilhalfling]

Sit back to hear the tale of Battlewing the raven!

playing in a living tourney, where if i happened to have the mini to match my pregen PC I recieved a extra benifit (very lame concept btw), the DM opened a box and handed me the figure. So I got a raven familar.
We were 3rd level and after a forgettable adventure we had to fight drow- I was KO first round before my initative. The rest of the party attacked the drow and I remembered my familiar.
Battlewing flew into the face of the main spell caster, and attacked defensivly to aid another, and then provided flanking for the parties rogue - Battlewing took an AoO for each action, but the mage villian was terrible in meele. Only by virtue of flanking and aid bonuses was the rogue able to win.

A few drow escaped and batttleing cawed that he would follow. (incidently not setting off a fireball trap that would have devestated the damaged party. The drow fled into a trap door and did not return, so no other PCs followed them.

(found out later that tiny critters can't flank, but the DM wasn't sure and misscalled it rather than slow the game)

 

[Pinotage]

PHB II has a feat called Combat Familiar which allows familiars to deliver touch spells a little easier. Still, if it doesn't get out of these after that, it's probably goodbye familiar.

Pinotage

 

[Richards]

Well, it's not technically a fighting familiar story so much as a combat support familiar story, but my younger son has a sorcerer PC with a toad familiar. The toad wears a potion harness with a healing potion on either side of it, and has been trained to pour a potion down the throat of any downed party member. My older son's PC was saved twice by that silly toad familiar, and was actually a bit embarrassed over the fact that he owed his life two times over to a toad.

In one adventure ("Headless," from Dungeon), the whole party was killed by demons, and the last character standing was the toad familiar - sadly, all out of potions and not able to do much in the way of damage. So its last act on this mortal coil was to give a toadish approximation (as best it could) of "giving its slayer the finger."

Heh heh - scrappy little toad.

Johnathan

 

[Scribble]

In the poor section of a city state of Magus just off of the Street of Glimmer is an old Tavern by the name of The Guannery. It's a relatively average tavern, (aside from the fact that it's full of wizards) owned by Nurell The Wart, an elf of royal lineage sent long ago to the city of wizards by his parents in an attempt to educate the young man in the arcane arts. Unfortunately Nurrell never amounted to much of a wizard. Instead, after a lucrative career as a hired thug, Nurrell decided he would try his hand at owning a tavern.

Always more interested in the physical sports, rather than the arcane, Nurrell found himself somewhat bored by the constant chatter of a mystical nature in his tavern. Yet, always when he attempted to promote the normal games and sports in his tavern (darts, arm wrestling, and general rough housing) his patrons promptly ignored them. Nurrell knew he had to find something that would attract wizards, yet not be more "boring mumbo jumbo debates."

Then, late one night after watching one wizards cat familiar chased off by an empowered rat, the idea came to him. It was perfect.

Soon after, Nurrel set about having a large sub basement built beneath his tavern. Within this sub basement he installed several sets of wooden bleachers, in a circle around a sandy pit. Here, unsavory wizards, or more commonly, those down on their luck, could come and have their familiars fight each other while their owners, and onlookers bet upon the outcome.

The Fighting Familiars League was born.

 

[RangerWickett]

I played in one session of a friend's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, just as they were trying to get inside the front door of the crater (I think).

Anyway, I was playing Eljay, a gnome sorcerer with a dachsund familiar (stats roughly equivalent to a rat) named Puckers. We got inside, and were attacked by a group of baddies, including an evil cleric who struck me blind with a spell as the battle was winding down.

I was nearly helpless, unable to target spells, unable to move to safety. All the people on my side were engaged in other combat, and most of them were near death. One wounded enemy warrior managed to slip out of the melee, and he headed over to me to finish me off.

I told the DM that Puckers was going to attack the warrior. What followed was a five minute argument about how stupid it was to try to have a dachsund attack an armed warrior, and about how the dog wouldn't endanger itself. I am firmly in the position that the player should be allowed to play his familiar as he sees fit, I ended up cussing at the DM's girlfriend (the most vocal of my opponents) to tell her to shut up, and I told the DM that my familiar was a dog, a gnome's best friend, and it was willing to risk its life to save mine, like any good dog.

I rolled the die, and got a natural 20, and confirmed the critical.

Puckers growled, and as the enemy stepped in to swing, my heroic familiar leapt into the air, bit into the warrior's throat, and crushed his windpipe. The warrior's attack of opportunity missed, and it staggered back, falling to the ground, unconscious.

I, for understandable reasons, left the game after that one session, with Puckers as my new seeing eye dog.

 

[Realmslord]

My snake familiar delivers a nasty touch attack of shocking grasp in combat.
It also has a hide bonus of +15

It moves into possition
I cast
it bites

it hides
I cast
it bites

repeat...
works very well for me.