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<blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8948797" data-attributes="member: 6988941"><p>I'll have no truck with these templated familiars. Familiars work just fine as is, a template is just an excuse to save a couple pages worth of tiny animal stats that would have had to go into the PHB. If they want to drop the Owl flyby ability I'd applaud that (with some wistful pangs of nostalgia for my many pet owls), but otherwise familiars were fine. If I had to make one other tweak it would be a clear statement that "your familiar can take the Help action, giving you advantage on your next attack roll against a creature", as I remember by first table didn't immediately get that. Or just a rule that they can't, if that's not what they are supposed to be used for; I'm fine either way.</p><p></p><p>In my experience newer players don't worry about optimizing their familiars, they choose whatever animal suits their vision of their character, they look up the stats in the back of the book, and that's all there is to it. Experienced players mostly do the same, but for the inability of many to resist the draw of the "strictly better for most purposes" owl.</p><p></p><p>I can understand the impulse to not want players to go shopping through stat blocks, but much of the charm and creative expressive quality of find familiar or druid wild shape in real 5e is in being able to tap into a bunch of content that isn't carefully balanced for players and homogenized.</p><p></p><p>Templates feel like a move to turn tabletop into a video game, where you can only do the handful of programmed things. When I want to play a video game, I play a video game. If I'm going to all the trouble of scheduling a time to get together with people regularly, where one of the people has to do a bunch of prep work, and we all have to remember a bunch of rules and do math I better be getting substantially more freedom to play how I want than a video game can give me.</p><p></p><p>Just another way in which OneD&D is clearly not the 5e clone for me. Fortunately there will be endless alternatives.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Benjamin Olson, post: 8948797, member: 6988941"] I'll have no truck with these templated familiars. Familiars work just fine as is, a template is just an excuse to save a couple pages worth of tiny animal stats that would have had to go into the PHB. If they want to drop the Owl flyby ability I'd applaud that (with some wistful pangs of nostalgia for my many pet owls), but otherwise familiars were fine. If I had to make one other tweak it would be a clear statement that "your familiar can take the Help action, giving you advantage on your next attack roll against a creature", as I remember by first table didn't immediately get that. Or just a rule that they can't, if that's not what they are supposed to be used for; I'm fine either way. In my experience newer players don't worry about optimizing their familiars, they choose whatever animal suits their vision of their character, they look up the stats in the back of the book, and that's all there is to it. Experienced players mostly do the same, but for the inability of many to resist the draw of the "strictly better for most purposes" owl. I can understand the impulse to not want players to go shopping through stat blocks, but much of the charm and creative expressive quality of find familiar or druid wild shape in real 5e is in being able to tap into a bunch of content that isn't carefully balanced for players and homogenized. Templates feel like a move to turn tabletop into a video game, where you can only do the handful of programmed things. When I want to play a video game, I play a video game. If I'm going to all the trouble of scheduling a time to get together with people regularly, where one of the people has to do a bunch of prep work, and we all have to remember a bunch of rules and do math I better be getting substantially more freedom to play how I want than a video game can give me. Just another way in which OneD&D is clearly not the 5e clone for me. Fortunately there will be endless alternatives. [/QUOTE]
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