D&D 5E (2024) Can a Warlock who swaps out Pact of Chain keep his familiar?

[ECMO3]

One of my players just leveled in Warlock to Warlock4/Fighter1.

Prior to leveling he had Pact of Blade, Pact of Tome and Pact of Chain Invocations and a Quasit familiar. After leveling he swapped out Pact of Chain with Agonizing Blast-Green Flame Blade, but his Quasit familiar is still alive.

He says he should be able to keep it as a familiar until it is dead, just like if a Wizard found a Find Familiar scroll and cast the spell. I told him it could not attack because that is part of the invocation, but it can still use scare and help and scout and similar.

What do you think?

 

[Charlaquin]

Your ruling seems perfectly reasonable to me. That’s probably what I would do too.

 

[James Gasik]

I mean, with DM permission, any caster can gain a Quasit as a Familiar, right? Ditto with Pseudodragons and other options not part of the spell's normal availability.

The guy took a shortcut, but if he's already got a working relationship with the Quasit, the demon's dark masters are probably like "yeah, stay on the job, tempt him to our side".

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Now, in most games, I don't see this as a problem. The Quasit's contributions shouldn't be that insane that the game would become unbalanced. But if you are a stickler for these kinds of things, or, say, you have two Chain Pact Warlocks and one wants to change their Pact, and the other feels put out by it, you could call it an exploit- but you'd run into the same issue if a player gets a special Familiar as a Boon or DM reward anyways.

Strictly RAW, it's probably not intended that you do this sort of thing, if that's important to you and your group. I think most of the issues people would have with this is the narrative of this guy just re-negotiating his Pact and would demand an explanation.

OTOH, those same people probably have similar issues with things you're already allowed to retrain, like spells known- and since you've already allowed the retraining, I think that's all pretty moot anyways.

 

[Clint_L]

I would rule against it - the player is trying to eat his cake and have it too. It also goes against the intent of the invocation, IMO. Plus, allowing it encourages players to shop around for other advantages they can get by swapping around subclasses and keeping some of the advantages of the swapped subclass. Do you really want to open that can of worms?

To me, this just seems like a strategy to get a familiar for free before taking the subclass they always intended. Had the player started the character at level 5 would you still let them have the familiar with if they told you they had swapped subclasses as part of their backstory?

Finally, I think the analogy to using a scroll is nonsense.