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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DarkKestral" data-source="post: 3165116" data-attributes="member: 40100">Well, if you go by RAW, yes, the arrows cost money. However, in the real world, you could often reuse or repair arrows if you had the skill. Furthermore, if you're in D&D world, an owl flying in the daytime's probably a familiar, so you're probably going to shoot it if you take a moment to recall that seemingly every spellcaster in D&D worlds that adventures is either a good adventurer, (a seeming rarity in many cases) a town wizard who runs the local magic store, (not terribly uncommon, but you'll probably know by sight what the locals' familiars look like) or Evil conquerers, (seemingly common) which means that on average, if the familiar doesn't look like a local's, it's probably a good idea to shoot it and weaken their master somewhat.That said, I think some of the familiars are great for RP, but mechanically, they often either need heavy heavy feat investment, which limits character ability, or are only useful for a few levels, and afterwards tend to become more and more of an afterthought. I personally think familiars should pretty well remain useful throughout the game.I think a solution presents itself in a modified form of the Leadership feat: You get a cohort (read familiar) that's slightly weaker, but levels up over time, so it's usually only a couple levels below Average PC Level, assuming you don't have too many character deaths concentrated on one or two people. If Animal Companions/Familiars/Paladin Mounts/Cohorts all came out of a single, unified mechanic and were all basically variations on the basic 'get a Player-controlled NPC' idea, you could have familiars which were combat-capable.To do this, I'd eventually make Leadership have 3 feats in a tree: Leadership/Improved Leadership/Improved Cohort with IC and IL being the second 'ranks' in the tree.  One (Improved Leadership) would offer more massive quantities of low level followers than the base version of leadership, but at the cost of forgoing advancement of the main cohort, while the other (Improved Cohort) would be like Improved Familiar/higher-level Animal Companions/special Paladin mounts... you might lose some levels, but you gain access to cohorts with higher base ECLs relative to player ECL. However, since it's not class-specific, but a unified setup, wizards could gain it as a possible bonus feat, and maybe have a wider list of possible familiars/cohorts available w/o spending additional feats.</blockquote>

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