I admit, one of the things that I don't enjoy about familiars is the idea one of the solutions to familiar over-reliance is to kill the familiar off. Even with all the "your familiar is an immortal celestial/fey/fiend spirit and not, you know, a cute little animal", it still feels murdering someone's pet. That the pet-owner doesn't seem to mind sending their pet in to be murdered, and will just bring 'em back, does nothing to offset the guilt experienced by a kind-hearted DM like myself.
It's not a big deal, it's just (a tiny bit) upsetting. I like to make jokes that the classes that apparently love animals the most (Druids, Rangers, Wizards with a familiar) wind up, by the rules as they are, being RECKLESS ANIMAL ENDAGERERS. Which seems like a bad fit to me? Rather than having your "pet" die but be super easy to bring back, wouldn't it be better if you just made them tougher, yet more limited in scope?
I mean, obviously it's easy enough to just fluff it that the familiar really IS immortal and just teleports back to its pocket dimension when threatened (IE takes any damage) - I've done it with beastmasters, too, by saying that when they run out of HP they really have twice the HP but run away when they're "bloodied".
At any rate, I think there's room for mechanical (and fluff vs crunch) improvements to "pets", whatever their sort.
Agreed but I think it goes quite a bit further than just feeling like ""murdering someone's pet. Some of the dismissive "solutions" people throw out whenever the problem comes up (some in this very thread) show how deep of a pit the GM is thrown down by the way 5e's familiars are setup when a player decides to overuse them exactly like the rules combine to encourage. It goes from feeling & looking like the GM is "
murdering someone's pet" all the way into coming off like the GM is singling out & picking on a player before downing the familiar is anything but the GM shooting their own game in the knee.
The most common retort is to simply interrupt the ritual or declare it too dangerous to recast where ever the party is. Any such time wasting interruption is very likely to end off with words along the lines of "ok I'm going to ritually cast find familiar" or "ok lets all keep watch while bob summons his owl". That is likely to remain the case right up until the GM appears to be blatantly trolling their players just to avoid using fiat to declare it simply impossible to cast a spell there is no reason to be an impossible cast. Using fiat in such a heavy handed way almost never goes over well. Maybe the GM decides to avoid those two bad ideas and just requires the party to go back to town to cast it during a rest, but that too is both fighting against rest rules designed for guarantee maximum availability & worse it just restarts the process of generating a full & accurate map with added caution & tedious inch by inch progression. This doesn't change until familiars are singled out for killing with ultra nightmare dark souls crossed with bullethell levels of persistence.
Someone in this very thread literally suggested illusion magic false information as another option to counter familiar overuse, seemingly if 5e's find familiar were available in a prior edition.
Or capture it and use illusion spells to give out false information.
There are a few serious problems here given that familiars can move & pretty much look like normal beasts. Firstly is the need to spamcast the 7th level
mirage arcane spell for every random owl & rat or the alternate need for something like a well choreographed army of minor illusion casters. That level of paranoia& required power level is one that could just absolutely destroy the players had it been channeled into almost anything other than misleading an effectively disposable camera drone.
The party shows up ready to fight ice golems, but really it's a red dragon who resist fire.
This gets to the second problem with this false information storyboard level idea... We are talking about the find familiar spell in
fifth edition where both a dragon & an ice golem are battled the same way "a magic weapon" & gratuitous use of healing word if needed. With Vancian casting gone the casters are likely to be equally prepared for either fight with little if anything they could or would prepare differently even if the group were to take a long rest in order to change up their spells. Past editions with 3.5 wraith & 2e level drain monsters might occasionally justify different prep before kicking in the door, but no 5e monster meets that bar (especially those two).
Sure the GM could constantly lie to their players about adventures or do nothing but throw them in the bottom of dungeons they need to battle their way out to escape while claiming "illusion spells" when every monster is wearing the wrong description like a horrifically messed up skyrim mod or something. That might work once or twice, but nobody is going to enjoy that style of calvinball for long. Even if the players did enjoy or accept that calvenball game it's going to terrible consequence of the players quickly starting to ignore the meaningless descriptions of the world from their GM or the players resorting to Tomb of horrors level paranoia where they start doing the situational equivalent of poking everything with a ten foot pole twice to be sure that they aren't unknowingly casting polar ray instead of fireball on an ice golem illusioned up to look like a red dragon.
Then of course there is the traps & doors "solutions". traps not being discovered doesn't matter because we are talking about 5e rather than 1e 2e dcc shadowdark or whatever. functioning doors don't belong in a lot of adventures & it's possible to summon a familiar to the other side of a door that you can't see as long as it's within 5feet. Even if the GM uses doors to slow the full & accurate map generation it does nothing but extend the tedium as the party will go back to the tried & true cursor scrubbing immediately after dealing with whatever is on the other side unless they simply choose to ignore the closed door in favor of some other known objective.
