D&D 5E (2024) Move over Owl and Bat, the best 2024 familiar is a Deer!

[LordEntrails]

And... when the party is lost and runs out of rations, the deer will get a good weeks worth of meat for everyone!

 

[sevenbastard]

And... when the party is lost and runs out of rations, the deer will get a good weeks worth of meat for everyone!

Dont familiar disappear when they die? Guess you have to take a leg off and eat it but make sure it stays alive. Maybe you can then kill it before you digest the meat in some sort of ultimate diet plan?

 

[ECMO3]

Where does it say that riders don't provoke attacks of opportunity if their mount disengages?

The rules on AOOs:

"You also don’t provoke an Opportunity Attack when you teleport or when you are moved without using your movement, action, Bonus Action, or Reaction."

The rider is not using their movement. To add insult to injury the character is a Rogue, so after 3rd level they will be able to steady aim and have the deer run in, make their Rapier truestrike with advantage, and then run out.

 

[ECMO3]

Now from a DM perspective, there are a lot of advantages for a mounted combatant. There are ways to counter that, such as targeting the mount, or trying to dismount the rider. However, if it is overpowered in practice in your campaign, I can see a DM nerfing this and having the rider still suffer attacks of opportunity if they too do not use the disengage action.

The Deer has 4hps and a 13 AC. So one attack in a fight is usually going to end these shennanigans and it will cause a save for the rider not to go prone.

There are things to mitigate that, Mounted Combat feat being the most obvious, where you can cause an attack that hits the mount to hit you instead. But that costs a feat and it means the rider gets hit on anything that targets the mount and hits a 13 AC. So you can keep the hits off of the mount, but you are going to take a lot more damage by doing it than if they were targeting you.

Also the Inspiring Leader feat is very effective for low hit point allies like familiars, but it works better at high levels and again it costs a feat.

So while this is a nice find, and is going to be neat in play, I don't think it is OP.