D&D (2024) Pets: Find Familiar and Find Steed.

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The more I think about it, the more I like the general idea of a templated familiar. I just backed Tome of Magic 2 and one of the many features in it (it's going to be a stuffed book) is a list of more familiars. The Complete Wizard's Handbook back in 2E, as I recall, also featured something similar.

But players shouldn't be scouring books, just like druids used to, trying to find good familiars. Opening it up to all tiny animals means we don't have to wait for the stats on a fox familiar, or a hedgehog, or bat or anything else a player might reasonably want, especially as the mathematical differences in them are so tiny as to be meaningless. That meant some DMs, like me, were happy to handwave it, but there are plenty of tables where that won't fly. A template blows open those doors for a lot of players, which is a good thing. Bring on the corgi familiars, the tree squirrels, the platypi!

 

[Weiley31]

I wonder what this will mean for Pact of the Chain Warlocks: will there be an enhanced-familiar template, or will it be an actual pseudodragon/sprite/whatever?

Warlock UA is gonna be quite interesting, thats for sure.

 

[Remathilis]

I wonder what this will mean for Pact of the Chain Warlocks: will there be an enhanced-familiar template, or will it be an actual pseudodragon/sprite/whatever?

My guess is there will be a Chained Familiar stat-block with a more combat effective celestial/fiend/fey creature that will be halfway between a familiar and a ranger's pet.

 

[Clint_L]

I don't like druids relying on familiars instead of themselves for the role of scout. It's way more fun when the druid has to infiltrate as a spider or something, always desperately avoiding being spotted and squashed, only to instantly revert out of wild shape.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

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.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Warlock UA is gonna be quite interesting, thats for sure.

Warlock, Warrior, Monk, and Sorcerer are ALL going to be quite interesting.

Well, either that or tremendously disappointing.

 

[Pauln6]

I hope this bodes well for Phantom Steed, which needs similar level boosting upgrades compared to previous editions. I don't know why it couldn’t have duration upgrades based on level and its ability to ignore difficult terrain. I could live without the ability to fly but the ability to ignore difficult terrain, walk on water, and cross ravines were really cool. Casting a ritual that lasts an hour makes it useless for overland travel, and I struggle to see why you would to cast it for anything else if it can't overcome obstacles.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I wonder what this will mean for Pact of the Chain Warlocks: will there be an enhanced-familiar template, or will it be an actual pseudodragon/sprite/whatever?

I think for pact of the chain you might get something bigger and most powerful them a familiar so that improved familiar can be a general arcane spell instead of a subclass feature, which was a mistake in the OG subclass.

Like maybe you get a Pact Servant stat for chainlocks pets, that can be Fey, Celestial, Fiend, Aberration, or Dragon.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

The Faithful Steed feature needs to be buffed so that a Paladin's steed is as powerful or more so then a Cleric or other future divine casters steed.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

The Faithful Steed feature needs to be buffed so that a Paladin's steed is as powerful or more so then a Cleric or other future divine casters steed.

My solution that is simply and balanced (because you can only have 1 Steed and 1 Familiar) is to tie the stats to character level instead of spell slot.