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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9694561" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Generally, the way I see it is, if any companion can use magic, they all should be able to.  If you rule "well, this one can and this one can't", then everyone will feel like they should take the one that can, even if they'd rather have something else- all choices should be equal, otherwise you're allowing "traps".OTOH, you could buff companions that can't use magic in some way to compensate, but I'm not sure how you'd do so.  Bigger numbers?  Innate magical abilities?Now if what's really bothering you is that your players are treating Familiars as extra attunement slots with no real downside, you could just deny it, or say that the player has to share attunements with the Familiar, as they are inextricably linked to it.  You want to have an Owl with a Ring of Spell Storing?  Then you have one less attunement for yourself.(What follows is a rant based entirely on my personal feelings.  YMMV.)Though honestly, I don't care for attunement on principle.  It just feels so arbitrary, and there's so many cool and interesting magic items out there that get left on the side of the road because "oh can't use that, I have this other, more interesting/powerful/omni-useful item".  I've watched players shrug when flavorful and niche items come up because "I'm already at my limit".  In my own game, the players found a Staff of Healing, and I thought it was going to be this big moment where the Cleric is like "awesome!".Instead, he looked at his character sheet and was like "I can't give up anything to use it." Because his weapon required attunement (Mace of Disruption), his shield required attunement (Spellguard), and his Gauntlets of Ogre Power (required to actually use the Mace effectively, because he'd started with notably more Dex than Str).In a recent adventure, we found a magic item that was effectively necessary for us to proceed, and my character was the only one who could attune to it, so I suddenly had to juggle my items in order to attune to the "plot coupon", which didn't do a lot for me.It wasn't the worst thing ever, but it was annoying.  And since one of the big reasons to adventure in D&D in the first place has been to find cool swag, of which magic items are the premium, watching people shrug when finding a very rare magic item because it's at best a sidegrade for something the party is already using?  Blah.</blockquote>

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