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I've been digging into the help files to help me figure out some of the changes and I was a little shocked to see this spell removed from new PCs. One of the things I loved about playing a wizard in FK was the option of having a familiar. I remember running around as my Transmuter with a cat trailing behind. It was a lot of fun to Role Play that kinship without being a "tree hugger" so to speak. (Nothing against Druids or Ranger folks!)

I'd love to see it make a come back if at all possible. It was a great system. If anything you could possibly make them non-combat if you felt they made Wizards overpowered.

You can still buy familiar-style pets and RP them as a familiar.

I don't exactly remember why the coded ones were removed... something to do with familiar permanency, dead familiars, penalties due to it, and familiar death being permanent I think. Something is telling me it was a permanent constitution penalty.

In Traditional D&D it is a Constitution deduction if your Familiar dies. According to the Help File it's a Health Point deduction in FK. I suppose that makes sense if they wanted to protect the players. Perhaps they could make some alterations to that one day? Until then I'll have to be satisfied with purchasing my "familiar" lol.

Familiars in tabletop are a relatively complicated set of rules, conditions, bonuses, penalties etc and to code them correctly to that standard would take significant effort to make them correct. FKs command system allows someone to roleplay a pet in a manner consistent with a lot of what a familiar is in table top especially regarding intelligence and communication between pet and wizard without these complications. You will also find as you become accustomed to the new code of FK that pets in combat are rather fragile and them dying no matter what combat mode you put them in is going to happen quite frequently.

The staff here is very approving of people roleplaying pets and I have never seen them approach a player who roleplays a pet as a familiar and place any restrictions on them regarding the pets actual intelligence and mental communication capability. Best of all with the application and rename process now in place you can find a pet that is the same generic race/type of a standard table top familiar and for a few glory get your pets appearance customized for a few glory. Overall the system as it is without coded find familiar works very well and does not end up unduly burdening the wizards for a pet dying to a bandit.

Pet deaths were pretty common back when I first played 13 years ago so that hasn't quite changed. We would always have them sitting around someplace safe so they wouldn't die. I've no qualms with RPing a pet as a familiar, though I loved the previous coded spell Find Familiar that allowed you a surprise of which you'd get depending on the area you're in. That was nifty, lol.

Timaeus wrote:You will also find as you become accustomed to the new code of FK that pets in combat are rather fragile and them dying no matter what combat mode you put them in is going to happen quite frequently.

Yeah, they are extra squishy. Might want to ward it somehow, even for bandits... it's not as much as they will die everytime, but they will certainly lose a limb of some sort if they get targeted for more than a round or two.

Generally if I don't have a "safe zone" for my pets I don't get them personally for that very reason. As a matter of fact Teepo's horse stopped listening to him so it's been set free, lol.

teepo wrote:Generally if I don't have a "safe zone" for my pets I don't get them personally for that very reason. As a matter of fact Teepo's horse stopped listening to him so it's been set free, lol.

Handle Animal skill required to give instructions to your pets. Just saying.

I kinda figured that out but since I'm just returning I didn't want to handle the maintenance of a previous pet right now, I will Role Play him learning and developing that skill as I get to it.

I would still like to try creating this at some point.

There actually was animal companion/familiar code before. We had an issue with people bringing their bears and panthers into Waterdeep for a bit but that got taken care of after a while, lol.