Has anyone ever tried to have their animal companion and familiar be one and the same, like if the character was a druid/sorcerer? Are there any rules on this? If not, any suggestions?

The rule against it is based on critter type.

A familiar must start as a normal animal and then takes on the type Magical Beast. An animal companion must be of type Animal. So if it were already your animal companion, that relationship would end the moment it became a familiar. If it were a familiar first, it would not qualify to become an animal companion.

You may be able to come up with some custom rules that merge the two concepts (weakening both to remain balanced), but by default it is not allowed.



That's also the reason why you can't Awaken an animal companion. Well, in 3.5 the spell description says that explicitly, but we had to figure it out in 3.0... although we found it out a bit too late. It would have saved a certain druid the embarrassment due to Awakening the legendary wolf Theobald, rolling 3d6 for intelligence, and finding out Theobald was smarter than the druid in question. In this situation, Theobald became a Magical Beast and stopped being an animal companion.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that WAS legal in 3.0, but I'm not sure?


But Zem is totally correct here.


Basically, there's rules that discourage progressing on two charts at the same time, and if you find yourself doing so, you should probably make a rule against that

Ok, sounds like that wont be happening. I just wanted to role both into one so there is less NPC crap to control, but its no big deal.

In 2nd ed there were spells that permanently enhanced familiars, but you had to do them in sequence. So you couldnt do II until you did I. Anything like that in 3rd?

In the PHB there is a feat to get a better familiar. It's Improved Familiar. In the PHB I think that's the only one, but there are some other spells and feats in various books. I think there is some stuff in the Spell Compendium. Usually it's just spells with a limited duration that allow you to do something interesting with the familiar. Sorry, I don't remember off the top of my head.

However, I'm pretty sure the rigid upgrade path is gone.


I have allowed pseudo dragons as familiars. I probably shouldn't, but they're a lot of fun. That's mainly because I maintained them as a character I control outside of combat. The catch was they were all retarded in some way (One couldn't count, one had no short term memory, and one was too lazy to fly unless absolutely necessary).

I might have to steal this idea. Thats pretty funny

It started as an accident. One of the first interactions was where they asked little guy how many ships he could see in the harbor from up above. I started speaking before I thought about it (I suddenly had to decide how many ships there were). "Thirty... <no, that's too many>... three... <no, that's not enough> ... ten... <oh hell, this is fun>." From there it just became a game. He would scout ahead a little bit, of course. I had him flee past the party at full speed, pausing only to telepathically shout "RUN! There are a million of them!" It was three medium dragons. Or he'd peak into a room and report a single enemy, and there would be ten.

The short term memory was hard to play, but also fun. There was a pit in a dungeon. They asked him to fly down and see what was down there. He came back up and said "Did you guys lose a troll?" They asked if there were any doors or passageways down there. "Ummm... I don't recall." So they sent him down again to check. A little later they heard his voice from the bottom of the pit "Did you lose an adventuring party?" Difficult, but fun.

The last one wanted to do nothing but sleep in the hood of the wizard's robe behind his back. Sure, he'd deliver a potion, but he would hop down to the ground, waddle over to the person with the potion, hop up to grab it, and then waddle over to the person who needed it. This didn't make him significantly less useful, but it make it more fun for me. It would be a dick move to get between a wizard and his cat. But when it's a pseudodragon... well, you can justify responding "I don't want to" or "Only if you cast fly on me because wings are tricky" when asked to scout ahead.

Holy shit, those familiars were awesome. Those were one of the best additions to those campaigns.

I just like how we all now assume that all pseudodragons are born with these wacky traits.

That's true... it has warped my perception of them. I now think of them as cuddling, goofy critters, and I doubt that's how they were intended.

Improved Familiar is a core feat- you aren't houseruling in Pseudodragons, you would be houseruling them out if you banned them. It's intended to grant a Pseudodragon!

But yea, I try to give every familiar SOME flavor. As a PC, I'm only really interested in the cool familiars, and pseudodragons are at the top of the list.

I think I allowed them below 7th level, and I also made them particularly easy to find.

Maybe in the previous game!

Yeah, probably. I didn't feel the need to be particularly nice to you... something about "I'm going to break the game with rainbows" or the sort.

They definitely had Sarth early on, but he was just more of an NPC for a while. I forget when he became an actual familiar.

Can I get Monty some of those fake plastic vampire teeth, so that everyone thinks he's a vampire bat?

Only if I get to make the Sesame Street count noise


Ah AH AH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUvi8tFQ ... re=related