Pookey Rocks

[Master Rahl]

I don't know how many of you have ever charmed this familiar, but it is quite enlightening when you look at the resources available to him:

He has got the spell of maybe a 9th level mage
He is very hard to kill, is very proactive in battle
And he has great (initiates) conversations....well taunts...even better!

Now I have been looking for a familiar mod, but cannot find one...so any help in this would be great

Getting back to pookey, now a familiar like him would be a whole lot better than the default...I mean lets face it, what is the point of having a familiar with lockpicking ability of 15%!

[Hank Parsons]

Oh yeah, Pooky. Some mephit type familiar hanging out in the Den Of The Seven Veils?

For a second there I thought you were saying he has 9th level mage spells - heh.

[SixOfSpades]

I agree wholeheartedly, the Familiars suck. The game should just admit that they're nothing more than a way to sneak in 12 extra hitpoints, and darn near useless for anything else. The Cat makes a good scout, and a free casting of Invisibility 10' Radius never hurts, but in all other matters, the Familiars are garbage. And whose bright idea was it to give the only Familiar with a decent Pick Pockets score to the Lawful Neutral alignment?!?

The game really needs a Familiars mod. I wish I had the coding capability, but all I can do is design. If I Had It My Way:
1) PCs of any class can use Find Familiar scrolls, although only Mages & Bards can learn the spell.
2) When you cast the spell, the game looks at your class, alignment and level(s) to determine which Familiars you get to choose from (depending on those stats, 2 to 6 Familiars will be open to you).
3) Different Familiars do different things: Some make good substitute Thieves, some cast useful spells, some are decent fighters. Not all Familiars can fit in your Backpack, though.
4) If your Familiar dies, you do not permanently lose a point of CON. Instead, you take a substantial penalty to your EXP, with the amount varying with the level of your Familiar.

[Firestormalpha]

Rangers of chaotic good alignment get a hamster but incurr an intelligence penalty

[Master Rahl]

Fair enough too - If you WANT a hamster you DESERVE an intelligence penalty LOL

I see on the TeamBG site that sometime back, the nuts and bolts workaround to get a decent familiar was put in place, but I cannot see that it has been progressed.

I do agree with a lot of what you are saying Six, apart from allowing all classes to own one.

All the literature agrees that it is just magic users that ever have familiars - I am not much of a purist, but I do think that this should be a hard and fast rule.

About losing constitution, now this is a biggie and should only happen if the familiar was very difficult to kill, say with either high hit points, or more realistically a capability to automatically jump into your inventory once the familiars hp reach 10%, noting that if he was hit hard at 11%, then he could die

Anyway many ways to configure it, but the one that I would particularly like is not to lose anything if he dies.

Instead it should cost you to build - conjure your familiar - say losing one or more levels depending on what your current level is.

Correspondingly your familiar could not level up

Instead you would have to euthenise him and decide if you wanted to lose levels as the cost of getting the new improved version

[Firestormalpha]

Well, there is a bug (don't know if it's been fixed by anything yet) that allows for any class to get a familiar.

have a potion in inventory, and the familiar scroll. That's all I'm saying, mostly cuz I can't clearly recall the rest.

[LennonCook]

Firestormalpha, the "Potion Swap tactic" is well known, and well documented. It also cannot be fixed by anything but the Official Patch (and I'm almost certain that Bioware no longer support BG; and Interplay is basically dead) because it is not a "bug" as such, but a downright exploit of the engine.
Six, your idea is very interesting, and I think I'd like to code it... but, with a few minor changes (some I'd like to discuss, others are simply unfeasable under the Infinity Engine). Check your PMs.

[Hank Parsons]

I like the ideas for familiars in this thread (esp. Six and MR's).

Every class, I agree, but *only PC*. As it is now, only PC Mages can FF. Six's modification would let my PC Ranger or Cleric have a magical pet regardless (at one point I had to do the potion trick for my cleric). I think that would be cool, in game-terms (especially for soloists). It can be justified and come with risks/trade-offs. MR is of course correct it's against the D&D/FR tradition for a non-mage to FF, but I kinda just think of it as your B-spawn having a magic animal companion. Not that non-mages need +12HP, just that the little animal adds to the game, and it seems reasonable to have one pet in the party.

I'd have no problem installing a Familiar mod that varied away from the original rules creatively, so long as it was limited enough to be somewhat balanced.

[Megachihuahua]

Non-pc mages should have familiars...Jan should have an animated turnip...

[Firestormalpha]

Jan should be able to summon Turnip Golems at will.