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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Pokemon-lite with familiars (VERY rough draft)



Soylentmatt
2018-08-14, 12:49 PM
When you first cast Find Familiar and you meet your Familiar, you are introduced to the little Celestial, Fey or Fiend spirit and it’s favorite form. As long as you know each other, you are always able to summon your Familiar in it’s favorite form. However, sometimes you might want to summon her in a different form. To do this, your familiar will have to LEARN additional forms. There is one way to do this: from other familiars.

Two familiars can play together, or “Scuffle”... and whoever wins their little mock battle will learn the form of the other. The loser will have to return to their home plane, but can be summoned again with another casting of the spell.

Familiars have a unique “Scuffle” skill. It can be associated with any ability of their choosing, and will often be unique for each of their known forms. When two familiars Scuffle, they engage in a series of opposed skill checks, the first to win two out of three checks wins the scuffle.

Once a familiar learns a new form, they can still improve it. By winning a scuffle with a familiar whose form they already know, a familiar can gain a permanent +1 to the scuffle skill for that form only.

Additionally, a familiar can scuffle with “wild familiars” (celestial, fey, or fiendish spirits that are lost on our plane in animal form). Winning this scuffle does not learn a new form (although it does allow the lost familiar to return to it’s home plane). Instead, it grants the familiar a “spirit point”. When scuffling with a regular familiar, your familiar can choose to spend a spirit point in order to earn +1 on a single Scuffle check, up to five points per check.

This is a really rough sketch of a mechanic I'm playing with. I'd love to know what people think of it so far.