Situation:
An owl familiar sits on the wizard's shoulder. The wizard is the target of a dragon's breath. He makes his save and barely survives. What happens to the owl? Even if it makes its save, it can't possibly absorb that kind of damage. Is it toast?
Does this mean that a wizard should send its familiar away at the start of every fight? What's the wise move here?
Don't even 1st level familiars have evasion?
Edit: They have Improved Evasion, so they take no damage if they make the save and half damage if they fail.
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It depends on what your dm lets you get away with. For instance, I allowed one character to retro-fit a handy haversack as a den for his familiar. Most of the time the familiar hangs out in the bag. We assume that, unless specifically called upon for some reason, the familiar is there when combat starts.
Helps with the paperwork :p
One fellow who ran a campaign I played in allowed familiars to be carried as an object and ran saves as if they were attended items.
In the case of the dragon, if the wizard had the opportunity to get his familiar out of the way and didn't, then that's his fault. The owl had better make that save, otherwise it's toast.
Also, it won't matter much anyhow, since the dragon's next move will probably be to finish off the irritating magic-user.
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One fellow who ran a campaign I played in allowed familiars to be carried as an object and ran saves as if they were attended items.
Treating familiars as objects is helpful because they don't take up a "slot" when doing things like teleporting and they don't have to make separate saves. There are no issues about the spellcaster sharing a space with another creature, but technically objects can be sundered...
Running them as creatures is helpful because they can have their own place in initiative and may have better saves than the spellcaster at low levels. And opponents who cast spells that affect a certain number of targets would need to decide whether to include the familiar or not (if they even know about the familiar).
The rules don't really support treating them as objects though. I generally allow spellcasters in my campaigns to make the choice at 1st level (creature vs. object) and then I let them switch it once during their PCs life time.