If you have a familiar like a scorpion or centipede with a poison attack.
Is the save DC for the poison effected by level or does it remain the base creature save DC for ever?>
I believe it is based on the creatures constitution modifier for those two.
DC 10 + 1/2 (poisoning creature's racial HD) + (creature's Con modifier), unless it states otherwise, the HD for the case of a familiar is your effective wizard levels.
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The rules say: "For the purpose of effects related to number of Hit Dice, use the master's character level or the familiar's normal HD total, whichever is higher."
This means that effects that target HD, such as cloudkill or circle of death or sleep, target your familiar as if it has your level in HD or its racial HD, whichever is higher. It's ACTUAL racial HD do not change at all, and thus it doesn't gain ability score boosts or new feats, nor does the DC associated with its special abilities increase.
To increase those, the familiar's actual HD need to go up. There's not really a way in game at this point to really do this, but that might change at some point.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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As Flashohol points out, James Jacobs doesn't think so.
But Sean K Reynolds seems to disagree, if his opinion on the Silvanshee familiar can be taken as any indication.
Technically, that should scale with HD, so as written, a wiz20's silvanshee improved familiar would have 7 uses of 10d6 LOH per day. Which is, of course, way too good. We're probably going to errata the silvanshee so the damage still scales up with HD but it remains capped at 1/day.
So basically, it's something that hasn't been settled yet. I would ask your GM, and see what his/her opinion is.
Me personally? I think poison DC should scale with the familiar's pseudo-HD. That's just my opinion though.
The rules are a bit ambiguous on that issue. The two sides being the JJ interpretation and the SKR interpretation.
I personally think the JJ interpretation is correct. You treat the DC based on the racial HD (which does not go up). The alternative is ridiculous powers for any of the improved familiars. The escalating HD rule is for effects that are effecting the familiar (ie: whats the HD of the familiar when it gets color sprayed, etc)
Edit: If it means anything further I took a look at which way hero lab rules the DC's. Hero Lab takes the JJ interpretation. No matter what lvl you are the poisons DC is still 10.
I think that when your looking at something like the silvanshee whos ability is bassed on a class skill its reasonable to say there is a problem.
but the save DCs for most poisons ans special abilities are very weak. I think its reasonable for a familiars save DC to go up at 1/2 HD. I mean... your generally not going to use it anyway because that would mean putting the thing in danger. but when you get the chance its nice to make the GM roll the save rather than the obvious fail for most things beyond 5th level or so.