| Rycaut |
Okay so I'm building a Hawk familiar for my character and I noticed a few things that confuse me around the skills for the familiar.
Specifically in the Bestiary it states that TINY animals get +4 to FLY and +8 to STEALTH.
However in the Hawk entry in the Bestiary it lists a Fly skill of +7 and a Perception of +14 with no other skills listed.
The rules on Familiars state that familiars treat Acrobatics, Climb, Fly, Perception, Stealth, and Swim as class skills.
Which implies that a base Hawk probably has 1 rank in Fly (1 + 3 for class rank + 3 for Dex of 17 = +7 and one rank in Perception (1 + 3 for class rank + 2 wis + 8 racial = +14)
[or the hawk has no ranks in fly but has the tiny size +4 and 3 for dex for the +7?]
But why no stealth skill noted for the base hawk?
Here are my questions:
1. What happens when a familiar gains HD levels (and gains INT) - does the familiar gain skill ranks (2+INT mod/per HD) and feats as per the monster HD rules for animals (or for magical beasts?)
2. When a familiar gains INT high enough for an INT bonus does it gain skill ranks retroactively? (like any other creature gaining a higher INT?)
3. What skills can a familiar use via their link to their master? i.e. non-physical skills like Sense Motive seem reasonable if rarely needed. What about skills like Escape Artist?
4. If a character takes Improved Familiar and chooses the Celestial Hawk (or Fiendish) what is the CR of the Familiar to determine the effects of the Celestial Template? Since the familiar text in the Wizard section of the core rules states that you use the effective HD of the familiar (i.e. the Character level) do you use that to determine the effective CR of the familiar to use when applying the Celestial template (i.e. this might mean that the familiar gains Spell Resistance and significant resistances...)
I realize that familiars are not animal companions (where the details about additional skill ranks and feats are clearly outlined in the tables) but the rules as I read them are not entirely clear - especially with how they interact with things like Improved Familiar and the templates.
Paul Zagieboylo
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The Hawk presented in the Bestiary has only one skill rank (as a 1HD Animal) and it's spent in Perception for a total of +14 (+1 rank, +3 trained, +2 Wis, +8 racial). The Fly skill is specifically called out at +7 (+3 Dex, +4 size), even though it hasn't spent any points in it, because it's likely to come up a lot and the size bonus would be easy for most GMs to forget. The hawk also has a +11 Stealth bonus (+3 Dex, +8 size) but that's considerably less likely to be important most of the time, so they didn't bother mentioning it. In general, creature entries in the Bestiary only mention skills that the creature has actually put ranks in; Fly in the Familiar (Hawk) entry is an outlier in this respect. It still has all the other skills; they're just at defaults that the Bestiary figures you can figure out for yourself.
My answers to your specific questions as follows. Note that these are purely my opinion and do not represent official rulings. They are just my best attempt at reading the rules as given.
1. The familiar does not actually gain hit dice. First paragraph of the Familiars section: "It retains the appearance, Hit Dice, base attack bonus, base save bonuses, skills, and feats of the normal animal it once was[.]" (emphasis added) The only way in which it is considered to have more hit dice than this is for adjudicating the effects of spells like sleep, cause fear, or holy word, which are limited in the hit dice of creatures they can affect. This is so that a high-level wizard doesn't have his familiar flattened by a sleep spell, which would suck. He does not receive any skill ranks, stat improvements, feats, or anything else that would normally attend an increase in hit dice.
2. Yes he does. Of course this only matters when your wizard gets to 9th level, increasing his familiar's Int to 10, which finally gives him two skill ranks (for his single hit die) instead of only one.
3. If the wizard is better at something than his familiar, the familiar can use the wizard's skill. However, most familiars still aren't going to have a lot of luck using skills that require communicating with other people (such as Diplomacy), or those that require hands (such as Disable Device), but Acrobatics or Escape Artist are probably fine if for some reason your wizard is good at them. The restriction on skills that familiars cannot use no matter how good they are at them is pretty much specifically intended to prevent a familiar from using Use Magic Device and becoming an action-less source of wand spells, although not all GMs actually enforce this restriction. I remember seeing a recent Paizo staff post about this but I cannot find it now; if someone has the link handy please add it.
4. Familiars do not actually gain hit dice, so the only thing they get from the Celestial (resp. Fiendish) template is Smite Evil (resp. Smite Good). At least that is the way I would rule it. But if you want to rule it that they get a more powerful version of the template, with the energy resistance, DR, and spell resistance it gives (probably better than it gets for being a familiar of a wizard 11+), I don't think anything breaks; most of the advantages that gives are pretty much good only for combat-capable creatures, which familiars aren't.