Familiar

[The Total Package]

Ive never had a Familiar before so pardon my noobery here ladies and gentlemen. I plan to play a Sorcerer and get the Familiar feat. The two abilities I plan to take are Independant and Manual Dexterity.Does this mean I could get my Familiar to feed me a potion of Quickness lets say on my turn? I guess he would be holding the potion in hand prior to combat, then at the start of each combat in Round 1 he would feed me it. Is this legal? And can I decide what my Familiar is, I guess he would need hands to perhaps an Imp?

[YuriP]

Familiars can't activate items, so even with manual dexterity familiars can't be used to apply any items effects to nobody.

The main idea is just to prevent the action compression of 1-action command, a familiar to make it draw and apply an item. Only few things like Retrieval Belts and Horn Of Plenty Ikon that allows such thing, and even they do this with limitations (the Belt have 1 per minute restriction while the Horn are exclusive for Exemplar classes/archetypes and only works with potions and elixirs).

That said, I know that many GMs ignores this rule for non-hostile and non-personal consumables, considering this an excessive restriction not so harm to the game balance or just to allow empowering the familiars utility.

[Trip.H]

Even when using that "cannot Activate" rule, familiars are still very helpful for item consumables.

Using it's Independent actions, familiars can put items into your hand via Interact, such as Draw-ing items off your belt and Swap-ing them in/out of your hands.

This will make your own Activate a total of just 1A to do.
As the familiar has 2 hands, you can even have them start combat while holding a spell scroll / potion you know you'll want, so they don't need to first grab it off your PC's belt.

[Zoken44]

I had an alchemical familiar doing this for me on a bomber alchemist.