One of my PCs asked the question of if he were to play a familiar of some unknown powerful character what his effective character level would be, and I am trying to figure out how to advance such a character to keep in line with the PCs.
I am assuming that the master has Familiar Spell, and sets aside spells for his familiar to use.
The familiar character is required to take the Infiltrator familiar archetype.
So here the question lies:
What should govern the level of the Familiar's master's level?
If the familiar were to join a group of level 1 adventurers its master would only assign it level 1 spells based on its desires and requests through the permanent telepathic bond from Infiltrator.
Thoughts:
Allow the familiar PC to come from the Improved Familiar list at first level, but offer that it is trying to stay in line with the adventurers around it. The familiar's ultimate goal might not be open even to the Player (it IS an infiltrator after all.)
The familiar's master could be a beast-bonded witch, but no feats would be allocated to the familiar.
What are your ideas and concerns for this?
Since the familiar can be from the Improved Familiar list it does not have any money. The first level may seem powerful, but it also is unlikely to have any spells allocated to it until the party hits level 2 when its master starts allocated spells to it. If it is doing particularly poorly then the master could allocate it spells.
In short this makes said character the Swiss Army Knife of characters. The master could be a mortal with a class, it could also be an outsider who has an effective class, or it could be a god that is treated as having all classes but this last one doesn't make any sense.
This probably won't work very well. You can't make a class feature into a character and have something that will end up working.
However, there are some options on the theme that would be workable. An awakened animal who perhaps used to be a familiar, but just takes class levels would be workable for certain classes, particularly casting classes.
Any of the improved familiars would be more problematic, as they frequently have abilities that a flat out more powerful than low level characters. An Imp for example can fly, had dr, turn invisible at will and has 3 hd. A whole lot more power than a level 1 character. If you want something like that, it is probably best to construct a 'racial class' where they start with one hd and few special abilities and as the rest of the party levels up they gain the rest of their racial hd and special abilites. I would just the imp in the example above, to be equal to about a 4th level character. After 4th level, they would have all of the abilities of an imp and would then start taking levels in a regular class.
This probably won't work very well. You can't make a class feature into a character and have something that will end up working.
However, there are some options on the theme that would be workable. An awakened animal who perhaps used to be a familiar, but just takes class levels would be workable for certain classes, particularly casting classes.
Any of the improved familiars would be more problematic, as they frequently have abilities that a flat out more powerful than low level characters.
I've done Awakened animal characters before, and they often times work out in fun or interesting ways: Someone wanted to play Sif the Great Wolf, they started as a regular wolf and then became a winter wolf that wasn't bound by alignment.
What I think will work best here is the character being an Aasimar/Tiefling who looks exactly like an animal, but is allowed to roll statistics as an assimar (variants allowed), but is limited in all ways that a familiar would be. Only basic familiars are allowed (no Improved Familiars, or later at level 7, they can lose two levels to ascend to an Improved Familiar where they adopt the benefits of the improved familiar by sacrificing two character levels to change their base creature from Aasimar/Teifling to the improved familiar [everything changes save for their attributes, and the alignment becomes required at that point.])
What do you think?
It might work better if the master were performing spell research on a spell that can increase the infiltrator bond. That way you can explain away any differences from how things usually are by "It's a spell effect." It would also allow you to add a few extra abilities. The first thing that jumped to my mind when reading this was taking a fox familiar and having the PC be the kitsune race. I can imaging a familiar getting enough of a magical boost that it can turn humanoid at will.
Also, I can imagine that enough personal experience away from its master would give the familiar so much life experience that it could reasonably begin taking class levels. Perhaps it discovers some magical artifact that allows this, or perhaps the artifact does some sort of weird echo thing along the magical link that allows the familiar to began casting spells independently. This last would cover the same ground as the master providing spells, but allow for a bit more independence.
...The first thing that jumped to my mind when reading this was taking a fox familiar and having the PC be the kitsune race. I can imaging a familiar getting enough of a magical boost that it can turn humanoid at will.
Also, I can imagine that enough personal experience away from its master would give the familiar so much life experience that it could reasonably begin taking class levels. Perhaps it discovers some magical artifact that allows this, or perhaps the artifact does some sort of weird echo thing along the magical link that allows the familiar to began casting spells independently. This last would cover the same ground as the master providing spells, but allow for a bit more independence.
This what I was thinking when I read the title. Fox/kitsune, Crow/tengu, ratfolk, catfolk, etc. You'd have a pc with an interesting rp angle. You could have a kitsune sorcerer that has to somehow commune with its master at each new level to learn spells.