Familiars at targets

[Weirdo]

Blymurkla wrote:

It's really sad. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger is like the epitome of a hero saga or really almost any story ever. Yet Pathfinder makes [u]absolutely no effort[/u] to foster a style where it's okey to loose once in a while. But that's the 40 year old legacy the game carries around.

In Burning Wheel (or rather Mouse Guard), you need to fail checks to gain experience. And an adventure where you beat every challenge the GM throws at you without an effort turns really boring really fast. In Pathfinder, it's so important that the PCs succeed without having to find alternate routes or do anything to improve their odds that most skill checks offer a 'retry'.

While it's true that PF doesn't encourage failing, it also doesn't discourage it as strongly as this suggests.

In PF games I've participated in, the PCs have fled from fights, lost nonlethal duels, failed to capture enemies, been captured themselves, failed to rescue friendly NPCs, and been manipulated by their enemies. It's less about the rules, and more about the adventure design. Use the Rule of Three Gargs454 mentioned to make sure a single failure doesn't stop an adventure in its tracks, use enemies that aren't interested in chasing down and slaughtering the PCs so that defeat doesn't mean a TPK, and provide objectives whose completion isn't critical to the campaign so that failing to meet those objectives doesn't mean the BBEG wins.

Note that of all this, the only thing that involved even temporarily depowering the party was having them captured (in lieu of TPK) and even then the group was able to recover its gear within a session. Killing off a witch's familiar really should not be necessary to apply pressure to the witch.

Off-topic on skills:

I think most of them already do have a suitable penalty for failing. If you fail to jump or climb, you fall and take damage. If you fail to lie or intimidate someone, the DC of the retry increases - fail repeatedly and it becomes impossible. The things that don't have penalties are things where you might expect persistence to pay off - if you're not under pressure. If you want more drama you can always add pressure. Electrify the door after the first failure so any subsequent checks deal d6 damage, or have the enemy behind the door start buffing when they hear the fighter's first attempt to break it down, or add a hazard on the near side of the door that the party is trying to get away from, like an approaching enemy or a room slowly filling up with water. Or just make it clear that the two minutes they spend taking 20 on opening that door are being taken out of the minute/level buff they have active.

[Nox Aeterna]

Well in my games , just like in so many others here , if the familiar isnt doing nothing inside the combat at all , then it counts like it is outside said combat and it wont be target or hurt at all by anything.

If the familiar does take part in said combat by doing things , like lets say using UMD and a wand , then it can be target and killed like a player.

This is just the way i prefer to approach this and im glad to see so many others also going this path.