Crossbow Monkeys (peripherally related to kingmaker)

[Raetu]

Hey folks. If you'd rather just have the short version, skip to the last two paragraphs.

Just started the kingmaker campaign with my pf group, and we seem to be doing something wrong because our party keeps wandering in to things way above the abilities of a first/second level party (four trolls, a dire-bear, something that requires an eleventh level character to cast dispel, ect...). The DM has fiddled with things each time so as to save the party. As I am not the DM, I am hesitant to go peeking in to everything to see what might be wrong. Our party is subsequently considering re-rolling our characters in to a bunch of min-maxed murder-hobos...

While pondering ways to break the game, I stumbled on to a guide that was suggesting using a monkey familiar with poisoner's gloves and infused alchemist extracts to give you the equivalent of a few free rounds of buffing. At this point I went and looked through all the rules for familiars and found myself wondering:

Can you use the re-training rules to swap a monkey familiar's weapon finesse with simple weapon proficiency light crossbow?

Sadly my search-fu is not strong, and all I seem to find are arguments that seem to fail to come to a hard answer. We are currently using the kingmaker pdf(s), and the paizo site's prd. Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Saethori]

You can swap out and retrain a familiar's feats, yes. This is especially useful for familiars that come with Weapon Finesse, which is useless for familiars to have (as they get Dex to hit automatically).

As for the crossbow... yes, you can get the monkey to be proficient in crossbows. But you can't easily persuade him to use it; an animal will always prefer its natural weapons over human tools. Even a familiar-level intelligent one.

[dragonhunterq]

Blog in support of Saethori.
Essentially it's up to your GM depending on what is good for their campaign.

And from what I understand of Kingmaker (never read it or played) it is very sandbox-y and so includes the possibility of running into CR inappropriate foes, so learning to scout and when to run away might be useful skills.