Familiars and Manual Dexterity

[Virellius]

Let's say you have a little capuchin familiar. They have, by nature, hands and can do things with them. Would you, as a GM, assume the spellcaster would have to take the Manual Dexterity ability the same way a flying familiar HAS to take fly? Or would you just let it go?

Mainly asking because a player was wondering and I'm tempted to just say go for it, because... as written, Manual Dexterity seems like it would give the monkey ANOTHER pair of hands which is... horrifying at best.

[SuperBidi]

The rules are pretty clear: If an animal has any of the abilities, you have to take it. So, for a capucin, you have to take Manual Dexterity.

As a DM, I would allow a player to not take Manual Dexterity if he doesn't plan to use it but if he really wants a monkey as familiar.

[Virellius]

I must have missed that. For some reason my brain only linked onto the fly part and not the rest of that sentence.

My bad. >_>

[Samurai]

Yeah, SuperBidi is right, RAW you would be required to always choose it with a monkey.

My Wizard has a rat familiar, and rats can be manually dexterous or not (in our GM's ruling). Right now he does have the ability, and it actually came in useful once. We'll see if another ability eventually seems like it's more important. Loosing the ability could be explained away by something like "Ok, if you want to swap it for flight, the rat's arms now become wings, loosing it's Manual Dexterity and gaining Flight..."

Now the rat would look more like a bat, but it's doesn't have other bat abilities like echolocation.

[mrspaghetti]

Samurai wrote:

Yeah, SuperBidi is right, RAW you would be required to always choose it with a monkey.

My Wizard has a rat familiar, and rats can be manually dexterous or not (in our GM's ruling). Right now he does have the ability, and it actually came in useful once. We'll see if another ability eventually seems like it's more important. Loosing the ability could be explained away by something like "Ok, if you want to swap it for flight, the rat's arms now become wings, loosing it's Manual Dexterity and gaining Flight..."

Now the rat would look more like a bat, but it's doesn't have other bat abilities like echolocation.

I agree with your GM, that the master has the prerogative to choose things other than what the familiar would have if it were an ordinary member of the species. So a monkey would have non-dextrous "paws" if the master chose abilities which did not include manual dexterity, an owl would have shrunken, non-functional wings if flight were not chosen, etc. Players should have flexibility to choose regardless, the root species of the familiar is really just flavor.