My Pact of the Chain Warlock player / Voice of the Chainmaster has an Imp Familiar. He originally chose a Good Archfey as his patron (eg The Summer Queen or Verenestra), so in my mind he has a fey spirit as his familiar, but he's twisted it to be summoned into this ugly demonic form that the Patron would certainly be disappointed with.
Also, the party is running Phandelver. The warlock sends the Imp in to investigate an old tower (Old Owl Well), and discovered a Red Wizard of Thay and his twelve zombies. I ran the Imp's stealth against a lessened passive perception of the wizard and the zombies. They immediately turned tail and ran... no parlay, no combat, back to town to talk to the quest giver thinking they'll be rewarded. To make matters worse, the warlock sent his Imp twenty miles south to attempt to find Orcs in the foothills, while the party returned to town. I feel like the party is going to remove all the tension and fun/danger of overland travel, and I want it to be discouraged somewhat, by playing its stealth very strictly as it was a level 0/NPC. I am a bit looser with the actual party however, as they are PCs.
What can an imp realistically do? It can speak common, does this mean the Imp communicates intelligently? Or is it the arcane spirit that does this? Does it need rest / sleep / food? How high does it fly? Does it get tired? When he dismisses and summons it as an action, will it simply appear where he is? Or does the Imp need to travel, lost in the foothills until it finds the main trail again and reunites with the Warlock days later?
I was planning on having the Imp have to roll a stealth check when walking in plain sight against NPC's passive perception. However, when it is standing still and hiding, the passive perception of every nearby creature is at disadvantage (-5) because the Imp is heavily obscured. If the Imp draws attention, say by opening a door, then it makes a new stealth roll, and the Passive Perception is normal. Once this happens, the enemies have time to bolster their defenses unless the party acts fast. I was also going to make the Imp have to use its intelligence / Wisdom to follow his orders accurately. He can see and hear through the imp, but he can not truly control it. Lastly, the imp is not proficient in any skills like Navigation or Tracking, so it can not really do any of these things without direct intervention by the Warlock, except poorly.
To make matters worse, the warlock sent his Imp twenty miles south to attempt to find Orcs in the foothills, while the party returned to town.
A PC moves 300 ft. per minute at a normal pace. Which is 5 ft. per second. This is 30 ft. per turn. (Each turn is 6 seconds.) An imp has a walking speed of 20 ft. and a flying speed of 40 ft. Which means it moves at 200 ft per minute walking or 400 ft. per minute flying. (At a normal pace.) A PC can walk 24 miles a day, the imp could walk 18 miles a day or fly 30 miles a day. Again, at a normal pace. A day is 8 hours of travel. The imp spent the better part of 8 hours just traveling 20 miles south. This doesn't include actually looking for the orcs.
What can an imp realistically do? It can speak common, does this mean the Imp communicates intelligently? Or is it the arcane spirit that does this?
Imp's are of average intelligence. They have an intelligence score of 11. They know common and infernal because they can speak common and infernal. Perhaps in your world it speaks broken common, but understands well enough.
Does it need rest / sleep / food? How high does it fly? Does it get tired?
This is a toss up and is ultimately up to you. "You gain the service of a familiar, a spirit that takes an animal form you choose .. though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast." As a pact of the chain warlock you gain access to special forms. The only real reference to a spirit that I know of is the Druid's Circle of the Shepard 2nd level ability. ".. you can magically summon an incorporeal spirit .. It counts as neither a creature nor an object .."
I personally, and I know many who rule as a spirit it does not tire, nor hunger. I know a handful who consider it a creature and therefore it requires rest and food.
The imp has a fly speed, so it can honestly fly as high as it wants within reason. If you rule it's a creature and needs to breath I wouldn't let it fly out of the atmosphere.
When he dismisses and summons it as an action, will it simply appear where he is? Or does the Imp need to travel, lost in the foothills until it finds the main trail again and reunites with the Warlock days later?
As an action, you can temporarily dismiss your familiar. It disappears into a pocket dimension where it awaits your summons. Alternatively, you can dismiss it forever. As an action while it is temporarily dismissed, you can cause it to reappear in any unoccupied space within 30 feet of you.
Hopefully this was detailed enough to help you out, if not just let me know and I'll expand wherever is needed.
/e Removed parts of post that didn't factor Voice of the Chain Master into the equation. My bad!
If you want the party to have to fight, have them fight with random encounters while traveling. You can even use the very fights that they are avoiding. Think of reason why the red wizard would be traveling wherever they are and have him bumble into them with his zombies in tow.
On the other hand, did they do everything they to do that the contact wanted them to accomplish? Perhaps the contact will want them to go back and finish them off. Maybe he won't and it'll be fine. I do remember that the wizard had a quest option associated with him, so it wasn't necessary for the party to defeat him outright.
Avoiding encounters isn't bad in and of itself. Picking and choosing your battles is a fine strategy, but it also means you give up on some things sometimes as well. Didn't the red wizard have some magical item(s) on him? Is the xp different for not dealing with him (regardless of whether it's killing him or getting him to move on)?
There's nothing that says that the imp has to find the orcs. This could be because the orcs weren't there to be found, it could be that they attacked the red wizard or some caravan passing on the Triboar trail, that the imp got caught up chasing squirrels, or misunderstood the directive. It shouldn't happen all the time, but it could happen. Also, the imp could simply get captured or killed, perhaps by something other than the orcs. I don't recommend doing this a lot depending on the imps stats. Probably the best way to do this as a warning would be to have the imp captured and hooded so it can't see with its hands tied so it can't perform touch spells. This can happen far enough away from the camp that it won't be reliable information to find it. I don't recall the distance that is involved but that could be a factor as well.
Have something stealthier or bigger spot the imp and kill it, "the last thing you see through your imps eyes is a large shadow, then nothing!" especially if it's 20 miles away. They then have to re-summon the imp and get it to travel 20 miles again, or be more cautious with it.
First, recognise that the player has chosen to invest in this familiar and not the other Warlock options, so try not to feel the need to punish the player for it. That being said, if the current/repetitive use of the familiar is impacting your own enjoyment of the game then you are well within your rights and powers as DM to do something about it.
So, as to the fey-imp; you are the DM so you roleplay on behalf of the entire universe. That includes this all powerful Archfey Patron. It can appear to the warlock in a dream to express its displeasure, or else it could intervene to change the appearance of the imp to a more pleasing aesthetic (though it keeps its exact same stat block).
Short range invisible scouting is exactly the reason one would choose a Chain Pact familiar, but if you are worried the long range scouting is an issue then introduce this little imp to the very real dangers of traveling alone: might I suggest some nocturnal blindsight creatures who aren't inconvenienced by invisibility. A swarm of bats, wasps or spiders perhaps? Any low-level enemy that wouldn't be any sort of issue for the party, but would love to find a little snack of imp. These could also be servants of the Black Spider sent out for the very purpose of inconveniencing these upstart adventurers. A night-time attack on the lone imp would pose an interesting choice for the warlock; let it fight alone or summon it back to the party. By the same token, an imp away scouting long distance is an imp that can't help the party with anything they are doing, so allowing it to be sacrificed like that might balance up in the end.
If the imp is invisible scouting and does something like open a door, then you don't need to roll a stealth check in order for enemies in that room to jump into action - if they see a door open on its own then invisible spy is pretty much the default assumption in this universe.
Finally, all this scouting and replacing of any lost imps is going to be time-consuming. Ratchet up the pressure by having the Black Spider's network take increasingly disruptive actions against the town and the party. An NPC like Sildar can deliver some stern warnings if the party seems to be sitting around waiting for imp-scout reports.
First, recognise that the player has chosen to invest in this familiar and not the other Warlock options, so try not to feel the need to punish the player for it.
Thiiiiiiiisssss. I'm part of an alternating campaign schedule (I DM one campaign one week, and play in a different one the next week) and the DM of the one I play for feels the need to plan EVERYTHING to counter our leveling choices. For example, we play a campaign HEAVILY focused on fighting Fiends soooo naturally our bookwormish cleric character spent downtime researching fiends and prepares a lot of banishment type spells (makes perfect sense in context of everything our party's been through) so our most recent major combat encounter, we banished the huge CR 15~ baddie and sent him back to his plane and concentrated long enough so it wouldnt come back (ending the encounter in like a few minutes) and the DM was MAD saying that he was gonna find ways to make the fiends immune to banishment, making all of our party's planning and spell investments useless.
other example, our sorcerer has pulled off some preeeeetty clutch hold-monsters recently and since then, the DM has picked nothing but monsters immune to paralysis.
tl;dr,
I wouldn't try to counter your players' choices, but rather incorporate this style of playing they've made into how you prep for the game . Of course, unless its just THATguy and even the other players are annoyed, then by all means, punish lol
I went on a rant about a year ago about a player who took Magic Initiate specifically for Alarm and Find Familiar. They chose an Owl familiar and used it to remove any chance of ambush or threat from surprise attacks. I was very frustrated, not only for the obvious tactic to take away threats and put certain parts of the game on easy mode, but that the player was a rules-lawyer type as well. In the end, after my rant was rebuked by a lot of posters who thought I was just trying punish my player for optimizing their character, I found the answer to be pretty simple. There is a risk/reward that comes with a familiar and it should be used to its fullest.
The player risked the Pact choice on something that is more tactical, squishy, and fidgety than a bunch of new spells or a pretty weapon, all for the reward of some very nuanced rewards. They send the familiar out to scout, that risks the familiar's safety, the party's safety, and the reward is information. The familiar is significantly weaker than any weapon or spell, so they risk damage output or survival, but the familiar can be utilized in combat to great effect with touch spells and other harassment. The trade off is something that the player feels like they'll enjoy, or has more utility, than the other choices that were available. This player also invested in a new party member, and this is where the DM can really have fun instead of punish the choice.
A captured familiar can simply be dismissed, a killed familiar can be resummoned, you rarely ever permanently lose a familiar. Instead, a familiar has a personality, just like any NPC, and the DM should work that in. The Warlock sends the familiar out to scout for days at a time, the familiar starts to complain that the Warlock doesn't like him and keeps sending him away. The familiar is killed often in battles, make the familiar reluctant to do as it was told, however don't make it say no since it is a familiar. It's a permanent fixture to the party, the bad guys will begin to recognize this and it becomes an indicator for where the party is. NPCs talk, the world spreads news, and the party is becoming famous, that imp will become just as much a liability as a reward, simply for existing. All the while, the player can use their familiar as they wish, but will also have to learn how to avoid their familiar becoming their Achilles's heel.
The warlock is a Chaotic Good Tiefling, and he left the Archfey Patron backstory up to me. The backstory I invented was that the Seelie Court is counteracting the corrupting influence of the Queen of Air and Darkness, who has been targeting Tieflings in an effort to corrupt them further through their fiendish heritage. As a Tiefling, he is not favored by the Seelie Court, but they are empowering him to weaken the Queen of Air and Darkness hold on Warlocks in Faerun. I was thinking of having his Archfey patron express disapproval by casting some sort of Illusion to change his Imp's physical form in his presence... in this case the choice of an Imp itself is an indicator to the Seelie of the Warlock's corruptibility by his heritage.
He has been getting visions of the Queen of Air and Darkness' throne, and Verenestra will soon appear where the Feywild meets Neverwinter Wood, to give him a personal quest to prove himself by killing the Banshee Agatha. To me, the cold vanity of the Banshee curse is a strong parallel to the description of the Queen of Air and Darkness, who is so vain that she refuses her true form to ever be seen... she simply speaks through a black diamond on an ebony throne.
As far as playing the Imp's travel, unless he is explicitly looking through the Imp's eyes, I was thinking it has a chance to simply die from an encounter with something with blindsight. There's a chance it could telepathically speak to the Warlock about the danger, and a chance it'll just get killed. The Imp can't track very well, and it can't map either. So it can certainly find the Orcs whereabouts, but only to a few square miles if there are no major landmarks, and it can scout how many there are. If the Imp never tires, then it should be able to travel three times further in the same day as the party, but it still can't scout very well at night. And it'll certainly complain, and possibly even wake the Warlock up from his long rest.
I'm not trying to counter his choices, I'm trying to maintain the tension and surprise. For example, I planned on having the party find a Sword + 1, the Talon of Tresendar in an old orc camp while searching the hills for the Orc Raiders. At first glance, they would think that this may be the Orc camp, but the further they venture in, they see bones stripped clean, until they reach the back of the cave to find various bones and the magic sword suspended in air. When they go to grab it, gelatinous cube! Instead, I can already tell he's going to send his Imp in to grab the sword from a mile away, it'll die, and they'll just walk away. No tension, no combat, no magic item reward... I'm upset.
I'm not trying to counter his choices, I'm trying to maintain the tension and surprise. For example, I planned on having the party find a Sword + 1, the Talon of Tresendar in an old orc camp while searching the hills for the Orc Raiders. At first glance, they would think that this may be the Orc camp, but the further they venture in, they see bones stripped clean, until they reach the back of the cave to find various bones and the magic sword suspended in air. When they go to grab it, gelatinous cube! Instead, I can already tell he's going to send his Imp in to grab the sword from a mile away, it'll die, and they'll just walk away. No tension, no combat, no magic item reward... I'm upset.
Put something in the Imp's way that it can't get through by itself. There's a heavy door that's closed and locked at the front of the cave (the last orc into the cave pulled it closed and locked it behind him). The imp isn't strong enough to force it open, and doesn't have the ability to pick the lock.
There could also be wards around the sword/cube, or somewhere down the hallway--a magic circle inscribed in the floor that prevents magical beings from crossing. That's a little more uncommon than a locked door, but in a magical world, people are going to have magical protections sometimes :)
In general:
I don't think the Patron should limit the Warlock's choice. The summoned imp is not evil--it isn't an imp, it just looks like an imp. At most, I would consider the patron telling the warlock to just not let the familiar run around in public looking like an imp. Bad for the rep :) But the imp can turn invisible, and when it's not invisible, it can be a raven, spider, or what..rat, I think?
I don't think it's necessarily always meta-gaming for you to think of things to neutralize or lessen the impact of the familiar. For example, opponents aren't dumb, and will recognize the value of the familiar, meaning they will attack it. Particularly opponents the party has faced before. I'm not actually sure why the Red Wizard ran in your example above...why would a Wizard with zombie cronies run from an imp? One magic missile would have taken the imp out.
You also have reason to limit the familiar at times (speaking here as someone currently playing a Chain Warlock) because an over-used familiar can quickly turn into the GM and one player playing the game while everyone else watches. So it is a balancing act, like everything else, between letting a player ability be useful, and letting it override the entire game. Luckily, there are easy ways to limit the familiar when needed.
One of those ways is to not make the familiar automatically successful. For the above example, there's no reason that the cave must be a cave the familiar can get into. If they find a cave with a big door...well, nothing really unusual there. No big "the DM is trying to limit my familiar!" red flags :) It's just reality.
For the flying south to search example--why assume the familiar will find the camp in the first place? If it's tasked with 'finding orcs in the foothills'--how big is 'the foothills'? Even if they're only 10 by 10 miles, that's 100 square miles to search. If it goes up too high, cloud cover, and poor detail. If it comes down too low, it's got a task that may easily take it a week. I mean, that's larger than the entire city of Los Angeles. Imagine that area, devoid of buildings, but covered with crags and hills and caves and woods and...that should not in any way be something that takes the imp a day and it comes back successful, no problem.
But you don't want to make it useless. So instead, the familiar comes back and reports that it didn't find any camps, but it did find a farmhouse that looked like it had been raided by something, and it could find it's way back to that. And then, when they go to the farmhouse area to search for the orcs, and the warlock sends it out to scout again--remember that the warlock therefore doesn't have the familiar around to help if there's combat. So when the orc party coming back to the farmhouse surprises the party, the warlock would have to spend two actions to bring the familiar back to help with combat.
My general advice is this--you know they have a super-familiar. So you need to plan your adventures as if the party has that super-familiar. It's just like another party-member in that sense--if the party has a Bear Totem barbarian, you as the DM need to plan for that. Plan differently, to make the game challenging, tense, etc. If the party had a party member who could fly himself, you would need to plan for that as well. So when you plan encounters, don't plan them in such a way that an imp sent on ahead could ruin it. Plan for the imp, and you'll be able to plan encounters that work just fine. :)
Particularly opponents the party has faced before. I'm not actually sure why the Red Wizard ran in your example above...why would a Wizard with zombie cronies run from an imp? One magic missile would have taken the imp out.
I didn't make this very clear, but it was the party that fled! This is what I'm afraid of. I'm building encounters and the party just wants to avoid them. They should be using the information to help your encounters, but grow a pair, guys!
As far as making the familiar successful on something like tracking, I was thinking I'd roll just like a single average party member was doing the task. I'd ask the player how he is directing the familiar. An easy roll to see if the familiar does a good job of following directions. Then it's 100 square miles of foothills, with no starting point to track the Orcs, that's a very difficult task, DC 25, and something the familiar can't roll for. It can certainly find various abandoned camps, or destroyed farmhouses, but will never be as able to do a good job of tracking without the players.
Have the Wizard of Thay and his zombies attack an kill some kids or a family from the town with one survivor returning traumatized telling the sob story.
Maybe not for all ignored threats, but for some there should be tangible consequences to the world. If they at all care about the well being of the people of Phandelver they can't just ignore every potential threat to the town.
Have the Wizard of Thay and his zombies attack an kill some kids or a family from the town with one survivor returning traumatized telling the sob story.
Maybe not for all ignored threats, but for some there should be tangible consequences to the world. If they at all care about the well being of the people of Phandelver they can't just ignore every potential threat to the town.
This but make sure the Wizard leaves a survivor to tell the tale that this is retribution for the cowards that ran. Party is now hated unless they do something about the Wizard!
Have the Wizard of Thay and his zombies attack an kill some kids or a family from the town with one survivor returning traumatized telling the sob story.
Maybe not for all ignored threats, but for some there should be tangible consequences to the world. If they at all care about the well being of the people of Phandelver they can't just ignore every potential threat to the town.
This but make sure the Wizard leaves a survivor to tell the tale that this is retribution for the cowards that ran. Party is now hated unless they do something about the Wizard!
This is a possibility, but the encounter is an optional one. As long as they aren't getting exp for not dealing with them (running away isn't dealing with them) it isn't terrible. Also, I would think that Paladins and Clerics would likely want to destroy the undead as well as Rangers and Druids (an affront to the natural world, plus the undead might be a favored enemy).
If the party isn't having encounters (read combat or RP) with the sources of exp, don't award it. If they attempt to take wave echo cave (and possibly Cragmaw Castle, particularly if there are normal goblinoids at the castle than normal and/or Targor's band shows up to pin them inside the castle while calling out the intruders) at too low a level, they may not be able to handle it.
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My Pact of the Chain Warlock player / Voice of the Chainmaster has an Imp Familiar. He originally chose a Good Archfey as his patron (eg The Summer Queen or Verenestra), so in my mind he has a fey spirit as his familiar, but he's twisted it to be summoned into this ugly demonic form that the Patron would certainly be disappointed with.
Also, the party is running Phandelver. The warlock sends the Imp in to investigate an old tower (Old Owl Well), and discovered a Red Wizard of Thay and his twelve zombies. I ran the Imp's stealth against a lessened passive perception of the wizard and the zombies. They immediately turned tail and ran... no parlay, no combat, back to town to talk to the quest giver thinking they'll be rewarded. To make matters worse, the warlock sent his Imp twenty miles south to attempt to find Orcs in the foothills, while the party returned to town. I feel like the party is going to remove all the tension and fun/danger of overland travel, and I want it to be discouraged somewhat, by playing its stealth very strictly as it was a level 0/NPC. I am a bit looser with the actual party however, as they are PCs.
What can an imp realistically do? It can speak common, does this mean the Imp communicates intelligently? Or is it the arcane spirit that does this? Does it need rest / sleep / food? How high does it fly? Does it get tired? When he dismisses and summons it as an action, will it simply appear where he is? Or does the Imp need to travel, lost in the foothills until it finds the main trail again and reunites with the Warlock days later?
I was planning on having the Imp have to roll a stealth check when walking in plain sight against NPC's passive perception. However, when it is standing still and hiding, the passive perception of every nearby creature is at disadvantage (-5) because the Imp is heavily obscured. If the Imp draws attention, say by opening a door, then it makes a new stealth roll, and the Passive Perception is normal. Once this happens, the enemies have time to bolster their defenses unless the party acts fast. I was also going to make the Imp have to use its intelligence / Wisdom to follow his orders accurately. He can see and hear through the imp, but he can not truly control it. Lastly, the imp is not proficient in any skills like Navigation or Tracking, so it can not really do any of these things without direct intervention by the Warlock, except poorly.
A PC moves 300 ft. per minute at a normal pace. Which is 5 ft. per second. This is 30 ft. per turn. (Each turn is 6 seconds.) An imp has a walking speed of 20 ft. and a flying speed of 40 ft. Which means it moves at 200 ft per minute walking or 400 ft. per minute flying. (At a normal pace.) A PC can walk 24 miles a day, the imp could walk 18 miles a day or fly 30 miles a day. Again, at a normal pace. A day is 8 hours of travel. The imp spent the better part of 8 hours just traveling 20 miles south. This doesn't include actually looking for the orcs.
Imp's are of average intelligence. They have an intelligence score of 11. They know common and infernal because they can speak common and infernal. Perhaps in your world it speaks broken common, but understands well enough.
This is a toss up and is ultimately up to you. "You gain the service of a familiar, a spirit that takes an animal form you choose .. though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast." As a pact of the chain warlock you gain access to special forms. The only real reference to a spirit that I know of is the Druid's Circle of the Shepard 2nd level ability. ".. you can magically summon an incorporeal spirit .. It counts as neither a creature nor an object .."
I personally, and I know many who rule as a spirit it does not tire, nor hunger. I know a handful who consider it a creature and therefore it requires rest and food.
The imp has a fly speed, so it can honestly fly as high as it wants within reason. If you rule it's a creature and needs to breath I wouldn't let it fly out of the atmosphere.
As an action, you can temporarily dismiss your familiar. It disappears into a pocket dimension where it awaits your summons. Alternatively, you can dismiss it forever. As an action while it is temporarily dismissed, you can cause it to reappear in any unoccupied space within 30 feet of you.
Hopefully this was detailed enough to help you out, if not just let me know and I'll expand wherever is needed.
/e Removed parts of post that didn't factor Voice of the Chain Master into the equation. My bad!
If you want the party to have to fight, have them fight with random encounters while traveling. You can even use the very fights that they are avoiding. Think of reason why the red wizard would be traveling wherever they are and have him bumble into them with his zombies in tow.
On the other hand, did they do everything they to do that the contact wanted them to accomplish? Perhaps the contact will want them to go back and finish them off. Maybe he won't and it'll be fine. I do remember that the wizard had a quest option associated with him, so it wasn't necessary for the party to defeat him outright.
Avoiding encounters isn't bad in and of itself. Picking and choosing your battles is a fine strategy, but it also means you give up on some things sometimes as well. Didn't the red wizard have some magical item(s) on him? Is the xp different for not dealing with him (regardless of whether it's killing him or getting him to move on)?
There's nothing that says that the imp has to find the orcs. This could be because the orcs weren't there to be found, it could be that they attacked the red wizard or some caravan passing on the Triboar trail, that the imp got caught up chasing squirrels, or misunderstood the directive. It shouldn't happen all the time, but it could happen. Also, the imp could simply get captured or killed, perhaps by something other than the orcs. I don't recommend doing this a lot depending on the imps stats. Probably the best way to do this as a warning would be to have the imp captured and hooded so it can't see with its hands tied so it can't perform touch spells. This can happen far enough away from the camp that it won't be reliable information to find it. I don't recall the distance that is involved but that could be a factor as well.
Have something stealthier or bigger spot the imp and kill it, "the last thing you see through your imps eyes is a large shadow, then nothing!" especially if it's 20 miles away. They then have to re-summon the imp and get it to travel 20 miles again, or be more cautious with it.
From Within Chaos Comes Order!
First, recognise that the player has chosen to invest in this familiar and not the other Warlock options, so try not to feel the need to punish the player for it. That being said, if the current/repetitive use of the familiar is impacting your own enjoyment of the game then you are well within your rights and powers as DM to do something about it.
So, as to the fey-imp; you are the DM so you roleplay on behalf of the entire universe. That includes this all powerful Archfey Patron. It can appear to the warlock in a dream to express its displeasure, or else it could intervene to change the appearance of the imp to a more pleasing aesthetic (though it keeps its exact same stat block).
Short range invisible scouting is exactly the reason one would choose a Chain Pact familiar, but if you are worried the long range scouting is an issue then introduce this little imp to the very real dangers of traveling alone: might I suggest some nocturnal blindsight creatures who aren't inconvenienced by invisibility. A swarm of bats, wasps or spiders perhaps? Any low-level enemy that wouldn't be any sort of issue for the party, but would love to find a little snack of imp. These could also be servants of the Black Spider sent out for the very purpose of inconveniencing these upstart adventurers. A night-time attack on the lone imp would pose an interesting choice for the warlock; let it fight alone or summon it back to the party. By the same token, an imp away scouting long distance is an imp that can't help the party with anything they are doing, so allowing it to be sacrificed like that might balance up in the end.
If the imp is invisible scouting and does something like open a door, then you don't need to roll a stealth check in order for enemies in that room to jump into action - if they see a door open on its own then invisible spy is pretty much the default assumption in this universe.
Finally, all this scouting and replacing of any lost imps is going to be time-consuming. Ratchet up the pressure by having the Black Spider's network take increasingly disruptive actions against the town and the party. An NPC like Sildar can deliver some stern warnings if the party seems to be sitting around waiting for imp-scout reports.
Thiiiiiiiisssss. I'm part of an alternating campaign schedule (I DM one campaign one week, and play in a different one the next week) and the DM of the one I play for feels the need to plan EVERYTHING to counter our leveling choices. For example, we play a campaign HEAVILY focused on fighting Fiends soooo naturally our bookwormish cleric character spent downtime researching fiends and prepares a lot of banishment type spells (makes perfect sense in context of everything our party's been through) so our most recent major combat encounter, we banished the huge CR 15~ baddie and sent him back to his plane and concentrated long enough so it wouldnt come back (ending the encounter in like a few minutes) and the DM was MAD saying that he was gonna find ways to make the fiends immune to banishment, making all of our party's planning and spell investments useless.
other example, our sorcerer has pulled off some preeeeetty clutch hold-monsters recently and since then, the DM has picked nothing but monsters immune to paralysis.
tl;dr,
I wouldn't try to counter your players' choices, but rather incorporate this style of playing they've made into how you prep for the game . Of course, unless its just THATguy and even the other players are annoyed, then by all means, punish lol
I went on a rant about a year ago about a player who took Magic Initiate specifically for Alarm and Find Familiar. They chose an Owl familiar and used it to remove any chance of ambush or threat from surprise attacks. I was very frustrated, not only for the obvious tactic to take away threats and put certain parts of the game on easy mode, but that the player was a rules-lawyer type as well. In the end, after my rant was rebuked by a lot of posters who thought I was just trying punish my player for optimizing their character, I found the answer to be pretty simple. There is a risk/reward that comes with a familiar and it should be used to its fullest.
The player risked the Pact choice on something that is more tactical, squishy, and fidgety than a bunch of new spells or a pretty weapon, all for the reward of some very nuanced rewards. They send the familiar out to scout, that risks the familiar's safety, the party's safety, and the reward is information. The familiar is significantly weaker than any weapon or spell, so they risk damage output or survival, but the familiar can be utilized in combat to great effect with touch spells and other harassment. The trade off is something that the player feels like they'll enjoy, or has more utility, than the other choices that were available. This player also invested in a new party member, and this is where the DM can really have fun instead of punish the choice.
A captured familiar can simply be dismissed, a killed familiar can be resummoned, you rarely ever permanently lose a familiar. Instead, a familiar has a personality, just like any NPC, and the DM should work that in. The Warlock sends the familiar out to scout for days at a time, the familiar starts to complain that the Warlock doesn't like him and keeps sending him away. The familiar is killed often in battles, make the familiar reluctant to do as it was told, however don't make it say no since it is a familiar. It's a permanent fixture to the party, the bad guys will begin to recognize this and it becomes an indicator for where the party is. NPCs talk, the world spreads news, and the party is becoming famous, that imp will become just as much a liability as a reward, simply for existing. All the while, the player can use their familiar as they wish, but will also have to learn how to avoid their familiar becoming their Achilles's heel.
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
The warlock is a Chaotic Good Tiefling, and he left the Archfey Patron backstory up to me. The backstory I invented was that the Seelie Court is counteracting the corrupting influence of the Queen of Air and Darkness, who has been targeting Tieflings in an effort to corrupt them further through their fiendish heritage. As a Tiefling, he is not favored by the Seelie Court, but they are empowering him to weaken the Queen of Air and Darkness hold on Warlocks in Faerun. I was thinking of having his Archfey patron express disapproval by casting some sort of Illusion to change his Imp's physical form in his presence... in this case the choice of an Imp itself is an indicator to the Seelie of the Warlock's corruptibility by his heritage.
He has been getting visions of the Queen of Air and Darkness' throne, and Verenestra will soon appear where the Feywild meets Neverwinter Wood, to give him a personal quest to prove himself by killing the Banshee Agatha. To me, the cold vanity of the Banshee curse is a strong parallel to the description of the Queen of Air and Darkness, who is so vain that she refuses her true form to ever be seen... she simply speaks through a black diamond on an ebony throne.
As far as playing the Imp's travel, unless he is explicitly looking through the Imp's eyes, I was thinking it has a chance to simply die from an encounter with something with blindsight. There's a chance it could telepathically speak to the Warlock about the danger, and a chance it'll just get killed. The Imp can't track very well, and it can't map either. So it can certainly find the Orcs whereabouts, but only to a few square miles if there are no major landmarks, and it can scout how many there are. If the Imp never tires, then it should be able to travel three times further in the same day as the party, but it still can't scout very well at night. And it'll certainly complain, and possibly even wake the Warlock up from his long rest.
I'm not trying to counter his choices, I'm trying to maintain the tension and surprise. For example, I planned on having the party find a Sword + 1, the Talon of Tresendar in an old orc camp while searching the hills for the Orc Raiders. At first glance, they would think that this may be the Orc camp, but the further they venture in, they see bones stripped clean, until they reach the back of the cave to find various bones and the magic sword suspended in air. When they go to grab it, gelatinous cube! Instead, I can already tell he's going to send his Imp in to grab the sword from a mile away, it'll die, and they'll just walk away. No tension, no combat, no magic item reward... I'm upset.
Put something in the Imp's way that it can't get through by itself. There's a heavy door that's closed and locked at the front of the cave (the last orc into the cave pulled it closed and locked it behind him). The imp isn't strong enough to force it open, and doesn't have the ability to pick the lock.
There could also be wards around the sword/cube, or somewhere down the hallway--a magic circle inscribed in the floor that prevents magical beings from crossing. That's a little more uncommon than a locked door, but in a magical world, people are going to have magical protections sometimes :)
In general:
But you don't want to make it useless. So instead, the familiar comes back and reports that it didn't find any camps, but it did find a farmhouse that looked like it had been raided by something, and it could find it's way back to that. And then, when they go to the farmhouse area to search for the orcs, and the warlock sends it out to scout again--remember that the warlock therefore doesn't have the familiar around to help if there's combat. So when the orc party coming back to the farmhouse surprises the party, the warlock would have to spend two actions to bring the familiar back to help with combat.
My general advice is this--you know they have a super-familiar. So you need to plan your adventures as if the party has that super-familiar. It's just like another party-member in that sense--if the party has a Bear Totem barbarian, you as the DM need to plan for that. Plan differently, to make the game challenging, tense, etc. If the party had a party member who could fly himself, you would need to plan for that as well. So when you plan encounters, don't plan them in such a way that an imp sent on ahead could ruin it. Plan for the imp, and you'll be able to plan encounters that work just fine. :)
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)
I didn't make this very clear, but it was the party that fled! This is what I'm afraid of. I'm building encounters and the party just wants to avoid them. They should be using the information to help your encounters, but grow a pair, guys!
As far as making the familiar successful on something like tracking, I was thinking I'd roll just like a single average party member was doing the task. I'd ask the player how he is directing the familiar. An easy roll to see if the familiar does a good job of following directions. Then it's 100 square miles of foothills, with no starting point to track the Orcs, that's a very difficult task, DC 25, and something the familiar can't roll for. It can certainly find various abandoned camps, or destroyed farmhouses, but will never be as able to do a good job of tracking without the players.
Have the Wizard of Thay and his zombies attack an kill some kids or a family from the town with one survivor returning traumatized telling the sob story.
Maybe not for all ignored threats, but for some there should be tangible consequences to the world. If they at all care about the well being of the people of Phandelver they can't just ignore every potential threat to the town.
This but make sure the Wizard leaves a survivor to tell the tale that this is retribution for the cowards that ran. Party is now hated unless they do something about the Wizard!
From Within Chaos Comes Order!
This is a possibility, but the encounter is an optional one. As long as they aren't getting exp for not dealing with them (running away isn't dealing with them) it isn't terrible. Also, I would think that Paladins and Clerics would likely want to destroy the undead as well as Rangers and Druids (an affront to the natural world, plus the undead might be a favored enemy).
If the party isn't having encounters (read combat or RP) with the sources of exp, don't award it. If they attempt to take wave echo cave (and possibly Cragmaw Castle, particularly if there are normal goblinoids at the castle than normal and/or Targor's band shows up to pin them inside the castle while calling out the intruders) at too low a level, they may not be able to handle it.