pact of the chain find familiar = (find familiar + y)
making flock = (find familiar + y) × x
I do not think you get to ignore those interactions, unless you are dm rule changing it, and unless one of the authors has come out and said they dont interact.
I’d agree with Miller. Spell does not say that it summons familiars as find familiar. It says “Each familiar uses the same rules and options for a familiar conjured by the find familiar spell.” If your class feature has given you additional rules and options for FF, FoF checks those options for each creature, and turns up “can be an imp etc.”
I don’t know, I won’t say that it’s a rock solid RAW situation in either direction. I just don’t see a reason to deprive the player of the class feature.
Thanks for the backup, and maybe I'm blind but even if it doesnt work the way I'm thinking it does an hour concentration spell to summon a max of 6 imps doesnt sound all that insane.
Flock of Familiars is not concentration. It simply lasts 1 hour, like Disguise self, for example.
And by RAW, Flock of Familiars lets you summon 3 familiars as if you were casting the Find Familiar spell. So you could technically summon Imps, Quasits etc. If you are a pact of the chain Warlock.
You temporarily summon three familiars – spirits that take animal forms of your choice. Each familiar uses the same rules and options for a familiar conjured by the Find Familiar spell. All the familiars conjured by this spell must be the same type of creature (celestials, fey, or fiends; your choice).
It's very powerful for Pact of the Chain warlocks. But you have to consider they essentially built their characters for this, and they have limited spell slots. It's something to be used once per adventure, maybe twice, and performs a very useful scouting function, maybe some "Help" actions in combat, and that is about it. You can only make one of them attack per round, and they have 10HP, so if they get caught by pretty much ANYTHING they are dead.
I think with a reasonable DM and player this spell works fine. Abusers will break it, but I think that is more of a player problem than a problem with the spell itself. Players who abuse mechanics will find ways to do it.
I like this spell and I think it fits the theme of the Chain warlock or Conjuration Wizard more than anything in the game.
Actually, it is Concentration. Of course it is. You're not performing the Find Familiar ritual 3 times, you're poofing 3 familiars (or 2 if you have them). It absolutely IS Concentration
The BBEG might be a warlock, but the spell still only lasts an hour, so they need to stay awake to keep it up to distract people. Using Dream spells as you say, would work if the party fails it's Wisdom saves.
If you don't play monsters as unique monsters and they all do the most tactical/strategic thing, you're basically just wargaming at that point. An Orc is not going to prioritize a distracting 12 inch tall Owl over an 8 foot high Goliath that is literally swinging down on them with a great axe. And to do that attack on an Owl, it needs to ready an action because you can't opportunity attack an owl for leaving your range, so the Owl swoops down every turn 10 foot, does help and then flies up 10 foot again. Or it does it from behind where the Orc itself needs to invoke an opportunity attack from the Goliath to chase it. Then when the orc readies it's action the party will see it did "nothing" on it's turn and they won't run the Owl in, so the readied action is wasted anyways. Now perhaps an Orc archer might prioritize the owl with an arrow, but that is an attack it can't use on the party and the owl may just be flying behind cover every round. Like getting behind the party, if it's behind a party member it is basically behind total cover. Seeing an archer not attack again is a sign to leave the owl in safety and that lack of attack maybe more helpful then a single help action.
So... they stay awake. And that's why he used his Flock of Familiars to scout on the party until he knew they were sleeping - then, using Dream to disrupt it (targeting the especially vulnerable). The Warlock can sleep when the party least expects it. I'm really not sure what your contention is maybe?
"Basically you're just wargaming" - Complete assumption. My point was - if you're applying some kind of "wisdom" check to just doing something strategic, then you're not understanding my point. If you make every decision of the baddies based on a die roll or "this guy isn't smart enough to attack!", then you're pushing wargaming even more than me - because you're reducing even base decisions into a dice roll or stat. An Orc has a wisdom of 11 - higher than most of your PCs that dump wisdom. If you want to argue with me about "an Orc wouldn't be strategic when fighting for its life and realize that the spider using the help action is allowing the rogue to get sneak attack damage every single round because he's so dumb"... I don't know what to tell ya.
Your scenarios are ridiculous - you're dictating "An Orc wouldn't..." and "an Orc would"... are you speaking from a PC perspective or a DM perspective? Because, if you're a PC with that expectation you're likely to be disappointed in many campaigns with various DMs. If you're a DM, go for it - I just wouldn't want to play in a world where sentient creatures have such "base instincts" and zero strategic play.
And to top it off... you're even metagaming enemy "Ready" actions so you can avoid more issues with your Familiar getting into trouble. Imagine if every time a PC "readied" an action to attack and your DM was like "Uh... the Orc doesn't come through the door because he notices your PC didn't attack last round and thinks you might be readying an action to attack him when he comes in"...
In conclusion - I kill Familiars in my game. And I don't do it all the time, either. I do it based on how dangerous the familiar is and how insightful the target may be, and the opportunity as it presents itself. I don't use stats, I don't use blanket statements like "All Xs would not notice an Owl in its face", I don't metagame my player decisions - I play each character as an individual with its own awareness.
Here's how I decide whether an idea is silly in my games - I apply a completely ridiculous counter-scenario:
Would it make sense that an Orc army just hired a bunch of Booyagh Goblin spellcasters to summon 100s of Familiars to help them get advantage in their attacks, and would the PCs care that every Orc is getting advantage? Or would they Fireball and Magic Missile and Smack the crap out of every familiar they get a chance to, to even the odds?
I agree with a lot of what you are saying, however stand by my opinion that familiars are not always so easily killed, making it a more difficult tactical decision than the clearly obvious one you seem to paint it as.
And if the monsters can fight intelligently, the PCs certainly can. That means they *can* and *should* use their familiars more tactically, taking precautions, etc rather than simply treating them as equipment.
As for your counter scenario, are there that many Goblin spellcasters simply available? Regardless if the party is really going head to head and toe to toe with any actual vaguely competent army, the party would or should lose, short of some major artifact. If that army is using those '100's of familiars' wisely, they would not be sending them all at once, but in small groups. Ideally the familiars draw a few fireballs and then much more effective reserves can be committed against a party that wasted firepower on familiars.
The rules say they are 'that easy' to kill. They don't have any bonuses for being tiny, they don't automatically have any concealment, if they're using the help action, they're not using Dodge or Disengage, their flyby (if owls) is irrelevant because any hit will kill; just because they don't trigger AoO's doesn't mean they're immune to attacks or damage. They're exceptionally vulnerable to area of effect abilities, for example.
Flock is a great spell. Just, not for combat. Even if all 3+ of your familiars are using the Help action, that's for one ability check, or attack per familiar per round. Its usefulness goes exponentially down after 5th level for any allied creature which isn't a grappler or which has extra attack.
The value in combat should be weighed against how much benefit that single instance if Help can be, or how much damage the familiar could soak with their 1 hit they can receive before poofing into the void. Most beasts have basic threat assessment ability and would ignore the familiar until the familiar did something directly to become a threat, but literally any humanoid could likely be assumed to have enough wherewithal to strike a familiar early if not first, but that's DM dependent.
5E has no rules for distance making *anything* harder to see, let alone for distance and size combining. I can give you a formula for approximating a creature's exposed surface area by size category and distance (it involves trig, as you might imagine), but I doubt it would be very useful. Precedent is that size category doesn't matter: when you make a ranged attack, you suffer disadvantage or not, and are out of range or not, based on the range of the weapon. Both a tiny and a gargantuan creature are exactly as hard to hit as each other, regardless of range. Seeing something is mechanically so similar to shooting photons from your eyes and hitting the target as makes no difference. This is why spyglasses are generally so useless in 5E.
Cover does care about relative size, of course. You can fit a rat in your pocket and give it total cover.
5E has no rules for distance making *anything* harder to see, let alone for distance and size combining. I can give you a formula for approximating a creature's exposed surface area by size category and distance (it involves trig, as you might imagine), but I doubt it would be very useful. Precedent is that size category doesn't matter: when you make a ranged attack, you suffer disadvantage or not, and are out of range or not, based on the range of the weapon. Both a tiny and a gargantuan creature are exactly as hard to hit as each other, regardless of range. Seeing something is mechanically so similar to shooting photons from your eyes and hitting the target as makes no difference. This is why spyglasses are generally so useless in 5E.
Cover does care about relative size, of course. You can fit a rat in your pocket and give it total cover.
5e has no set rules for setting the DC for seeing any given thing. It is left to the DM to determine DC's, with guidelines given in terms of the difficulty represented by DC's in increments of 5.
Size is usually reflected in AC's and if you cannot see the opponent, you will have more trouble hitting them, if you even know to shoot in their direction at all.
Size is never reflected in AC. A gargantuan creature and a tiny creature are both AC 10 + Dex mod while naked, and this is then modified up by natural armor as the designers see fit. Accordingly, a Rune Knight's AC doesn't change when they change size, and likewise Enlarge/Reduce has no impact on AC, and likewise you can combine the two for no effect. A Tiny Rune Knight Halfling and a Gargantuan Rune Knight Halfling are the same AC.
Size is never reflected in AC. A gargantuan creature and a tiny creature are both AC 10 + Dex mod while naked, and this is then modified up by natural armor as the designers see fit.
This is true, but it's also true that smaller creatures tend to have proportionally higher DEX scores than larger creatures (and usually lower STR and CON.)
Accordingly, a Rune Knight's AC doesn't change when they change size, and likewise Enlarge/Reduce has no impact on AC, and likewise you can combine the two for no effect. A Tiny Rune Knight Halfling and a Gargantuan Rune Knight Halfling are the same AC.
This is more of a design tradeoff than a deliberate feature. One of the design goals for 5e was to avoid rules that slow the game down significantly, and that generally rules out anything that would affect your ability scores and force you to recalculate a bunch of other numbers. That's also why conditions like unconscious and paralyzed use advantage/disadvantage instead of negating your DEX modifier to AC. The latter would be more accurate, but would also force you to track multiple AC values and know which one applies at any given moment.
If you play it safe with your familiar or your DM is lax about killing it, Find Familiar is a spell that you can theoretically cast once and never even need in your spell list again to get a great deal of use out of it. It’s likely that you’ll recast it every once in a while to change its shape or resummon it after a kill, but with its long casting time and ritual casting ability, there’s no reason to not cast this thing as a ritual in the downtime you’ll inevitably doing this in. Meaning that you’re likely to never burn a spell slot on this for an entire campaign. The component cost is a fair tradeoff for that.
Flock of Familiars, on the other hand, costs a second level spell slot, and it costs a second level spell slot every time you use it. Combat use requires an anticipation of said combat that Find Familiar simply doesn’t— the former requires the full one-minute cast almost every time, whereas with the latter you just use an action to summon your familiar and they can start helping in that same round. With that said, Flock of Familiars is great for dungeons and other hostile environments where you’re likely to run into multiple combats within that one-hour span, and you can combine it with Shocking Grasp or leveled touch spells to great effect in stealth scenarios.
(Sidenote, but I agree with Brewksy on combat priority. An orc isn’t going to focus on the giant baring down on them with an axe, because the entire point of the Help action is that your owl familiar is distracting them and taking up their attention to make that axe swing more likely to land. If the orc is thinking logically, they will recognize that the owl in its face is a significant nuisance that takes very little effort to kill and is close enough to grab out of the air, making it a high-priority target. If the orc is thinking emotionally, they won’t care about any of that and just want to swat down the obnoxious thing that won’t stop flapping at it. They’re not going to have their focus forcibly directed onto the owl and just not kill it.)
For the scouting uses, it’s less comparable to Find Familiar and more comparable to Arcane Eye. You get to cast this with a lower spell slot, can somewhat bypass your familiars’ limited movement speed by switching perspectives with multiple different “eyes,” don’t need concentration, have access to “eyes” with wider sight ranges, and in the rare instances where it’s relevant the lack of a material component makes it easier to cast it with Sleight of Hand or without a component pouch. In exchange, your “eyes” are visible, easily scoped out by Detect Evil and Good or Divine Sense, can be killed on a whim by a careless bystander (combat priority need not apply), are constrained to a comparatively small area, require you to give up your own sight and hearing to use them for scouting, and require more planning in the rare instances where time crunch matters. Both spells have fair tradeoffs, I feel.
The rules say they are 'that easy' to kill. They don't have any bonuses for being tiny, they don't automatically have any concealment, if they're using the help action, they're not using Dodge or Disengage, their flyby (if owls) is irrelevant because any hit will kill; just because they don't trigger AoO's doesn't mean they're immune to attacks or damage. They're exceptionally vulnerable to area of effect abilities, for example.
Flock is a great spell. Just, not for combat. Even if all 3+ of your familiars are using the Help action, that's for one ability check, or attack per familiar per round. Its usefulness goes exponentially down after 5th level for any allied creature which isn't a grappler or which has extra attack.
The value in combat should be weighed against how much benefit that single instance if Help can be, or how much damage the familiar could soak with their 1 hit they can receive before poofing into the void. Most beasts have basic threat assessment ability and would ignore the familiar until the familiar did something directly to become a threat, but literally any humanoid could likely be assumed to have enough wherewithal to strike a familiar early if not first, but that's DM dependent.
Cool spell, hardly gamebreaking
So a tiny creature needs the same amount of cover as a dragon does to hide it, then?
It is as easily seen at a distance?
You do make a good point about attacks of opportunity and are completely correct on AE's
I feel as though you're being deliberately obtuse regarding the creature size.
They don't require the same number of 5ft squares to be concealed, but they do require the same % of their body to be covered. But that point is entirely irrelevant. (Im not sure why exactly you mention it, except to be combative, as indicated by your syntax)
A DM decides how difficult a creature is to spot (perception, passive perception, possibly investigation, if a roll is needed at all) this is irrespective of creature size.
I'm not sure why you even mention creature AC, nothing in the familiar list has above a 16 off the top of my head, meaning just about every creature in the game has ~40% chance of hitting a familiar of they want to, if not better. Intelligent enemies might go for the familiar, but they might not too, which gets into DM territory, and I'm very much not interested in debating what a dm will or won't do. AC also has zero relevance to creature size in 5e.
The rules say they are 'that easy' to kill. They don't have any bonuses for being tiny, they don't automatically have any concealment, if they're using the help action, they're not using Dodge or Disengage, their flyby (if owls) is irrelevant because any hit will kill; just because they don't trigger AoO's doesn't mean they're immune to attacks or damage. They're exceptionally vulnerable to area of effect abilities, for example.
Flock is a great spell. Just, not for combat. Even if all 3+ of your familiars are using the Help action, that's for one ability check, or attack per familiar per round. Its usefulness goes exponentially down after 5th level for any allied creature which isn't a grappler or which has extra attack.
The value in combat should be weighed against how much benefit that single instance if Help can be, or how much damage the familiar could soak with their 1 hit they can receive before poofing into the void. Most beasts have basic threat assessment ability and would ignore the familiar until the familiar did something directly to become a threat, but literally any humanoid could likely be assumed to have enough wherewithal to strike a familiar early if not first, but that's DM dependent.
Cool spell, hardly gamebreaking
So a tiny creature needs the same amount of cover as a dragon does to hide it, then?
It is as easily seen at a distance?
You do make a good point about attacks of opportunity and are completely correct on AE's
I feel as though you're being deliberately obtuse regarding the creature size.
They don't require the same number of 5ft squares to be concealed, but they do require the same % of their body to be covered. But that point is entirely irrelevant. (Im not sure why exactly you mention it, except to be combative, as indicated by your syntax)
A DM decides how difficult a creature is to spot (perception, passive perception, possibly investigation, if a roll is needed at all) this is irrespective of creature size.
I'm not sure why you even mention creature AC, nothing in the familiar list has above a 16 off the top of my head, meaning just about every creature in the game has ~40% chance of hitting a familiar of they want to, if not better. Intelligent enemies might go for the familiar, but they might not too, which gets into DM territory, and I'm very much not interested in debating what a dm will or won't do. AC also has zero relevance to creature size in 5e.
Yes the DM decides all. So? That the DM makes decisions is in and of itself irrespective of creature size does not equate to the DM not taking creature size into account when making those decisions. Yes, a DM can ignore it. A DM can also decide the enemy gives the familiar a nice bouquet of flowers and asks them on a date. The DM can act as arbitrarily as they think will entertain players. However, if the campaign is a relatively serious one, the DM is likely to take actual logic into account in making their decisions.
The amount of matter needed to hide a tiny creature is much smaller than that to hide any larger creature. The tiny creature needs less cover to gain cover.
If a familiar is hiding behind a much larger creature's back, it could be hard to impossible for the enemy creature to harm it. Minimum it would be out of sight and thus the enemy creature could suffer disadvantage. Now could the DM decide that impossible? Sure. Could they decide that the arbitrary 5' forcefields imposed by the 'You can't end your turn in the same square' rule make it impossible? Sure. But they could also rule that the tiny creature is small and agile enough to stay behind the enemy creature. And they can also decide that because, as you say, the DM decides all.
And as for spotting, the DM sets the DC's by their decision. Again, they can decide that a tiny creature is as easily spotted as a huge creature, but they can also decided otherwise.
I do not feel I am being obtuse here and I apologize if my arguments are coming across as a little hostile. They are not intended as such.
I hope I have successfully restated my position.
The only creatures in the game that can hide behind larger critters say so in the description; ie halflings. Anything else, no matter how common sense, is homebrew (which is totally fine, and I encourage)
We agree about the number of 5ft squares, and I believe about the idea that the % of a creature covered is the key.
The reason I didn't want to bring discussion about DM motivation into play is exactly as you, and I, stated. That's why I didn't want to discuss it.
I still think this spell is hardly game breaking. It's a spell slot, and concentration, for basically Arcane Eye. It's better for recon than for combat
It gets better (much) if you're allowed, as a Chain Warlock, to summon more imps/quassits/pseudodragons with it, which, because the opportunity cost is so high, I believe I personally would allow, but the reading could go either way. Yes, because chain modifies how YOUR Find Familiar spell works (you're still casting it, it's still a spell just with extra options) and because specific beats general; but also I can see No because FoF says you use normal stuff from the Find Familiar spell
…Okay, can someone take a screenshot or a photo or something of where it says that Flock of Familiars requires concentration? I keep seeing people insist that it does when none of the sources I use to look it up indicate anything about concentration.
…Okay, can someone take a screenshot or a photo or something of where it says that Flock of Familiars requires concentration? I keep seeing people insist that it does when none of the sources I use to look it up indicate anything about concentration.
It has a C next to it. That means it requires concentration.
…Okay, can someone take a screenshot or a photo or something of where it says that Flock of Familiars requires concentration? I keep seeing people insist that it does when none of the sources I use to look it up indicate anything about concentration.
None of the sources I use (DDB spell listing, compendium, and character sheet) don't indicate concentration.
To everyone that responded, no, I don’t see the little “C” symbol that indicates concentration. I don’t own the sourcebooks, so maybe the websites I use are just wrong, but it’s strange that multiple different sites would make that mistake. That could be why others were confused earlier in the topic as well.
In any case, I’d love a photo of the original book’s section on Flock of Familiars, if anyone is willing to link it.
To everyone that responded, no, I don’t see the little “C” symbol that indicates concentration. I don’t own the sourcebooks, so maybe the websites I use are just wrong, but it’s strange that multiple different sites would make that mistake. That could be why others were confused earlier in the topic as well.
In any case, I’d love a photo of the original book’s section on Flock of Familiars, if anyone is willing to link it.
Most likely, they post the UA material, or are not licensed to use info. I suggest, since you're here, you use this site, or use the roll20 compendium. I hate roll20, but their info is good, valid, and up to date
I don't think flock was ever UA. It looks like d&d ******* has the spell with incorrect information first and the few other free sites copied from that.
I'm looking at is as
pact of the chain find familiar = (find familiar + y)
making flock = (find familiar + y) × x
I do not think you get to ignore those interactions, unless you are dm rule changing it, and unless one of the authors has come out and said they dont interact.
I’d agree with Miller. Spell does not say that it summons familiars as find familiar. It says “Each familiar uses the same rules and options for a familiar conjured by the find familiar spell.” If your class feature has given you additional rules and options for FF, FoF checks those options for each creature, and turns up “can be an imp etc.”
I don’t know, I won’t say that it’s a rock solid RAW situation in either direction. I just don’t see a reason to deprive the player of the class feature.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Thanks for the backup, and maybe I'm blind but even if it doesnt work the way I'm thinking it does an hour concentration spell to summon a max of 6 imps doesnt sound all that insane.
Pact of the chain interacts with the find familiar spell. This is a different spell. Ergo, pact of the chain does not interact with this spell.
William Brackwater: Human Fighter - The Windward Isles
Actually, it is Concentration. Of course it is. You're not performing the Find Familiar ritual 3 times, you're poofing 3 familiars (or 2 if you have them). It absolutely IS Concentration
The rules say they are 'that easy' to kill. They don't have any bonuses for being tiny, they don't automatically have any concealment, if they're using the help action, they're not using Dodge or Disengage, their flyby (if owls) is irrelevant because any hit will kill; just because they don't trigger AoO's doesn't mean they're immune to attacks or damage. They're exceptionally vulnerable to area of effect abilities, for example.
Flock is a great spell. Just, not for combat. Even if all 3+ of your familiars are using the Help action, that's for one ability check, or attack per familiar per round. Its usefulness goes exponentially down after 5th level for any allied creature which isn't a grappler or which has extra attack.
The value in combat should be weighed against how much benefit that single instance if Help can be, or how much damage the familiar could soak with their 1 hit they can receive before poofing into the void. Most beasts have basic threat assessment ability and would ignore the familiar until the familiar did something directly to become a threat, but literally any humanoid could likely be assumed to have enough wherewithal to strike a familiar early if not first, but that's DM dependent.
Cool spell, hardly gamebreaking
5E has no rules for distance making *anything* harder to see, let alone for distance and size combining. I can give you a formula for approximating a creature's exposed surface area by size category and distance (it involves trig, as you might imagine), but I doubt it would be very useful. Precedent is that size category doesn't matter: when you make a ranged attack, you suffer disadvantage or not, and are out of range or not, based on the range of the weapon. Both a tiny and a gargantuan creature are exactly as hard to hit as each other, regardless of range. Seeing something is mechanically so similar to shooting photons from your eyes and hitting the target as makes no difference. This is why spyglasses are generally so useless in 5E.
Cover does care about relative size, of course. You can fit a rat in your pocket and give it total cover.
Size is never reflected in AC. A gargantuan creature and a tiny creature are both AC 10 + Dex mod while naked, and this is then modified up by natural armor as the designers see fit. Accordingly, a Rune Knight's AC doesn't change when they change size, and likewise Enlarge/Reduce has no impact on AC, and likewise you can combine the two for no effect. A Tiny Rune Knight Halfling and a Gargantuan Rune Knight Halfling are the same AC.
This is true, but it's also true that smaller creatures tend to have proportionally higher DEX scores than larger creatures (and usually lower STR and CON.)
This is more of a design tradeoff than a deliberate feature. One of the design goals for 5e was to avoid rules that slow the game down significantly, and that generally rules out anything that would affect your ability scores and force you to recalculate a bunch of other numbers. That's also why conditions like unconscious and paralyzed use advantage/disadvantage instead of negating your DEX modifier to AC. The latter would be more accurate, but would also force you to track multiple AC values and know which one applies at any given moment.
Let’s get this back on track.
If you play it safe with your familiar or your DM is lax about killing it, Find Familiar is a spell that you can theoretically cast once and never even need in your spell list again to get a great deal of use out of it. It’s likely that you’ll recast it every once in a while to change its shape or resummon it after a kill, but with its long casting time and ritual casting ability, there’s no reason to not cast this thing as a ritual in the downtime you’ll inevitably doing this in. Meaning that you’re likely to never burn a spell slot on this for an entire campaign. The component cost is a fair tradeoff for that.
Flock of Familiars, on the other hand, costs a second level spell slot, and it costs a second level spell slot every time you use it. Combat use requires an anticipation of said combat that Find Familiar simply doesn’t— the former requires the full one-minute cast almost every time, whereas with the latter you just use an action to summon your familiar and they can start helping in that same round. With that said, Flock of Familiars is great for dungeons and other hostile environments where you’re likely to run into multiple combats within that one-hour span, and you can combine it with Shocking Grasp or leveled touch spells to great effect in stealth scenarios.
(Sidenote, but I agree with Brewksy on combat priority. An orc isn’t going to focus on the giant baring down on them with an axe, because the entire point of the Help action is that your owl familiar is distracting them and taking up their attention to make that axe swing more likely to land. If the orc is thinking logically, they will recognize that the owl in its face is a significant nuisance that takes very little effort to kill and is close enough to grab out of the air, making it a high-priority target. If the orc is thinking emotionally, they won’t care about any of that and just want to swat down the obnoxious thing that won’t stop flapping at it. They’re not going to have their focus forcibly directed onto the owl and just not kill it.)
For the scouting uses, it’s less comparable to Find Familiar and more comparable to Arcane Eye. You get to cast this with a lower spell slot, can somewhat bypass your familiars’ limited movement speed by switching perspectives with multiple different “eyes,” don’t need concentration, have access to “eyes” with wider sight ranges, and in the rare instances where it’s relevant the lack of a material component makes it easier to cast it with Sleight of Hand or without a component pouch. In exchange, your “eyes” are visible, easily scoped out by Detect Evil and Good or Divine Sense, can be killed on a whim by a careless bystander (combat priority need not apply), are constrained to a comparatively small area, require you to give up your own sight and hearing to use them for scouting, and require more planning in the rare instances where time crunch matters. Both spells have fair tradeoffs, I feel.
I feel as though you're being deliberately obtuse regarding the creature size.
They don't require the same number of 5ft squares to be concealed, but they do require the same % of their body to be covered. But that point is entirely irrelevant. (Im not sure why exactly you mention it, except to be combative, as indicated by your syntax)
A DM decides how difficult a creature is to spot (perception, passive perception, possibly investigation, if a roll is needed at all) this is irrespective of creature size.
I'm not sure why you even mention creature AC, nothing in the familiar list has above a 16 off the top of my head, meaning just about every creature in the game has ~40% chance of hitting a familiar of they want to, if not better. Intelligent enemies might go for the familiar, but they might not too, which gets into DM territory, and I'm very much not interested in debating what a dm will or won't do. AC also has zero relevance to creature size in 5e.
The only creatures in the game that can hide behind larger critters say so in the description; ie halflings. Anything else, no matter how common sense, is homebrew (which is totally fine, and I encourage)
We agree about the number of 5ft squares, and I believe about the idea that the % of a creature covered is the key.
The reason I didn't want to bring discussion about DM motivation into play is exactly as you, and I, stated. That's why I didn't want to discuss it.
I still think this spell is hardly game breaking. It's a spell slot, and concentration, for basically Arcane Eye. It's better for recon than for combat
It gets better (much) if you're allowed, as a Chain Warlock, to summon more imps/quassits/pseudodragons with it, which, because the opportunity cost is so high, I believe I personally would allow, but the reading could go either way. Yes, because chain modifies how YOUR Find Familiar spell works (you're still casting it, it's still a spell just with extra options) and because specific beats general; but also I can see No because FoF says you use normal stuff from the Find Familiar spell
I apologize for being rude too.
…Okay, can someone take a screenshot or a photo or something of where it says that Flock of Familiars requires concentration? I keep seeing people insist that it does when none of the sources I use to look it up indicate anything about concentration.
You don't see the little "C" in a black diamond next to the name, and also the 1 hour duration?
It spells it out in actual words in its sourcebook (Lost Labratory of Kwalish):
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
It has a C next to it. That means it requires concentration.
None of the sources I use (DDB spell listing, compendium, and character sheet) don't indicate concentration.
To everyone that responded, no, I don’t see the little “C” symbol that indicates concentration. I don’t own the sourcebooks, so maybe the websites I use are just wrong, but it’s strange that multiple different sites would make that mistake. That could be why others were confused earlier in the topic as well.
In any case, I’d love a photo of the original book’s section on Flock of Familiars, if anyone is willing to link it.
Most likely, they post the UA material, or are not licensed to use info. I suggest, since you're here, you use this site, or use the roll20 compendium. I hate roll20, but their info is good, valid, and up to date
I don't think flock was ever UA. It looks like d&d ******* has the spell with incorrect information first and the few other free sites copied from that.
The usual story then! God that site is useless/harmful.
I quoted the original source several posts up, that’s all you need, if you don’t trust the tool tips.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.