I think you have mistaken my point: I never mentioned sending assassins against familiars. I suggested that assassins and other stealthy party members are better scouts than a mere familiar.. That implies that the familiar (and by extension, the player who controls him) isn't just stealing the show at the expense of the rest of the party; they can and do have roles to play and contributions to make.
you can decide that there are families of gnomes available on demand to use familiars en masse
The Players Handbook implies that there are families of forest gnomes within the game world. Whether or not some of those forest gnomes are willing to use their Speak With Animals abilities to enlist the help of animal scouts to help defend a given area depends very much on the game world, and the gnomes' motivation to do so. If animal spies (familiar or otherwise) are a significant threat to the gnomes, their homes, or people they care about, then they'll be more strongly motivated to try to prevent those spies from gaining an advantage against them.
But none of these are creative story telling.
Creative story telling happens independently of the game rules; specific game rules at best provide a better or worse framework to encourage such stories. The relative power of the PCs to the world around them doesn't dictate whether or not an interesting story can be told; it just shapes the nature of the threats and obstacles that they will struggle to overcome as a part of their story.
You can set a story with a super-hero on Earth, or on Krypton: the setting will impact the nature of the story you tell, but it certainly won't determine whether or not the story is interesting, creative, or enjoyable. That's up the the author (the DM) to figure out, by taking her audience (the players) into acount.
This is true. You could be on Forest Gnome World or on Squirrel Girl World or some other world with an equally strange and yet similar hat, however it is far more likely your world is not like that.
I like Squirrel Girl. hmm...maybe homebrew a race.
I struggle as a DM with one of my players who has a Quasit familiar with pact of the chain. Between it's resistance, immunities, magic resistance, and invisibility it's very elusive and durable as well. We're running Dungeon of the Mad Mage and a lot of that is cave passageways etc. with no doors to the thing has pretty free reign.
It's been challenging to have anything to surprise the party with due to this. I don't want to punish him but I also don't want to just hand them a map of each level. I've resorted to having lots of creatures with enhanced senses, blindsight, and tons of webs to detect it's presence.
You can block passages from them with Hallow, and a single casting of Forbiddance turns a large area into a familiar-free zone, and you can even establish permanent zones with multiple castings of the same spell.
While 10GP is not a lot to an adventurerer it is a lot to normal folk. As someone said it represents either a huge volume or a moderate volume of a very rare herb. It is quite likely that a herbalist in a villlage/small town would only have enough for one casting a city might have enough half a dozen or you could say the volume of materials required means that a bag of holding will only hold enough for x castings. This would increase the "cost" of losing there familiar.
Another approach if the party are making excessive use of a familiar isto use it back on them. Have the BBEG know exactly what they are doing because the spider that beat there passive perception is actually his familiar (and if they kill every spider / rat they see in case it is a familiar so do the bad guys).
Sure, the components are cheap, but just don't make them readily available. Depending on your setting incense especially could be considered exotic and rare. You could even bump up the price; 10gp "worth" of something doesn't necessarily mean the merchant is selling it for that much.
The brass container it needs to be burnt in could also very easily be made hard to find. One large enough to fit all those herbs (10gp of herbs is a lot depending on which herbs), wouldn't necessarily be hard to come by. Sure it's not consumable itself, but as the DM, there's nothing stopping you from, after a few uses, saying it was damaged during the spell's casting or something.
Many of the points have already been touched on but a few that I've used before:
If the Familiar is close enough that the owner has telepathic contact and the familiar triggers a light or sound trap the owner suffers the effects (in my world anyway). Imagine you're piloting a rat down a hallway and a blinding flash goes off. The rat is blind...you're blind...The same goes for loud noises.
My Warlock player knew that I didn't want his Familiar to become a nuisance so he uses it for spying somewhat rarely AND he gave it a snarky personality that I get to play out. A recent exchange when his raven flew through a darkened cave entrance and died went something like this (after he resummoned it):
Duncan: So, Poe...what happened?
Poe: Well, I died...thanks by the way.
Duncan: Yeah...sorry about that. HOW did you die exactly?
Poe: It went something like 'Flap...flap...dark! I'm dead!'
Duncan: You didn't see what killed you?
Poe: I DID say the word 'dark', right? You HEARD me use the word 'dark?'
I also had some issues with a familiar destroying the exploration pillar of one of our group's campaigns. That campaign ended up fizzling, so I didn't end up having to deal with it in the moment. But in my current campaign, one of my players mentioned that they wanted to use it (fortunately before he rolled the character so we could figure something out). I offered him three different options.
1) You get a small animal companion per a blend of the Tasha's new beastmaster rules and the rules for training animal companions in Pathfinder 1e. (For those who just want an animal friend who can take some orders. No telepathic scouting BS, but there is definitely some utility).
2) You get the spell per the rules from AD&D 1e/2e. Essentially it is the same, but if your familiar dies you permanently lose one point of CON (can be cured by Remove Curse or higher) as it is bonded to your soul. (You can do everything you want with your familiar, even see through its eyes, but it is a high-risk, high-reward prospect).
3) You can have the spell RAW but it is now a third level spell (which seems appropriate for the utility it provides).
We went with the third option (and the conversation was heated for a bit) but to us this felt like the most fair option.
I agree with most regular Find Familiar really isn't that OP. Our Eldritch Knight uses his owl (and loses his owl) quite often. Send the owl down a dark hallway, if nothing is there, cool we would have been fine either way. If something is there, DM says "all of a sudden you lose contact with your owl" ok so we know something is there, but no idea what, how far, how many, etc. So it finds a tiny bit of info for us but now he can't use it until the next long rest. And if flyby is helping too much there's always a crossbow, spell or something that will peg it out of the sky.
Now Pact of the Chain can be a bit more trouble for the DM (but fun for the player). Genie's are especially epic. At 10th lvl, "hey everyone, hop into the genie bottle, my invisible imp will carry us anywhere we want to go while we take an 8 hour long rest" basically a free 8 hour invisible ride anywhere you want. AND after that, since you can only go into a bottle again after a long rest, well you take 8 hours in the bottle to fly to a castle you need to break into, then, back into the bottle since you had the long rest. Now you're invisible imp is infiltrating the castle with your whole party in the bottle after having a nice long rest. Very easy to abuse that kind of stuff but very fun to play up. Specially if you make the inside of your bottle very lavish, pillows, throw rugs, etc. But Warlocks don't get a lot of perks and Pact of the Chain as far as combat is very weak past lvl 5 or 6 i'd say, so after that its really pure scouting and infiltrating use only.
And maybe your DM is playful and decides half way through flying your group your Imp changes its mind and goes off chasing something it saw or deciding it would rather go into town and pig out on food while you rest and you wake up farther away than when you started lol damn imps
I like Squirrel Girl. hmm...maybe homebrew a race.
I struggle as a DM with one of my players who has a Quasit familiar with pact of the chain. Between it's resistance, immunities, magic resistance, and invisibility it's very elusive and durable as well. We're running Dungeon of the Mad Mage and a lot of that is cave passageways etc. with no doors to the thing has pretty free reign.
It's been challenging to have anything to surprise the party with due to this. I don't want to punish him but I also don't want to just hand them a map of each level. I've resorted to having lots of creatures with enhanced senses, blindsight, and tons of webs to detect it's presence.
A familiar is either a celestial, fey, or fiend.
You can block passages from them with Hallow, and a single casting of Forbiddance turns a large area into a familiar-free zone, and you can even establish permanent zones with multiple castings of the same spell.
More Interesting Lock Picking Rules
While 10GP is not a lot to an adventurerer it is a lot to normal folk. As someone said it represents either a huge volume or a moderate volume of a very rare herb. It is quite likely that a herbalist in a villlage/small town would only have enough for one casting a city might have enough half a dozen or you could say the volume of materials required means that a bag of holding will only hold enough for x castings. This would increase the "cost" of losing there familiar.
Another approach if the party are making excessive use of a familiar isto use it back on them. Have the BBEG know exactly what they are doing because the spider that beat there passive perception is actually his familiar (and if they kill every spider / rat they see in case it is a familiar so do the bad guys).
Sure, the components are cheap, but just don't make them readily available. Depending on your setting incense especially could be considered exotic and rare. You could even bump up the price; 10gp "worth" of something doesn't necessarily mean the merchant is selling it for that much.
The brass container it needs to be burnt in could also very easily be made hard to find. One large enough to fit all those herbs (10gp of herbs is a lot depending on which herbs), wouldn't necessarily be hard to come by. Sure it's not consumable itself, but as the DM, there's nothing stopping you from, after a few uses, saying it was damaged during the spell's casting or something.
Many of the points have already been touched on but a few that I've used before:
If the Familiar is close enough that the owner has telepathic contact and the familiar triggers a light or sound trap the owner suffers the effects (in my world anyway). Imagine you're piloting a rat down a hallway and a blinding flash goes off. The rat is blind...you're blind...The same goes for loud noises.
My Warlock player knew that I didn't want his Familiar to become a nuisance so he uses it for spying somewhat rarely AND he gave it a snarky personality that I get to play out. A recent exchange when his raven flew through a darkened cave entrance and died went something like this (after he resummoned it):
Duncan: So, Poe...what happened?
Poe: Well, I died...thanks by the way.
Duncan: Yeah...sorry about that. HOW did you die exactly?
Poe: It went something like 'Flap...flap...dark! I'm dead!'
Duncan: You didn't see what killed you?
Poe: I DID say the word 'dark', right? You HEARD me use the word 'dark?'
We get the whole table rolling on a good day.
I also had some issues with a familiar destroying the exploration pillar of one of our group's campaigns. That campaign ended up fizzling, so I didn't end up having to deal with it in the moment. But in my current campaign, one of my players mentioned that they wanted to use it (fortunately before he rolled the character so we could figure something out). I offered him three different options.
1) You get a small animal companion per a blend of the Tasha's new beastmaster rules and the rules for training animal companions in Pathfinder 1e. (For those who just want an animal friend who can take some orders. No telepathic scouting BS, but there is definitely some utility).
2) You get the spell per the rules from AD&D 1e/2e. Essentially it is the same, but if your familiar dies you permanently lose one point of CON (can be cured by Remove Curse or higher) as it is bonded to your soul. (You can do everything you want with your familiar, even see through its eyes, but it is a high-risk, high-reward prospect).
3) You can have the spell RAW but it is now a third level spell (which seems appropriate for the utility it provides).
We went with the third option (and the conversation was heated for a bit) but to us this felt like the most fair option.
I agree with most regular Find Familiar really isn't that OP. Our Eldritch Knight uses his owl (and loses his owl) quite often. Send the owl down a dark hallway, if nothing is there, cool we would have been fine either way. If something is there, DM says "all of a sudden you lose contact with your owl" ok so we know something is there, but no idea what, how far, how many, etc. So it finds a tiny bit of info for us but now he can't use it until the next long rest. And if flyby is helping too much there's always a crossbow, spell or something that will peg it out of the sky.
Now Pact of the Chain can be a bit more trouble for the DM (but fun for the player). Genie's are especially epic. At 10th lvl, "hey everyone, hop into the genie bottle, my invisible imp will carry us anywhere we want to go while we take an 8 hour long rest" basically a free 8 hour invisible ride anywhere you want. AND after that, since you can only go into a bottle again after a long rest, well you take 8 hours in the bottle to fly to a castle you need to break into, then, back into the bottle since you had the long rest. Now you're invisible imp is infiltrating the castle with your whole party in the bottle after having a nice long rest. Very easy to abuse that kind of stuff but very fun to play up. Specially if you make the inside of your bottle very lavish, pillows, throw rugs, etc. But Warlocks don't get a lot of perks and Pact of the Chain as far as combat is very weak past lvl 5 or 6 i'd say, so after that its really pure scouting and infiltrating use only.
And maybe your DM is playful and decides half way through flying your group your Imp changes its mind and goes off chasing something it saw or deciding it would rather go into town and pig out on food while you rest and you wake up farther away than when you started lol damn imps