How do you create a familiar?

[Ryan_Singer]

You can use skills for Declarations also - Alertness or Lore would fit the familiar depending on whether you're sending it on a scouting mission or using it to help with spellcasting.  Depending on what the familiar is, you might allow other skills as well. 

This is a beautiful mechanic for familiars.

[devonapple]

There are some obvious mechanics:

1. Joe the Wizard sends his Wolf familiar to distract a Ghoul during their swordfight [spend 1 FP to tag Wolf Familiar aspect for +2 to the Weapons check that round].

2. Joe the Wizard is imprisoned, but sends his Raven familiar to deliver a message to his friends [spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar aspect for a Declaration].

So, how do you envision the gameplay mechanics working in these hypoteticals:
1. Joe the Wizard wants to send his Raven familiar across town to secretly spy on some crooks at a shipping company
(my thought: spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar aspect in a much larger Divination Ritual)

2. Joe is in the middle of searching a warehouse and wants to post his familiar over the front door to act as a warning system
(my thought: spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar on any Alertness checks to see if trouble is coming)

[UmbraLux]

So, how do you envision the gameplay mechanics working in these hypoteticals:
1. Joe the Wizard wants to send his Raven familiar across town to secretly spy on some crooks at a shipping company
(my thought: spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar aspect in a much larger Divination Ritual)

That's one possibility, another would be rolling Investigation to declare 'the Raven is watching'.  Which one works may well depend on how important the scene is.

2. Joe is in the middle of searching a warehouse and wants to post his familiar over the front door to act as a warning system
(my thought: spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar on any Alertness checks to see if trouble is coming)

Could also be an Alertness roll to declare 'the Raven will give warning'.

Kind of interesting when analyzing the meta-game differences between the methods.  (No familiar in our game so we haven't tried this.)

[mostlyawake]

Also, consider if you want it as an NPC, or how central this familiar will be.  We have a shaman in our group, and I drew up his familiar as an NPC just to feed hooks and info to the group, because I wanted some of the plot to be more obvious.

We have a lot of characters in our group, so I didn't want another thing I had to track in combat as the GM. So it just doesn't enter combat, really.  The spirit possesses any nearby dog when it shows up, so it only costs a fate point for the player to have the spirit show up if he needs it in a hurry, somewhere that a dog is unlikely to be.  (Otherwise, it's a simple ritual to summon the spirit if time is not an issue).

However, our current story arc hinges on an outsider that has been bound away eons ago by native american magic users.  Turns out, in a different time line, native american culture won out: they were more numerous and developed when the Europeans arrived, they went to war, won, conquered the world in time, and went forward past our modern day in a society based on open use of magic, led by shamans.  However, the tribes never reached true peace, and one of them eventually called in an outsider that moves through time so that his tribe could eliminate other tribes before they ever started...and it all went to pot, some shamans went into the past to imprison the thing, ending up altering the time-line so drastically that our time-line happened instead.

Anyways, so the familiar spirit happens to know all of this because he was brought back from the alternate future when the shamans went to our own past... see this gets confusing, stupid time travel... and I use him frequently as a way into plot hooks.  He likes to say "WE HAVE TO BE AT THE CORNER OF 5TH and MAIN TODAY AT 3:47PM AND I CAN'T TELL YOU WHY OR YOUR MIND WILL BREAK AND YOUR MAGIC WILL DARKEN!!" or the like.

[devonapple]

That's one possibility, another would be rolling Investigation to declare 'the Raven is watching'.
Could also be an Alertness roll to declare 'the Raven will give warning'.

True, one can use Skill rolls to make Declarations, but what are those Declarations going to mechanically provide the player in the system?

I should probably expand the example.

1. Joe the Wizard wants to send his Raven familiar across town to secretly spy on some crooks at a shipping company. To do this normally the GM says it would be an Assessment action that requires:

Base Investigation roll difficulty: 6
Base time to complete: 1 hour - half an hour to get to the scene, plus half an hour on the premises

But Joe the Wizard wants this in 15 minutes (the quickest he can justify a raven getting across town), and doesn't want to actually go himself, so that ups the Difficulty by 2 (for the two steps down the Time Chart from "an hour" to "15 minutes").

(my thought: spend 1 FP to tag Raven Familiar aspect in a much larger Divination Ritual based on the "Solve Improbable or Impossible Problems" aspect of Investigation, aiming for an Assessment of difficulty 8 or so)

How would the Raven fit into just doing this as a skill check?

[UmbraLux]

How would the Raven fit into just doing this as a skill check?

Looking back at it, my original response might be better categorized as a Maneuver.  As a skill use Declaration it probably fits better into something similar to Scholarship's 'Declaring Minor Details'.  Something like sending your raven to fly around a building and declaring "a city bus is on the way down the road" or "there's a lot of trash in the alley". 

Using the raven in a ritual to 'see through its eyes' would probably work better as a maneuver assisting the spellcasting. 

It depends on meta-game intent.  Are you attempting to create some specific scene aspect?  Declaration.  Or are you attempting to discover something the GM will need to tell you?  Maneuver which will assist your casting or spying.

If you want it to be separate from you and capable of independent action I'd go with Nyarlathotep5150's suggestion of paying for it as an IoP.

[Sitrein]

Without reading all the comments, it sounds like you don't want an animal companion or anything so much as something inside yourself in which case I'd say just take Echoes of the Beast. That would fully represent the spirit animal mechanically. As for story, make it an aspect and then just RP it. Only thing to be careful of is the player getting bonuses from Echoes and then fating extra bonuses from the aspect allowing him to get +3. Sure, it's at the cost of the fate and you can compel it against him but I would only worry about him being able to pull out legendary+ rolls due to, say, 3-5 in a skill, +1-3 from echoes/aspect and then rolling. Just saying that it could instantly halt certain things you had planned.

Example being their animal giving alertness and you planning on ambushing the party for story purposes but being unable to get passed the character's legendary+ alertness. You now have to improvise your story. This shouldn't be too much of an issue for a seasoned DM but with this system being as new as it is and not everyone being seasoned DMs, yeah it can really derail a session.

If you do want to avoid the aspect then just take Echoes and rp the rest without the aspect. Simple.

[devonapple]

Without reading all the comments, it sounds like you don't want an animal companion or anything so much as something inside yourself

This may be a time to read all the comments, then. Most of the discussion is about having a separate entity that can go out and do things, and the people who want something inside themselves generally want a way to up their Lore as much as their Alertness, and Lore would be hard to justify upping with Echoes of the Beast. It could be an elegant solution, though, for some aspects of having a familiar.

[arete]

my final ruling for my game was make the familiar an aspect.  I also am allowing a survival stunt to enhance the familiar from costing fate chips to act into becoming a being with stats and capable of independent action.  I will use the rules out of spirit of the century as my basis for creating this familiar.  I wanted to thank everyone for posting to this thread to help me come up with a good solution for my game.

[newtinmpls]

It all depends on what the player means by "familiar"; do they want some way to get more power? Something interesting to interact with? Both? Neither? A PC in my campaign did a ritual to put the sticky (as in lifetime - long power) aspects "understands human speach" and "enhanced intelligence" on a Raven. Not exactly a familiar, but they now have an interesting relationship.

[arete]

This was more along the lines of the familiar listens-to-wind has

[newtinmpls]

Again, I think it's all a matter of what the PC is trying to gain, and "more interesting" I'll help with. "More power" I'll just blow off.

[arete]

In all honesty I am numbers first and fluff second.  I want a good solid system mechanic before I start writing fluff that cannot be backed up by the systems crunch. 

I really love how these boards step up and help with these kinds of tasks. 

[devonapple]

So we have six options:

1) Make the familiar one of your Aspects. Invoke to help with rolls. Compel to complicate your Wizard's life.
2) Use a Stunt as a way to buy something like an NPC Minion or Lieutenant in "Spirit of the Century." May combined with 1.
3) Take Echoes of the Beast or Supernatural Sense to reflect that the familiar is improving your ability to notice something. May be combined with 1 or 4.
4) Take it as an Item of Power and buy whatever powers you want the familiar to give you. GM probably will stat the creature himself. May be combined with 1 and 3.
5) Create a Thaumaturgic Ritual to summon it. Ideas vary wildly on how to do this. Some folks suggest you do enough shifts to "kill" the proposed creature. Others propose pricing it based on its Skills, Stunts and Powers. Either way you have to worry about duration and Counterspells.
6) The GM just makes an NPC of it.