How Find Familiar Works in 5e

Find Familiar is a level 1 Wizard spell that gives you a spirit in the form of a small animal: an owl, cat, raven, bat or any other Challenge Rating 0 Beast. The familiar obeys you, talks to you by telepathy within 100 feet, lends you its senses, and delivers your touch spells. It can't attack, but it can take the Help action, which gives an ally Advantage: a 55% attack becomes 79.75%. It costs 10 GP of incense and an hour, or 1 hour 10 minutes as a Ritual with no slot spent. Below: the spell quoted, which form to pick, and what the familiar is worth in a fight.

The rule

You gain the service of a familiar, a spirit that takes an animal form you choose: Bat, Cat, Frog, Hawk, Lizard, Octopus, Owl, Rat, Raven, Spider, Weasel, or another Beast that has a Challenge Rating of 0. Appearing in an unoccupied space within range, the familiar has the statistics of the chosen form (see "Monsters"), though it is a Celestial, Fey, or Fiend (your choice) instead of a Beast. Your familiar acts independently of you, but it obeys your commands.

Casting Time: 1 hour or Ritual. Components: V, S, M (burning incense worth 10+ GP, which the spell consumes). Duration: Instantaneous, so it lasts until something ends it, and it needs no Concentration.

Four parts of the spell do the work:

Telepathic Connection. While your familiar is within 100 feet of you, you can communicate with it telepathically. Additionally, as a Bonus Action, you can see through the familiar's eyes and hear what it hears until the start of your next turn, gaining the benefits of any special senses it has.

Finally, when you cast a spell with a range of touch, your familiar can deliver the touch. Your familiar must be within 100 feet of you, and it must take a Reaction to deliver the touch when you cast the spell.

Combat. The familiar is an ally to you and your allies. It rolls its own Initiative and acts on its own turn. A familiar can't attack, but it can take other actions as normal.

Disappearance of the Familiar. When the familiar drops to 0 Hit Points, it disappears. It reappears after you cast this spell again.

You can also dismiss it to a pocket dimension as a Magic action and call it back, as a Magic action, to a space within 30 feet. Anything it carries drops where it stood.

Which form

Every listed form is Tiny with 1 or 2 Hit Points, so the choice comes down to speed and senses. From the SRD stat blocks:

The owl is the usual pick, for one line:

Flyby. The owl doesn't provoke an Opportunity Attack when it flies out of an enemy's reach.

It can fly in, act, and fly out again without drawing an Opportunity Attack. The rat has a land version (Agile), at a third of the speed.

Help: the familiar's attack

The familiar can't attack, but the Help action isn't an attack:

Assist an Attack Roll. You momentarily distract an enemy within 5 feet of you, giving Advantage to the next attack roll by one of your allies against that enemy. This benefit expires at the start of your next turn.

A Fighter at +5 against a Goblin Warrior, AC 15:

For a Rogue it does more, because Advantage turns on Sneak Attack. A level 3 Rogue with a Shortbow (+5, 1d6+3, Sneak Attack 2d6) shooting a lone Goblin Warrior with no ally beside it averages 3.75 damage a turn. With the owl's Help it averages 11.79, more than three times as much.

Two catches. Initiative order matters: the benefit ends at the start of the familiar's next turn, so it only helps whoever acts between its turn and its next one. And the familiar must be within 5 feet of the enemy, which is where Flyby earns its place.

Delivering touch spells

A touch spell cast through the familiar reaches 100 feet. A Wizard can cast Shocking Grasp, "a melee spell attack", from the back row through an owl beside the target, using the Wizard's own attack bonus. The familiar spends its Reaction, so it does this once per round.

Keeping it alive

A familiar with 1 Hit Point dies to any hit. A Goblin Warrior's Shortbow (+4) hits an owl 70% of the time, a raven 65% and a hawk 60%. Nothing the spell gives it changes those numbers. What saves it is play: the owl Helps on its turn, flies 60 feet away with Flyby, and is out of reach on the goblin's turn.

When it does die, the price is small. Cast it again as a Ritual: no slot, 10 minutes longer than the hour, and 10 GP of incense. The same spirit comes back.

Other ways to get one

• Druid, level 2, Wild Companion: "you can expend a spell slot or a use of Wild Shape to cast the Find Familiar spell without Material components." It takes a Magic action instead of an hour, the familiar is Fey, and it "disappears when you finish a Long Rest."
• Warlock, Pact of the Chain: you cast Find Familiar "as a Magic action without expending a spell slot", and you can pick a special form: Imp, Pseudodragon, Quasit, Skeleton, Sphinx of Wonder, Sprite, or Venomous Snake. These can attack. A Pseudodragon has AC 14 and 10 Hit Points, so a goblin's arrow no longer kills it in one hit. When you take the Attack action you can "forgo one of your own attacks to allow your familiar to make one attack of its own with its Reaction."
• Investment of the Chain Master (level 5+ Warlock invocation) gives the familiar a 40-foot Fly or Swim Speed, lets you command it to attack as a Bonus Action, uses your spell save DC for its saves, and lets you spend a Reaction to give it Resistance to the damage it takes.

Odds are exact d20 counts. Stat blocks and rules from the SRD 5.2.1: Find Familiar, Help, Druid, Warlock and the Monsters chapter.

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.