Last time our Warlock friend leveled up, and as he did we called it a night. Today he came over to discuss options for multi-classing, as he feels the Warlock is somewhat limited in spells.
The normal advice was of course to pick Sorcerer or Bard, since Charisma and all that.
But he's hellbent on going with a Wizard.
The reasoning he gave us, was that he would have 2 Familiars.
One from his Pact of the Chain, and then one from summoning it with a Wizard spell.
We tried to explain to him that the book says the following in the spell description:
You can’t have more than one familiar at a time. If you cast this
spell while you already have a familiar, you instead cause it to adopt
a new form.
As many players do when they get told no, he tried to give us reasons why that wasn't right.
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It's a spell from a different class. If he has to use different spell slots and different spell levels when he's using different classes, he should also be able to have different effects instead of being forced to have the same one.
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The book is written like that because it's not taking multi-classing into account in "spell tooltips".
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(This one had me giggle) If he has the spell on 2 classes for his character, can't he at least combine the two to summon a bigger Familiar, like an Owlbear or something like that?
The question
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I'm quite sure he just shouldn't be getting anything extra
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casting the spell on the Wizard side of his character would just be
a less efficient version of his Warlock one
Best Answer
You answered it yourself. NO.
As you said, by RAW, casting Find Familiar will get rid of any previously existing Familiar and that is the end of that. It does not say it has to be from any particular class.
As far as "should I allow them to do it anyways?" I would still suggest no. Battles are only going to slow down with having extra creatures and one of the players is going to have triple the amount of things to do compared to the rest. This is without even considering any possible exploits that could come from this.
Making the familiar stronger also has it's own cons, as a "pet" that is comparable to other PC characters can seriously shift the balance of the game, especially for that character who only needed to be level 4 to play a "second character". If you take this route, it should not be something like an owlbear but another small utility outsider like the ones Warlock gets.
It would be a more compassionate case if not for the fact that Wizard can just pick different spells and maintain their full effectiveness. He's not "losing" anything with this multiclass.
If you still want to give him something, let him change his pact to something else or add some new options to the familiar list that aren't stronger than the unique ones he already gets.