Natural Cunning (Ex): Do minotaurs need the Track feat to track foes?

frankthedm

First Post
Natural Cunning (Ex): Although minotaurs are not especially intelligent, they possess innate cunning and logical ability. This gives them immunity to maze spells, prevents them from ever becoming lost, and enables them to track enemies. Further, they are never caught flat-footed.
The 3.5 MM entry for the minotaur list the minotaur as having the track feat, but looking over the Natural Cunning extraordinary ability, it looks like they might not even need the feat for most uses a minotaur would put tracking to, since natural cunning “enables them to track enemies.”

In the MM 3.0 write up, Minotaurs did not posses the track feat, just natural cunning. My current suspicion is that when 3.0 went to 3.5 the extra feats monsters got went to feats that the upgrade team felt ‘made sense’, though in this case they may have overlooked one of natural cunning’s benefits.

On the other had minotaurs are very solid for their CR and even their level adjustment, perhaps requiring the feat for tracking enemies is not unfair.

Plus how does one draw the distinction between track a creature in general and tracking enemies? I could see just about anything being the “enemy" of a minotaur, though limiting it to invaders of the minotaur’s labyrinth /cavern and those it already recognized as enemies also make sense.
 
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IndyPendant

First Post
Since no one else has decided to tackle this, I figured I would give it a try. By RAW, they don't need the Track feat to track enemies. That's clear. Determining what an enemy is, by RAW, would almost certainly use the same rules as determining an 'enemy' for a spell...which...does not...seem...to have a clear RAW definition in the SRD.

Hrm.

Okay, moving on (and ignoring that little inconsistency), I would still rule 'enemy' as having the same definition as for spells, whatever that happens to be.

*cough*

The point! Yes. The point. That I was going to make. --Was that I noticed in reviewing the minotaur that survival is not listed as a class skill for minotaurs, and they get no bonuses to survival whatsoever, either through a wis boost or a skill bonus. They also get a whopping -4 (!!!) to intelligence, which means that they are usually going to get 1 skill point per level, and rarely more than 2.

Keeping all that in mind, I hardly think it's overpowered to allow minotaurs to track enemies. Even if they take a class like ranger/druid (ha!!!)/barbarian, they still have 'wasted' 8 levels where survival was not a class skill, and are unlikely to catch up soon. In short, their survival check is probably going to suck anyways, and RAW is unclear, so why not give it to them?

Heck, just to avoid arguments over what exactly defines an "enemy", I'd probably give them Track anyways; it's hardly unbalancing imo and good flavour. Helps keep the minotaur from being a complete "KROK FIGHT!!!" type of character.
 

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