Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 796424" data-attributes="member: 8461">I don't recall the rules for Awakened animals right off, but the general formula for calculating the total ECL is to add the creatures hit dice + plus its level adjustment.Now, just to be clear, level adjustment is the effective levels added on for inherent abilities (usually for SR, Sp, Su, and Ex abilities). Wolves only have two special abilities. One of them is just that they get a +4 racial bonus to Wilderness Lore checks (Survival checks in 3.5E) when tracking by scent. That's not worth a level adjustment. Their other ability though is that when they make a successful bite attack, they can make a trip attack without having to make another touch attack, and they are not subject to an attack of opportunity. Furthermore, if the trip attempt fails, the opponent cannot react to try to trip the wolf.Now, considering that a wolf's only attack is a bite attack, this means that the Awakened wolf PC is going to get to make free trip attempts with no chance of repercussion every time he makes a successful hit. That can be a fairly substantial combat ability, so IMO it'd be worth a +1 level adjustment (Savage Species may disagree here, I can't quite rightly recall).So, 5 hit dice plus 1 level adjustment, 5 + 1 = 6. The Awakened wolf would have an ECL of +6, so it would be treated as a 7th level character after it took its first character level. Be sure to note that the normal wolf entry has only 2 hit dice, and being Awakened adds only 2 more hit dice, so unless that wolf was advanced to begin with, it should only have 4 hit dice now, which would reduce its total ECL to +5.</blockquote>

Verification