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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 3290944" data-attributes="member: 13966">Man, people are really underestimating some of the advantages.  I'd peg it at +4 LA and +4 CR, or at the very minimum +3 LA and +3 CR.The Armoured Body and the slam attack are negligible and probably balance each other out somewhat, sufficiently to be of little impact to the LA/CR determination.+2 LA for the 15 + HD/CL Spell Resistance.  This alone makes the creature immune to at least 75% of spells used against it.  Ergo, immune to the majority of non-pitiful ranged attacks that would be used against it, and more (virtually immune to most afflictions/hindrances that enemies could try to set against it).  Also, many monsters tend to have several hit dice for their Challenge Rating.  A CR 5 threat with 8 hit dice, for example, would gain SR 23, just barely vulnerable to 10% of spells from a 5th-level wizard.  This gets, of course, drastically worse if the templated creature is a dragon, giant, or the like (and thus probably having abundant HD for its CR).+1 LA for the Damage Reduction and Light Fortification.+1 LA for the +4 natural armor and the ability modifiers (which themselves provide an overall benefit of +4 Strength basically; the template already makes the critter less useful as a caster or manifester, namely with the couple of points of LA it would inflict, so the mental stat penalties are of little importance when this is clearly a melee brute's or archer's template).Slap a flying magic item on them and they'll be pretty dang close to impervious (at least for the most part; SR to negate spells like Magic Missile or Fireball or Hold Monster, DR to minimize the likelyhood of arrows/bolts doing any real harm, LF to mitigate the occasional natural-20 attack with a bow/crossbow, natural armor to further reduce enemies' chance of striking them...).Of these factors, the DR and Fortification are perhaps the most likely to not matter in play (i.e. the enemy may be using an adamantine weapon in the first place, and may happen to not roll any criticals, or rolls really well on confirming them and avoiding the Fortification effect).  Thus a possible minimum of +3 Level Adjustment and Challenge Rating.  But only broad playtesting would really be able to determine if +3 or +4 is most appropriate.Since this template grants pretty much just combat-related benefits, and nothing to compensate a skill, feat, or magic-oriented character, it would adjust Challenge Rating and CR by the same amount.  The non-combat possible benefits for a PC are negligable (the SR may help in some other situations), and since the template's amount of LA would put a significant damper on their initial feats and skills and class features, that's probably balanced out enough for it to have identical LA and CR adjustments.</blockquote>

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