Savage Species and leadership feat

[Severion]

When a member of a race from SS (oh, say a Succubus) picks up the leadership feat, how do you determine its leadership score? Would you use its CL (10) or its HD (6)? I'm current leaning toward CL but any input would be appreciated.

 

[Alzrius]

When a member of a race from SS (oh, say a Succubus) picks up the leadership feat, how do you determine its leadership score? Would you use its CL (10) or its HD (6)? I'm current leaning toward CL but any input would be appreciated.

I assume you mean ECL when you say CL; that is, you think you should take not only the class levels into account, but natural hit dice and level adjustment. I thought that I saw an official answer to this somewhere, but can't find it now, so here's my take on it.

While it seems obvious that natural hit dice get added in, it's the idea of a level adjustment that requires some thought. One the one hand, LA is meant to be a balancer for natural abilities that make a PC more powerful than his levels and hit dice would otherwise indicate. It's the counterweight to them, so to speak, and so shouldn't be beneficial. On the other hand, it seems like Leadership should be a feat that takes into account things like special powers, since the measure of the Leadership Score is to take into account everything a PC has going for him.

Personally, I'd take the latter view and use total ECL for the Leadership Score.

Oh, and as an aside, the 3E Succubus is somewhat different from the 3.5E Succubus, so you might not want to trust the Savage Species monster-level listing for that particular creature.

 

[Severion]

Thanx for the quick reply. I'm using 3.0 and as far as i can tell SS is 3.0, so NBD there. As i said, i was thinking about using ECL as opposed to HD, you have just given me a better justification. Thank you again.