Savage Species: WHy So Much Hate

[HoboGod]

Not to defend the system--it's horribly unbalanced--but actually using a CR3 monster as a level 3 pac was broken. That's because of soemthing they learned and changed into 4e: monsters can have tons of out-of-combat abilities that have NOTHING to do with combat. Charm Person at will, for instance, is useless in the hands of a CR 3 goblin but broken in the hands of a level 3 PC. Further, some combat abilities are far more powerful in the hands of PCs. A well-prepared divine spellcaster can bypass almost any type of 3.5 damage resistance, but a huge number of monsters simply cannot hurt a PC with a high resistance bypassed by, say, Silver.

Oh, no doubt. I've seen many PCs abuse a high level adjustment race to do something ridiculously overpowered in a specialist role. However, an overpowered specialist isn't an effective player. I had a player wanting to be a succubus, he specialized the succubus to utterly crush any encounter that involved baddies of human intelligence. However, any animal, undead, or construct seemed to send the succubus running due to her sheer worthlessness against them. So, type A encounters are pushovers and type B encounters are a tougher encounter level than the party might like to fight because one player backs out. Trading general proficiency for circumstantial pwnage makes for a bad PC.

 

[pawsplay]

I think it's a high quality book, one which I have frequently referred to. It has good templates, good PrCs, some useful feats. It incidentally opens the door to some massive abuses when combined with some other materials, but my answer is to not use those other materials (FR, I'm looking at you). The only real problem is some of the monster classes, which is not a problem of the book, but of what happens when you replace more than about 1/4 your ECL with non-hit-dice and several of your hit dice with featureless monster HD. It works just fine for hound archons, jann, and the like.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Savage Species was the first book that really explained the LA/ECL system; opinions of it are based on opinions of that system.

There is a lot of great innovative material and a lot of unbalanced poorly written material. Personally, that works for me, but others have different tastes.

 

[pawsplay]

Savage Species was the first book that really explained the LA/ECL system; opinions of it are based on opinions of that system.

There is a lot of great innovative material and a lot of unbalanced poorly written material. Personally, that works for me, but others have different tastes.

It's a very easy book to ignore the less-good parts of.

 

[aarondirebear]

Savage Species is an example of one of the things I absolutely LOVED about 3E, and that is the beauty of the system that allows the curtain to be drawn back and every monster dissected to determine the mechanics of exactly how they were created. This allows a DM to reconstruct the monster in endless combinations.

4E doesn't have that magical ability. A monster is just designed the way it's designed and there's not necessarily a rhyme or reason to it.
\.

that's one of my reasons for liking it too.
My personal experience is limited (most of my DM's don't show me the plot bubblegum), but I did just create some new monsters that I am rather proud of using this book.