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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samnell" data-source="post: 3718922" data-attributes="member: 130">Animals do not get high will saves, unless dire and in that case we're not dealing so much with a real world creature as it's bigger fantasy equivalent anyway, or for that matter very many skill points. It's just 2 per HD, plus int. Since that's a penalty, most animals are going to have next to no skills. So far as feats go, there are plenty of extremely obvious feats that an animal can benefit from and even help reflect its toughness and size in the rules without giving blue whales whirlwind attack. A baleen whale has these feats:"Alertness, Diehard, Endurance, Toughness (2)"What about that selection is unreasonable? I think it's an excellent selection of feats for the animal. I don't think the system is suggesting that the world's blue whales go to a cetacean dojo under the sea to learn Alertness. I do not see anything that suggests a baleen whale is a sage either. It has an Int of 2. The PCs will not be hiring it to translate some ancient runes. I don't see how racial skill bonuses are a patch any more than ability score bonuses to skills are a patch. These are perfectly reasonable ways for the game to deal with the situations being described. It seems to work excellently for animals, including the animal you brought up.If you have a complaint about completely fictional characters which ought not to have the benefits to go along with their high HD, I'm afraid I can't agree. Since they're fictional, there's no sense at all applying to reality to determine what sorts of statistics they ought or ought not have. The most obvious analogs to real animals in the game are their dire equivalents, some of which might have had prehistoric antecedents, but the only thing the game does with dire animals that's odd is give them a good will save. That's a spot fix, not a huge-overhaul-of-the-entire-way-monsters-are-done-fix.</blockquote>

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