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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samnell" data-source="post: 3720641" data-attributes="member: 130">Hit Dice, but sure there is a correlation between HD and size. It would be strange to have a colossal creature with 1 HD. Counterintuitive, even.Any int penalty whatsoever will put any animal creature at 1 skill point per HD, plus the usual extra 3 for the first HD. So the only difference is by HD, sure. But is it really that big of a deal? The most HD a horse is given in the SRD is four. A dog has 1 HD, a riding dog 2. You are suggesting that a difference of at most three skill points is sufficient reason to vastly overhaul the system by which monsters are built? That seems very extreme to me.If an animal really needs the feat, make it a bonus feat. That's what they're for, just like racial skill bonuses. They cover these trivial corner cases.A quirk in one template in one supplement is the very definition of a corner case. Are you suggesting that the system of rules that model monsters in the game needs to be changed because one template is a bit wonky? There are not two distinct ways of measuring an animal's skill performance, which is the real issue. Skill performance depends upon the final skill bonus, however it is arrived at. Racial skill bonuses are an exceptionally elegant and smooth portion of the system geared to fix the corner cases where the overall system does not quite give the result we expect. Is it a patch when a halfling gets a bonus to move silently instead of a straight up, bigger, dex bonus? I don't think so. Halflings are more dexterous than humans, but they're even quieter than their dexterity score would indicate at the outset. So might an eagle get a racial Spot bonus that shoves its Spot score way above what it could get with ranks and ability bonus alone.But I suppose I'm arguing semantics here. It doesn't matter if it's a patch or not. It's an astoundingly good and elegant patch if it is one. It's easy to apply, even on the fly, and adjudicate. Furthermore, its inclusion points the way for DMs who hit this modeling issue to handle it in a way consistent with the rest of the system.</blockquote>

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