Savage Species: Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 12:23 pm

Why does a bat get +6 Wisdom anyway? When did bats get known for being wise?

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 12:54 pm

Because Batman.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 12:56 pm

The early parts of the 3e adventure path are pretty decent. I quite like The Sunless Citadel. It only goes down from there. Forge of Fury is merely "pretty OK". Deep Horizon is just stupid. You can totally follow Skip Williams' design process there though:

He wanted to get lightning to strike twice by recreating the first mysterious encounter with the Myconids from The Dungeons of the Slave Lords.
But that encounter worked because Myconids were neutral, alien, and mysterious. But in 2001, the Myconids had been appearing in published works for twenty actual years. You couldn't expect the same effect from an actual Myconid, you needed something new.
The adventure was for characters in the double digit levels, and 3rd edition encounter guidelines very much did not support throwing around 400 Orcs and the like the way AD&D did. So to compete with the PCs in the small numbers they were allowed, they had to have over one hundred hit points each.

Basically, Skip Williams was in charge of designing a high level play environment, and he didn't do that. So when it became time for him to show off his design by making an iconic high level adventure, the result was ass.

-Username17

Post by **fbmf** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 3:04 pm

Red_Rob wrote:Why does a bat get +6 Wisdom anyway? When did bats get known for being wise?

Perception skill bonuses would be my guess, though a flat bonus to Listen would have made more sense.

Game On,
fbmf

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 5:23 pm

A number of animals in D&D have ~12 wisdom scores to represent their perceptiveness and survival skills. I would imagine the idea of skill bonuses was floated, but someone realized that you'd be throwing around bonuses to 3+ skills, and so animals were just given a wisdom bonus. The Anthro template then gives a boost to wisdom, thus the bat has +6.