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Greyhawkrr 06-13-04, 11:42 PM

Concerning the first salamander in the newest Elite Opponents module, Andy Collins states the following: "His effective character level is 10th, and his CR has been raised from 5 (3 for a flamebrother and 2 for his ranger levels) to 6 because of his elite ability scores." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that if monsters had PC levels, they were assumed to already have an elite array and thus it wouldn't affect their CR. However if a monster without PC class levels gets an elite array, then the CR of the monster should be raised by +1 to account for the difficulty in defeating a monster with higher than normal statistics. I think there are three possibilities: 1) I misread the column somewhere (always possible). 2) Andy Collins made a mistake here. 3) I don't understand the rule for raising the CR of a monster based on CR properly. Which is the case? I've read the section in the back of the monster manual about improving monsters and this looks like an error to me. Is the part about elite arrays only supposed to apply to creatures without racial hit dice? Thanks.