Post/Author/DateTime	Post
ChefOrc 04-07-05, 10:44 PM	One of my players decided to play a druid and chose a dog as an animal companion. This prompted me to look at the skill progression of that animal. I think I found a mistake in the skill scores of the dog in the MM and I wanted someone to confirm that I am indeed calculating correctly. A dog from the book (p271 MM 3.5): Jump+7, Listen+5, Spot+5 Survival+1 Alertness, racial bonus on Jump +4 str13, wis12 My calculations: At 1 HD, a dog should get 4 skill ranks. Let's say it chooses to allocate 2 points to spot and 2 points to Listen, it should have Jump +5 (str+1 racial+4) Listen +5 (alertness+2 wis+1 ranks+2) Spot +5 (alertness+2 wis+1 ranks+2) Survival +1 (wis+1) Is that right? If not where do the 2 missing skill points come from?
Colmarr 04-07-05, 11:23 PM	You seem to have correctly identified an error in the statistics for the dog. However, I think the dog's Jump bonus is in fact too low, not too high. From the SRD entry for the Jump skill: If your speed is greater than 30 feet, you gain a +4 bonus for every 10 feet beyond 30 feet. Dogs are speed 40, so a dog's Jump check should be +4 (racial) +1 (Strength) +4 (speed) = +9, not +7.
ChefOrc 04-08-05, 10:31 AM	Good point, unless they mislabeled the speed bonus as racial, which could make sense ...
Sildatorak 04-08-05, 12:42 PM	Generally speed bonuses to jump aren't labeled in the entry, so I bet that someone wrote up stats for the dog and some editor looked at it and thought, "Hmm...this +9 to jump seems to much, let's just move 2 points of that to other things..." or some other brain fart like that.