Thursday, September 3, 2009

One if by sea, two if by land, 120 if by air.

I am totally perplexed by the Legendary Tracker (Epic) feat found in the Complete Adventurer. Now, I really don’t ever play or DM in an epic level campaign so perhaps I am missing something here, but how is a character supposed to make a DC 120 check? I mean, that seems really absurd for even the most munchkinny of munchkin players.

The legendary tracker feat allows an extremely skilled woodsman to track prey across virtually any surface, including underwater and through the air. The DC for tracking an opponent through the air is 120! So how does one go about making that roll? I have no idea but I am willing to try and find out. First off, any character that qualifies for this feat is no joke. The requirements are Track, Wisdom 25, Knowledge (Nature) 30, and Survival 30. That is one serious ranger, but even then can he really track an opponent through the sky? Let’s be generous and say that our tracker in question is 40th level, and has 43 ranks in Survival (the skill that track is based on). Realistically I would think that anyone who is 40th level is probably friends with a wizard that has other ways of locating this person, but we’ll say that they are out of town. Our Tracker’s Wisdom is very high, somewhere around 30. That is another +10 as his ability modifier. He also has a Periapt of Wisdom +10, to give him another +5 to his Track check. Even though it is not entirely legit I would be more than happy to give him another +2 as a synergy bonus related to his Knowledge (Nature). 25 ranks of Knowledge should be enough to cover some atmospheric conditions that will help in this particular example. This man is also so serious about tracking that he has taken Skill Focus (Survival) for another +3 to his roll. I can’t think of an item that gives a bonus to tracking, but I’m sure it exists. And this guy has it. And it gives a +10 to his track. All together that puts his modifier at +73. We will assume that he rolls a 20 on his attempt for a grand total of 93. He is still 27 points short of tracking the elusive airborne creature. So how does he do it? Any ideas?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The thing that you've missed is that an item that gives him +50 (fifty) to tracking would only cost a measly 250,000 gold pieces, which is chump change at level 40. Take a look at the formula for creating magic items in the DMG. (Or you could click here: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/creatingMagicItems.htm )