MageBred Template LA/Breeding rules

[SilverWolf999]

I am making an awakened wolf character for my next campaign and i was wondering what the LA on the magebred template would be. I know it doesnt have a listed LA, however my DM is open to having templates no listed LA being used with a reasonable LA for the granted bonuses.

In our current game my character breeds and sells animals/magical beasts. Regarding the magebred template, there is no specific way to breed them or requirement so does anyone have an idea of what breeding magebred animals/magical beasts might entail? I would appreciate any ideas even if its just for flavor.

[Inevitability]

Magebred on its own? Probably +1: the benefits are too great for it to be free, but +2 would be excessive.

That said, I feel like a magebred awakened wolf might be balanced as an ECL 2 character if your group's optimization level is above average.

What are the other people playing? It'll help people get an idea of your baseline for 'balance'.

[ShurikVch]

+3
Brown Bear and Tiger are available as Animal Companion at 7th level
Magebred Brown Bear and Magebred Tiger - at 10th

[Inevitability]

+3
Brown Bear and Tiger are available as Animal Companion at 7th level
Magebred Brown Bear and Magebred Tiger - at 10th

I strongly suggest against directly using the animal companion rules to determine at what LA a creature would make a good PC.

Not only do animal companion ratings come with a ton of assumptions that won't apply to an independent PC (lack of intelligence, sacrifice of animal companion progression, the support of a full caster), but the system for categorizing them by power is also skewed.

As new animal companions are only unlocked every third level after the first (so 4th, 7th, 10th, etc.), it's basically impossible for magebred tigers to be anywhere else than three levels past their untemplated relatives. After all, making magebred tigers available at level 7 would be ridiculous (they're strictly better than two of the default animals, after all), and 8 or 9 would've been impossible due to no animal companions becoming available at these levels.

In other words, the magebred template might very well be worth only a single level, and the developers might even agree with this, but for the reasons listed above they had no choice but put magebred brown bears a whole three levels above the regular variant.

[SilverWolf999]

Magebred on its own? Probably +1: the benefits are too great for it to be free, but +2 would be excessive.

That said, I feel like a magebred awakened wolf might be balanced as an ECL 2 character if your group's optimization level is above average.

What are the other people playing? It'll help people get an idea of your baseline for 'balance'.

Most of the other players optimize well and we fight way above CR but as for party make up i dont know much since about half of our party either hasn't decided yet or doesn't want anyone to know until we figure it out in game.

That being said most of the players are the same from my current game in which we killed a Huge size blue dragon in 3 rounds at level 10-11 without much damage taken on our part with only 3 members of the party there. Most of the party has ways of doing approximately 100-140 damage in a round if we are unloading and are currently at 12th level.

[Falontani]

I am going to side with Inevitability on this, an LA+1 is a good choice for Magebred, However with 2 racial HD thrown into the mix, you would be vastly underpowered with that LA +1.

As for flavor/breeding, read up on Vadalis Beastmaster in Dragonmarked. That is all basically their shtick, and to properly summarize it would require me copying most of the passage.

[Remuko]

Most of the other players optimize well and we fight way above CR but as for party make up i dont know much since about half of our party either hasn't decided yet or doesn't want anyone to know until we figure it out in game.

That being said most of the players are the same from my current game in which we killed a Huge size blue dragon in 3 rounds at level 10-11 without much damage taken on our part with only 3 members of the party there. Most of the party has ways of doing approximately 100-140 damage in a round if we are unloading and are currently at 12th level.

That sounds like what he was saying then. ECL 2 is probably fine for an awakened magebred wolf.