XP and advancing creatures with just racial HD


Rules Questions

Shadow Lodge

So a few quick questions about creatures with racial HD.

1. If a creature has racial HD does it collect experience and progress along its racial HD track the same way as a 0 HD creature does to level?

2. If a creature with racial HD wants to pick up its first level in a class does it need to collect xp and if so does it treat it's level it like multiclassing for determining the amount of xp it needs to gain in order to collect said level? I.e. if say a glacial toad wants to take a level in fighter does it have to earn 51,000 xp to do it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated along with page references or links to rules sources.


There is no actual "racial HD track". Creatures do not "level up" their racial HD by gaining XP. The reason for this is "Racial HD" represents, basically, how NATURALLY big and tough and dangerous a creature is. Bears have more racial HD than squirrels because they are bigger, tougher, and more dangerous. If that squirrel lives a long time, gains lots of XP fighting against other squirrels and birds and the occasional cat, it will not simply "level up" and become a bear, or get as big and tough and dangerous as a bear.

Adding "Racial HD" is not something that happens to a creature after it is born. It's something that might happen to a creature genetically, before it's born. It's conceivable that our squirrel might, for random DNA reasons, be bigger than normal squirrels and consequently have more "Racial HD", but if this is true, then nature did that in the squirrel's DNA long before it was born.

As a GM, you can add Racial HD to a creature. If you do, this represents the fact that it was, for some random DNA reason, born to be a bigger, tougher, more dangerous version of its species. Maybe a druid or wizard meddled with it magically, or maybe nature just made an anomaly.

Moving away from bears and squirrels, we can look at an ogre as a better example of "Racial HD". Ogres have 4hd. Every ogre has 4HD. If he's a little scrawny, he has 4HD but below average HP. If he's a little beefy, he has 4hd but above average HP. Etc.

It's easy to imagine an ogre born way too small (midget/dwarfism). This ogre would likely have fewer than 4 racial HD. It's also easy to imagine an ogre born way too big (gigantism), in which case he might have more than 4 racial HD.

As for your second question, bears and squirrels don't usually pick up levels in a class. But sentient creatures with racial HD might. It's possible to find an ogre who has levels in fighter or barbarian. In this case, he was (probably) born with "racial" 4HD and later in life he learned some new skills and abilities represented by learning, not by growing bigger and tougher. These are his class levels.

As for XP needed to get the first level, humans and elves and dwarves (etc.) don't need any XP for class levels, so neither do ogres (etc.). It just happens that some monstrous critters have "racial HD" before gaining their class levels, good for them, but they still don't need any XP for the first level.

Hope that makes it all clearer.


The first Bestiary tells how to use experience to add levels to a monster that already has racial HD. The section Monsters as PCs explains that you treat the monster as having as many Levels for experience as the base monster's CR. The monster's racial levels become less important as it levels up, so every three experience levels it should gain four player levels until it has gained as many extra levels as half its original CR.

Your Glacier Toad is CR6, so it would need enough experience to become 7th level (53K, 35K, 23K) to get one level of fighter, but it would start with (35/23/15)

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