Turn undead only considers monster hit dice

[dolio]

This is vanilla behavior as far as I can tell.

I don't recall the exact context of the monster, but for instance the 13HD greater temple bugbear zombie is easily destroyed by a medium level cleric, because for some reason it's beefed up by 10 class levels, and only its 3 undead hit dice count for turning.

That's kind of an odd example, but an SRD one would be a mummy lord, which is 10 cleric levels stacked on top of a mummy. The CR of a mummy lord is 15, while a mummy is 5, so presumably the cleric levels are supposed to increase its turn requirements, or else a level 15 cleric would be close to instant-killing one (since it still only has 8 undead hit dice).

[DudeMcDude]

Reading the title, I thought you were working on lichs 😉

[dolio]

Not yet anyway. :)

I was messing around with scripting a zombie template a bit. Which reminds me that these bugbears are probably wrong on that end, too. They should have 6 undead hit dice from the 3 bugbear hit dice. But even 6 hit dice would be pretty vulnerable for something that's probably supposed to be a significant challenge. (I imagine changing the zombies isn't the job of Temple+, either.)