[3.5] When are level adjustments fully paid off?

[Endarire]

I know about reducing level adjustments (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/races/reducingLevelAdjustments.htm) (LA Buyoff), but when are these level adjustments (1, 2, 3) fully paid off so I'm on par with the party's experience?

I know what the chart says. It doesn't specify when my EXP will be of the same level as my party's EXP, all of whom didn't take a level adjustment.

For example, a Goliath Barbarian1/Fighter1/Warblade1 can spend 10,000 EXP to remove his level adjustment, effectively losing his LA, but also not gaining a level. He must still gain 10,000 EXP to reach level 4.

Assuming D&D 3.5's scaling experience system, at what level will this Goliath be the same level as a LA0 person who took class levels?

[NineThePuma]

For the first 3, right after that.

For the rest... I can list them, if you like.

[fortesama]

it's right on the table, at least for LA+1,2 and 3

Edit: Ninja'd

[Lapak]

The OP is not asking 'when will my LA be zero'; he's asking 'when will the accelerated experience gain from being lower level cause me to catch up to my party level-wise, after I've eliminated all my LA?'

[ffone]

Your XP from an encounter or enemy is 300 * L * Y / P

where
L = your level (current ECL)
P = number of PCs
Y = basically '2' to the power of (C - L)/2 with some convenience round.g L is your level again, and C is the challenge rating of the encounter or individual enemy. (This is why two enemies of CR=C give the same XP as one enemy of CR=C+2). The convenience rounding is taht you multiply by 4/3rds for the 'odd' level with C>L, or by 2/3rds for an odd level with C<L.

In other words, it's 300 if C=L, 400 if C=L+1, or 200 if C=L-1. For every two steps C is above or below this, multiply or divide by 2.

The XP you need to reach the next level is 1000 * L. Since the XP also has a factor of L, this means that, if you're two ECLs behind your friends, you will 'level up' twice as fast. Once you're one level behind, you'll be somewhere between one-fourth and one-third faster, depending on how the evens and odds work out.

So the exact answer is 'it depends', b/c of this and b/c XP comes in chunks. You can even leapfrog your friends! But this means they may later leapfrog you.

So you'll spend about 1/2 a level 2 ECLs below them, and 75% to 80% of a level one level below.

this is why I dislike LA buyoff. In the longrun, it's free. You're behin din the short turn, but ahead in the long term, and IMO this should be balanced within each time frame, not traded off over time.

Also, it treats two LA +1 templates different from one LA +2, which is weird.

[Marnath]

Also, it treats two LA +1 templates different from one LA +2, which is weird.

Wait, what? +1 twice is +2 cumulative, and you pay that off exactly as if it was a +2 from one source.

[Lapak]

this is why I dislike LA buyoff. In the longrun, it's free. You're behin din the short turn, but ahead in the long term, and IMO this should be balanced within each time frame, not traded off over time.This assumes that
1) play continues forever and
2) the perks of your LA matter as much at high levels as they did at low ones.

Neither is typically true. If your game only runs up to level 15 and stops - and many game don't even get that far to begin with - you've spent a respectable chunk of the game behind your companions. And with many LA-adjusting perks, the real value of them is already much less significant by level 10ish. So once you're talking about even LA +2, buyoff isn't really getting something for nothing; it's just easing off the cost as the benefits reduce in value.

[ffone]

Wait, what? +1 twice is +2 cumulative, and you pay that off exactly as if it was a +2 from one source.

If you take them serially (i.e. acquired templates, or a monster class), you can pay off the first one at L3, take the second, then pay it off.

If your DM lets you. The RAW of the variant rule at SRD lets you (since you use 'current' level adjustment), but, the idea is perhaps outside the 'intent' of their rule, which just shows how ill-thought out it is. The rule's not really even consistent with itself.

Sure, you could treat it like one LA +2 thing, but that's less favorable, so of course players will try to do it sequentially.

[ffone]

This assumes that
1) play continues forever and

Actually no - I said that if play is too short term, it's worse, and if it's long term, it's much better.

Which is terrible game design, like how earlier editions gave free perks to demihumans but then had level caps. Ideally, balance should be roughly consistent across levels.

Level adjustment buyoff is well intentioned but terribly designed. It's popular b/c it makes PCs more powerful, plain and simple.



2) the perks of your LA matter as much at high levels as they did at low ones.


Depends on the perks. A random spell-like ability becomes less useful, as does most anything that could be gotten via a flat-price magic item.

But for a melee guy, +2 Str will always give him +1 melee attack and +1-2 damage, roughly offsetting a point of BAB.

The argument for buyoff is always 'as young get high level, that one level of racial benefits is less important'. But the Strength only becomes less important in the same sense that a high-level human melee guy caress less about each individual point of his base attack bonus.




Neither is typically true. If your game only runs up to level 15 and stops - and many game don't even get that far to begin with - you've spent a respectable chunk of the game behind your companions.

This is half my point.



And with many LA-adjusting perks, the real value of them is already much less significant by level 10ish. So once you're talking about even LA +2, buyoff isn't really getting something for nothing; it's just easing off the cost as the benefits reduce in value.

It just depends on the race/template.

I might allow something like: if your racial benefits can be replicated with flat-price magic items, you can buy those off in a way analogous to item crafting but paying all the cost in XP rather than GP -at maybe 5:1 as when making an item based on a spell with an XP cost (some people do the reverse, all-GP crafting where the XP = 1/25th GP cost is replaced by an extra 1/5th GP, for 70% instead of 50% of the market price a the crafting cost.)

So, for example, the drow's spell resistance is like a spell resistance item (IIRC, 10,000 gp per point above 12, min 13), possibly with the doubling for being slotless (and as a bonus, it's also unsunderable, unstealable, undispellable, etc.) The drow has some other things, like an unbalanced stat array, but you could also just count some for that against their +5 limits for inherent bonuses, or counterbalance their point buy at char creationm or something.

Granted, magic item crafting has the same issues (the XP part is free in the long run b/c of 'catch up' when you're behind a level).But this at least makes it like a more normal part of the game, and helps distinguish between racial features that are easily 'buyable' and those that aren't.