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megabyter5
2010-11-30, 12:44 PM
I like the idea behind monster classes, but every time I think about them, I can't help but wonder what you would do if you rolled one in a gestalt game. If you used your other class to determine BAB and HD, then you'd essentially be bypassing LA after you take your last level in the class. Would that be allowed? Should monster classes and gestalt characters be mutually exclusive? I've been wondering about this for a while now.

Seerow
2010-11-30, 12:49 PM
Seriously, you're already playing gestalt, you clearly don't care a great deal about a balanced game, and are looking for something to explore different concepts in a high powered environment. There's no reason as far as I'm concerned to disallow monster classes in such a system. You're giving up a lot of power in terms of class features, even if you do bypass the HD/BAB penalties.

BooNL
2010-11-30, 01:00 PM
Gestalt is actually one of the best ways to play monster characters.

The whole RHD/LA system is so convulted and broken it's not fun anymore. As Seerow said you're sacrificing your 'utility' side* of the gestalt for monster bonusses, which is a decent tradeoff in my book.

* I'm convinced the best (mechanically, not RP) have a main side and a utility side. Fighters and Monks are decent utility classes as they offer nothing but passive bonusses. Spellcasters and ToB characters are decent main classes.
A gestalt character still has the same number of actions a turn as a regular character and while a Wizard//Cleric would be very versatile you can only one one of those classes at a time. A Monk//Cleric doesn't have this problem.
So you see, monster RHD and bonusses are basically the monks of gestalt.