level adjustment and gestalt

[astrerouge]

Good day to you playgrounders.
I am having the opportunity of entering in a gestalt game and I would have want to be a monster(harsaff from MM3) and I ask myself and my future DM about that:Does level adjustment impede both classes?We couldn't respond so I decide to ask here.
Thanks for your answers.

[Cog]

Gestalt only talks about classes, so the strictly-RAW answer is that LA penalizes both "sides" of the gestalt. That makes LA even weaker than before, of course. The "easy" answer is to apply it to one side of the gestalt, but that makes LA instead very strong, as it can often do more to complement a class than another class can (there are plenty of exceptions, of course). A middle way that I've seen mentioned often is to split the LA in half and apply it to both sides - so that if a character has, say, 5 LA, 2 of that get applied to one side of the gestalt, and three gets applied to the other.

[manyslayer]

Friend of mine is running a gestalt game where the PCs were specifically made to be non-standard races and he runs LA/racial hit dice up one side. Now, not a group of optimizers, but it has worked out for his group. Though since everyone is doing it (to a greater or lesser extent) I don't know how it would work in a regular gestalt party.

[Frog Dragon]

IMHO, LA should only be applied to one side. It makes LA stronger and monster races stronger, but have you looked at the average monster as a playable character (using playable really loosely here)? For example, a Rakshasa would be godawful in a normal game, but is actually playable in gestalt. The reason very few people play monster in games without special accommodations for them is because it would make them woefully underpowered, and people don't like to suck.

Long story short, apart from the really high-powered templates, gestalt LA should be applied to one side only.

[astrerouge]

I think we'll do it like you say mostly because it would really logical since monster classes in gestalt only take on of the two classes.
I thank you very much