Please Explain LA to Me, It Doesn't Make Sense

[Keinnicht]

Well, I understand the concept of it. It's just never made sense to me. At all. Mainly how LA and CR tend to not match up, at all.

For instance, let's say we have an 8th level Human Fighter. His challenge rating is 8. He is considered an 8th level character. Now let's take a Hooded Pupil (Libris Mortis) Human Fighter 7. His CR is also 8. He is considered a 12th level character.


Wait...hold on, what? What? If something is considered an appropriate challenge for 8th level characters to fight fairly often, how can it be considered a 12th level character? If you put up a party of 8th level characters against a party of 4 level 12 fighters, they probably would not fare all that well!

How can something that would supposedly be an even match for an eighth level character be considered a 12th level character if someone actually wants to play it? It just doesn't make sense. At all.

Is LA seriously just some kind of juvenile WoTC crap to screw over anyone who wants to play a nonstandard race?

[Waker]

Well, there are a few points to address, which I'm sure several other people will go into greater detail with than I.
1. First off, CR is a rather poorly done system. One of the biggest screwups is the stating that an NPC who progressed by class levels has a CR = Class Level. Simple put, a lvl 10 Fighter is not equal to a lvl 10 Wizard in terms of a challenge.
2. As far as the LA issue. Many people will also say that is something of a wonky system, though I don't think it's as subjective as CR. One of the main notes to take home is that powerful races with LA are more open to abuse since a player character can play through many sessions with a character, whereas an NPC is only expected to fight one or a few fights. Thus having a powerful SLA wouldn't be huge for an NPC, but a PC who can utilize it multiple times can be overdone, hence the application of LA.

[Urpriest]

In general you might want to read my Monster Guide to Monsters, located in my sig.

More specifically, D&D isn't a game where everything that can be an opponent works as a player at the same level and vice versa. Just because an NPC Fighter 8 is CR 8 and ECL 8 doesn't mean that in general ECL and CR should couple. CR represents fights that take roughly 1/4 of the daily resources of a party of four. ECL represents players whose capabilities are appropriate to engage in said fights (as well as everything else, hence the exploitable abilities mentioned in the post above). There's simply no reason for them to track one to one like you seem to think they should.

[Flickerdart]

Consider a Vampire (CR+3, LA+8), the poster child of CR/LA disparity.

What is an NPC vampire going to do? Sit in his castle and do evil things until the PCs come and get him. His only relevant abilities are those that can effectively be used in combat against a powerful enemy. When they reduce him to 0, he turns to mist and flies away, but the players still get XP for winning, so the mechanical outcome for them is the same.

What's a PC vampire going to do? Farm minions like crazy, and become very very powerful if he's smart about it. His non-combat abilities are just as useful as his combat ones. If he falls in combat, he escapes instead of dying - a very important difference, especially if the rest of the party was killed.

While Vampire is hugely overvalued, this is a good example of why CR is not equal to ECL.

[CommodoreCrunch]

Both CR and LA are wonky systems to begin with. Just look at the Sharakim (Races of Destiny). They have an entirely undeserved LA of 1. They get -2 to two stats and +2 to two others, +1 NA, light sensitivity and a bonus to a few skills and attacks against orcs.
Shadowswyft (Planar Handbook) is another LA 1 race that doesn't seem to deserve it.The only racial traits that I can see contributing to it are Dark+Low Light vision 120ft and a +2 initiative.
Compare to the Tiefling, which gets +2 to two stats, resistance 5 to cold, electricity and acid and a SLA. Assimar have all that, but don't take a hit to any stats.

[Flickerdart]

There are a few things that are worth the LA. Feral and Mineral Warriors arevery good. Half-Minotaur is ridiculous for its LA. Half-Fey is a fair choice, especially with Magic in the Blood. Then there's stuff like Llolth-touched and White Dragonspawn which is plain ridiculous.

[Tvtyrant]

I think some of the anthropomorphic races from Savage Species are worth it as well. Dire bat, Anthropomorphic Giant Squid, etc.

[grarrrg]

Is LA seriously just some kind of juvenile WoTC crap to screw over anyone who wants to play a nonstandard race?

In a word:

Yes.


To go a little more in depth would take a lot of paragraphs.
Basically, there are some abilities that would be incredibly abuse-able/broken if a PC had ready access to them, but in and of themselves are not overtly powerful. This is why a "Level 3 Fighter = CR 3 Monster" but that same creature as a player might be "Level 3 Fighter +2 LA"

There are many other reasons, but this is the simplest answer that makes the most sense (without resorting to calling WotC morons to their face...)

[Zeta Kai]

The short of it is that WotC wanted players to gravitate toward certain options (PHB races, a few others without any really cool toys) while avoiding other options (IE, everything else). They knew that players would stay away from high-LA races, although I'm not sure if they understood that even LA+1 was as big a drawback as it is. It's a system primarily based on deterrents, which is why it's so unpopular.

[Chronos]

Think of it this way: Which would you, as a player, rather have, a nifty ability usable 1/week, or the same nifty ability usable 1/5 minutes? Obviously the 1/5 minutes is much better; you'll be able to use it in basically every encounter, without ever worrying about wasting it, while with the 1/week ability, you're only going to use it rarely, since you'd better make sure that it's the best situation for it, or that you really need it. So a race that gets the ability frequently should have a higher LA than one that gets it 1/week.

But now consider the same question for a monster. The PCs are the biggest threat the typical monster will ever face in its life. If it has an ability it can use in the fight against the PCs, it's going to use it. There is almost no difference between a monster getting an ability 1/5 minutes and getting it 1/week, in terms of the threat to the party: Either way, it's going to use it exactly once in the fight. So the monster should get the same CR either way.

Or another example, that goes the other way: Suppose you have a choice of one ability that makes the enemy roll a saving throw or die, and another ability that makes the enemy roll a saving throw (we'll assume same save and DC) or fall asleep for five minutes. For a player, there's not much practical difference between these two: Either you kill the monster, or you coup de grace it after the combat and kill it anyway. So those two abilities, for a player, should be close to the same LA.

But what if a monster has those abilities? A monster that makes one of the party members fall asleep is an annoyance, but you'll just wait for that guy to wake back up after the battle. A monster that instantly kills one of the party, though, is a Big Deal. The monster that can kill instantly thus gets a higher CR than the one that just sleeps things.

Fundamentally, the asymmetry comes from the fact that the party is expected to win, while the monsters are expected to lose. That fact alone means that what's most useful to the players is not the same as what's most useful to the monsters.

[Endarire]

My spiel: In 3.5, WotC wants to punish players for breaking stereotypes. See level adjustments and favored classes.

Classes are powerful. If done properly, a single class level is worth 4+ racial hit dice, since the RHD don't give much.

Also, Regdar the Human Fighter was a poster boy for 3.0 at Gen Con. WotC seemed very proud of the Fighter. The Fighter is a tier 4 or 5 class.

As for the CR/LA discrepency, the CR system is bunk. To me at least, it doesn't measure useful things, like how many of this creature type I should pit against my party. Balancing fights at the end of the day, when people are weakest, is bad balance. It implies that GMs should ignore the CR and throw whatever at the party initially then hope they survive long enough to force them into fighting things CR appropriate.

A better gauge of CR is how well a CR X fares against a PC of level X when both are at full strength. If it's about a 50-50 chance for each, you've found your sweet spot.

[Emperor Tippy]

Except in that case the percentages will screw the party bad unless the DM does a lot of fudging. That's already a problem. One bad saving throw or one good monster damage roll a a PC is dead, and if that happens before about level 7 it's a permanent death. Now it doesn't matter so much once you hit level 15, and by level 17 you should expect multiple deaths per fight if the DM is playing things straight; but the party has the means to make death nothing more than a temporary condition, much akin to sleep or a bit of ability damage at lower levels.

With Craft Contingent True Res (something ever PC should have at least one of in high level play), Death is just an accepted fact of life and doesn't mean much.

---
But yes, the CR and LA systems are massively ****ed up. And how badly varies wildly between sources. For example, I've found that CR in the MM is at least 3 levels too high (what it says is CR 10 for example should really be CR 7) while the MM3 tends to have some of the tougher monsters for a given CR, in some cases to the point where they are a level or two low.

A lot of CR also depends on how smart you play the monster and how many of them there are.

[werik]

I don't think that Level Adjustment is (just) about getting you to play the standard races. While it's true that they probably do want you to do so in order to avoid a game dominated by the cheesiest characters that players can develop, there are tangible reasons for level adjustment. Frankly, a lot of the level adjusted races would have a distinct advantage if you just took their already generous monster abilities and slapped a class on them, too.

So I agree with the philosophy of the level adjustment. The execution, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. I recently had to do some work looking at level adjustments for thri-kreens and found that in the various sources listing level adjustment or racial classes with little consistency in the rankings. What I like to do with level adjusted PCs is to create my own barometer. I use dwarves, elves, humans, gnomes, and halflings as a fair base line for races with no level adjustment and compare the monster races to those. If they meet the same amount/usefulness of abilities than I remove any level adjustment if they have one. If the monster has at least 3 more important powers added to their race I would add a level adjustment of 1. 3 more powers and make them LA 2. It's definitely not an exact science and I suspect that this was the exact some problem that the various writers of the original source books faced. Not only is there no set standard, but you had different authors creating different races who probably thought that other writers were either too liberal or too stringent with the level adjustment that they gave to other creatures and so you end up with a system full of inconsistencies and illogical comparisons.