e6: how to deal with Racial Hit Dice?

[Deaxsa]

I'm stumped. does anyone have good suggestions for dealing with races with RHD? all i've come up with so far is:
1. removing it and re-assigning LA (and then giving a reduced point-buy)
2. gestalting it (though this can be ridiculously powerful, and should be mixed with the above option)

advice?


in fact, this question could be expanded to include any monster with more than 6 rhd. are the allowed? lowered to 6 rhd?
for instance, an adult dragon: what do you do? leave it as is? does it get any bonus feats? do you use different rules for the players than for the NPCs and monsters?

[BornValyrian]

Honestly, Racial Hit Dice was intended to stay in E6.

I'm running an E6 gestalt, and when monsters with 6+ racial hit dice take class levels, I'd gestalt them, but only up to 6 levels of character classes.

[BrokenChord]

I might recommend using the Savage Species progressions, but letting players switch to taking class levels instead at any point in the progression. This might be hard to eyeball for balance, but as a general rule Savage Species has a pretty good rate for how quickly races gain their important stuff so it ought not be too stronk.

[Deaxsa]

Honestly, Racial Hit Dice was intended to stay in E6.

I'm running an E6 gestalt, and when monsters with 6+ racial hit dice take class levels, I'd gestalt them, but only up to 6 levels of character classes.

probably smart. huh. however, i'm not playing Gestalt, so i don't know what to do.

edit: and even if i WERE playing gestalt, what would i do for the normals? is everyone a badass gestalt, or only the main characters? it would make character creation a pain, that's for certain.

[BornValyrian]

probably smart. huh. however, i'm not playing Gestalt, so i don't know what to do.

edit: and even if i WERE playing gestalt, what would i do for the normals? is everyone a badass gestalt, or only the main characters? it would make character creation a pain, that's for certain.

No, not everybody's a badass gestalt. I save that for "main" characters. (for example, each of the player characters are associated with one dragon. I haven't statted them up per se, considering the PC's are level one, but I've mentally added in a few levels of class abilities. For example, a steel dragon astronomer has a few levels of diviner, while a fang dragon who lives for the hunt has a few levels of barbarian or such)

Honestly though, I second BrokenChord's suggestion.

[HunterOfJello]

Check out Ur Priest's guide for monster conversions if the players are interested in playing monsters.

Monsters in general can have more than 6 HD in an E6 game, although they shouldn't have access to spells or SLAs that are of a higher level than what a level 6 character could gain access to.

You should not be editing the stats of monsters for an E6 game unless you're interested in just making weaker versions of the same monsters. Characters with enough feats and wealth in an E6 game can become as strong as much higher level characters anyway.

[heavyfuel]

Currently DMing an E6 game and one of the players wanted to be a pally centaur. We're using the savage species base race with paladin class levels instead of centaur progression.

Works out pretty well.

[Talakeal]

I don't actually use RHD for monsters with class levels as I find it to be completely artificial and pointless.

For a PC most races have an overly punishing LA anyway, there is no need to make them waste a bunch of levels on garbage HD on top of it.

For an NPC, HD are for the most part completely gamist and artificial, just a way to say "this monster belongs on this level of the dungeon!". They served a purpose in earlier editions, when monsters were more simply done, but now that they use the PC creation rules there is no reason why you can't just handle that with racial ability modifiers*.


*The only exception is size, as it doesn't make sense for a gigantic creature to have the same number of HP as its tiny brethren. As a house rule I simply multiply a creatures HD by its base size to get around this.

[Yogibear41]

A player who wants to play as an adult dragon in an e6 game is missing the point imo, a wyrmling sure, but an adult? Yeah not so much.

That being said, just keep the RHD most of the things with 2-3 RHD get some kind of bonus that makes them better than base races anyway, even if they have LA and need to use a reduced point buy as well, if you get rid of the RHD then the monsters can become strictly better than something like a human, dwarf, or orc. Granted there are exceptions, where the LA is absurdly inflated.

Alternatively you could do the savage progressions like people have said, or do a homebrew like these: http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=1r98gml7emak32aq2e0ufaket1&topic=270.0

granted I would suggest not using any of the classes that have over 6 levels, because those kinds of monsters are normally out of the reach of an e6 game anyway, unless its something like the dragon classes because then you can just say the dragon has yet to mature and is still a wyrmling or something.

but taking a monster right out of the book and just removing his RHD seems like a bad decision to me.