Level Adjustment...adjustments?

[Sir Chuckles]

I'm setting up my house rules for a campaign I am soon to be running.
Thus, I'm curious, what common changes to certain Templates and Race's LA do you do?

I'm not asking about changes to the templates themselves, or "remove it entirely", I'm saying that Feral should not be a +1, and asking what should it be?

[Sian]

Use the Level Adjustment payoff rules from Unearthed Arcana. It would effectively leave the characters picking small LA's, slightly behind the rest of the party without it being as incapacitating as running without the payoff rules, as they'll keep inching closer if you give exp as DMG suggests instead of giving a flat number all around.

[frogglesmash]

Use the Level Adjustment payoff rules from Unearthed Arcana. It would effectively leave the characters picking small LA's, slightly behind the rest of the party without it being as incapacitating as running without the payoff rules, as they'll keep inching closer if you give exp as DMG suggests instead of giving a flat number all around.

This does help with most templates/races that LA's of 1 to 3, but anything beyond that is effectively unplayable. Something I've considered doing, but have never had the chance to implement myself, is to use the Savage Progression rules as written, but also have every level of a Savage Progression give Hit Dice, Saves, BAB, and skill points (you'd probably have to write up the skill lists yourself) as appropriate for your creature type. I'm not sure how well this would work, but I think it would get rid of some of the more glaring issues with high LA. I've also heard good things about how Pathfinder treats LA, though I've never looked at it myself.

[Orderic]

Change the LA of Incarnate Construct to +0 if a warforged takes it.

ALso, if you want your players to be able to use some of the more expensive templates, you might consider giving them free level adjustment.

[Yael]

Change the LA of Incarnate Construct to +0 if a warforged takes it.

ALso, if you want your players to be able to use some of the more expensive templates, you might consider giving them free level adjustment.

This.

It happened once, where a player just messed up with templates, adding first two templates, then Incarnating it to reduce the LA by 2, and having a character with a lot of templates and very low LA...

[martixy]

Start at level 3 or 4.
Give 1 free LA.
Use the buy-off rules on top.

And voila - more flexible game.

On the flip side:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?394344-Optional-Gestalt-LA-gestalting&p=18696663
(Crake, still haven't playtested it, but I keep peddling this, because it's what I would have come up with if I decided to come up with something like this.)

[Chronos]

Quoth frogglesmash:

Something I've considered doing, but have never had the chance to implement myself, is to use the Savage Progression rules as written, but also have every level of a Savage Progression give Hit Dice, Saves, BAB, and skill points (you'd probably have to write up the skill lists yourself) as appropriate for your creature type.
The thing to be careful of there is that not all racial HD are created equal, and that's theoretically one of the things taken into account in balancing their LAs. Something like animal or ooze RHD are little better than LA, and so giving them out instead is a minor issue balance-wise, but dragon or outsider RHD are, by themselves, probably equivalent to about a Tier 4 class. Give out that in addition to all of the goodies those creature types usually have (spells, SLAs, breath weapon, etc.), and it's probably overpowered.

[Brova]

Probably something like this.

Templates: Drop LA by one, limit of one +0 template per person.

Races without RHD: Drop LA, can't take a template.

Races with RHD: Can be a character starting a level = CR, some exceptions for races that are under-CR'ed (Dragons) or have extra powerful abilities (Mind Flayers), maybe use PF advancement.

[NomGarret]

The thing to be careful of there is that not all racial HD are created equal, and that's theoretically one of the things taken into account in balancing their LAs. Something like animal or ooze RHD are little better than LA, and so giving them out instead is a minor issue balance-wise, but dragon or outsider RHD are, by themselves, probably equivalent to about a Tier 4 class. Give out that in addition to all of the goodies those creature types usually have (spells, SLAs, breath weapon, etc.), and it's probably overpowered.

You could work out a tier system pretty quick. Category one (animals and monstrous humanoids) grant full RHD. Category two (incl fey and magical beasts) grant 3/4 of LA as RHD. Category three (dragons and outsiders) grant 1/2.

[OldTrees1]

I'm setting up my house rules for a campaign I am soon to be running.
Thus, I'm curious, what common changes to certain Templates and Race's LA do you do?

I'm not asking about changes to the templates themselves, or "remove it entirely", I'm saying that Feral should not be a +1, and asking what should it be?

I count the number of interesting things and give it +1LA or 2RHD(player's preference noted) per interesting thing(1 free interesting thing for races)

Examples:
Feral - Improved Grab, Pounce(actually I give this for free to Martials), Fast Healing
So that would be +3LA(or +2LA at my table due to free pounce).

Winged - Flight, Perfect Manuverability
So that would be +2LA.

[Chronos]

That depends on how you count "interesting things", and assumes that all interesting things are of equal value.

[marphod]

Another option is how E6 treats LA -- the higher your LA, the lower the number of points in your point buy. You have to keep an eye out for templates that add more skill points than they cost, but it is an alternate method.

[Sir Chuckles]

Alright, I'll do a bit more clarification to make the advice more pertinent to me.

I am running a 4d6v1 iron rolls randomized dungeon delve beginning at 5th level. The level five start is to avoid early game mass graves, and to make the poor guy who rolls 7 Con less likely to abandon his application right after rolling.

Probably should've led with that.

[Enran]

I always, always, always recommend using the Pathfinder method. Just make CR and ECL equivalent, with automatic buyoff every 3 levels up to half CR. So let's say you want a Minotaur Barbarian. Under the normal rules, a Minotaur Barbarian 1 is ECL 9. This is way weaker in almost every conceivable way than a normal ECL 9 character, even other Barbarians, and frankly Minotaur are some of the few in 3.5 who actually have fairly reasonable LA (oftentimes they'll have nearly as much or more LA as RHD, which is entirely ludicrous in every case with more than 1 RHD). Using the Pathfinder rules, since Minotaur are CR 4, adding one level of Barbarian would make them an appropriate ECL 5 character, thus applicable for your campaign. Just as the most common example.

[OldTrees1]

That depends on how you count "interesting things", and assumes that all interesting things are of equal value.

The more sophisticated version has you count interesting abilities/traits by how worth a level they are to you. While this still depends on how you count "interesting things", that bit of subjectivity correlates closer to what a particular DM/Table would want than any purely objective measure.