How to play a high LA race?

[magicalmagicman]

I'm looking at LA+4 and LA+6 races.

When starting at level 1, how do you play/survive with 1hd all the way until level 5/7? How do you keep up with other players?

[Troacctid]

Well, for starters, you can't actually start at level 1 if you have +4 LA. As soon as you have your first class level, you're considered a 5th level character. So you're actually just starting as a level 5 character in a level 1 party.

But passing over that, it mostly just sucks to be you. The best you can hope for is to use your racial abilities to survive. For instance, if you're a pixie, your Greater Invisibility should keep you safe from targeted attacks.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Hope you gain tremendous defensive powers from your race or be incredibly careful? Low HD is bad for several reasons.

[Inevitability]

At low levels, it kind of sucks to be you, yeah. I'd recommend brewing up a racial class (akin to Complete Psionic's) with your DM, so that you can vary between class levels and level adjustment (which doesn't give you any HD, only racial abilities). Then at higher levels, buy off your LA.

[magicalmagicman]

Alright thanks.

Since I usually play caster, hp doesn't really matter I guess. Except I'll also be 4 levels behind. Whatever, this is what makes it fun XD.

My DM employs a NWN2 start. You can begin with any LA+ race you want at level 1, but you won't level up until you reach that level. So a LA+2 race won't level up until he gets 6,000xp.

This is because he is absolutely adamant about starting at level 1.

[nedz]

You can use Savage Progressions to start at level 1 — you don't even have to take all savage levels. What race are you interested in playing ?

[Sian]

Players Guide to Faerun has a variant rule for playing high LA races in a low level game

you start with one level of your class of choice as normal, but gain negative levels equal to your LA (so in the case of LA+4, it would be 4 negative levels), and each time you would have had leveled up your negative levels drop by one.

For the example LA+4 you'd have
-4 on all Ability checks and Skill Checks
-4 on attack rolls and saving throws
-4 on level checks (including Caster Level checks)
-4 to the DC of any Spell or any other ability that allows for a saving throw
-4 on Natural/Racial Armor (such as Dodge armor bonus against giants)

[Aletheides]

I thought the high LA races (more than +2) usually had racial/monster HD, as well as large stat modifiers and/or racial abilities to make up for it.

Does this ruleset mean you're basically stuck at Level 1, with 1 effective HD, for 10,000+ xp? That would seem a little...punitive to me. You should get the sweet along with the bitter, after all. :smallsmile:

[Fouredged Sword]

My suggestion is that you shouldn't. It is almost impossible to play a race with LA higher than your actual HD. A LA 6 race can almost be played starting at level 12. A LV 4 race can almost be played starting at level 8.

That said, how to play them... Ur-Priest or some other self contained PRC class that advances quickly and provides enough strength to make up for the lost class levels.


LA 5 / Class 5 / Ur-Priest 10 is an almost viable build if you get something really good for those 5LA.

[awa]

it depends to much on the race some have grossly inflate la and are basically unplayable others have sufficient special abilities to hold there own at low to mid op.

with out knowing what your race is any advice is going to have to be very limited.

You said your going to be a caster that will make it even harder because racial powers will rarely stack with your class abilities.

[magicalmagicman]

I don't have a race particularly in mind. I'm just a little bored with all the standard races and wanted to try something weird.

The negative levels sound good, but you gotta houserule a minimum of 1hd, otherwise most monsters won't survive the negative levels.

The interesting monsters are all high LA+ which is why I asked. Why is LA so horrible? I thought the point of LA was to make them equal, not horribly gimp them to unplayability.

[OldTrees1]

I don't have a race particularly in mind. I'm just a little bored with all the standard races and wanted to try something weird.

The negative levels sound good, but you gotta houserule a minimum of 1hd, otherwise most monsters won't survive the negative levels.

The interesting monsters are all high LA+ which is why I asked. Why is LA so horrible? I thought the point of LA was to make them equal, not horribly gimp them to unplayability.

Why is LA so horrible:
1) Because WotC (the people that estimated the LA) underestimated the value of HD
2) Because WotC underestimated the power of classes (including Tier 3, but especially Tier 1-2 classes)
3) Because WotC overestimated the value of the racial abilities responsible for the LA estimate
(I suspect they estimate the earliest level they wanted to deal with an ability rather than estimating how many levels an ability was worth)

If one were playing a game roughly balanced around Tier 3-4, and if the DM estimated correct LA/RHD values for the races, then lots of interesting monsters would be fine.

[nedz]

I don't have a race particularly in mind. I'm just a little bored with all the standard races and wanted to try something weird.

The negative levels sound good, but you gotta houserule a minimum of 1hd, otherwise most monsters won't survive the negative levels.

The interesting monsters are all high LA+ which is why I asked. Why is LA so horrible? I thought the point of LA was to make them equal, not horribly gimp them to unplayability.

This can be made good with an experienced DM. I had a player recently who wanted to play a Nixie which is LA+4. Since his primary class will be Warlock I wasn't worried about power level and did suggest that he play a Half-fey Warlock where we would customise Half-fey into Half-nixie. He didn't want to go for that so I ended up creating a savage progressions for Nixie. I replaced the LA with racial HD to improve things a little but it's not over-powered. So far he has taken one of these levels - along with 2 Warlock levels. The character is functional but it is, currently, an island hopping game so the water breathing stuff is useful.

[Segev]

A slightly better metric to use when permitting monsters-as-characters is to consider just letting them treat CR as their ECL. Whatever their HD, higher or lower, is irrelevant: the monster "package" is balanced as a CR-as-level character.

So an Ogre would be ECL 3 before any class levels. Ignore the +2 LA, and that he has 4 HD.

This isn't perfect. Even ignoring the fact that CR is not always well-designed for estimating the power level and challenge of a monster, there are things which have CR adjustments that don't work well on their own. Lycanthropes, for example, really do require something more than the template's inherent LA or CR to be fairly judged; the HD of the animal are important. (You could just take the CR of the animal and add it to the CR of the template, though.)

[Crake]

I run an optional gestalt system which allows players to gestalt either classes or (in cases like this) LA to allow them to play the higher LA races/templates without completely crippling themselves. I do force people to use savage progressions though (or homebrew some if they don't exist for the particular thing they want to run), so you wouldn't start off at LA +4, but would eventually get there.

if you're interested, there's a link in my signature to it.

[Inevitability]

A slightly better metric to use when permitting monsters-as-characters is to consider just letting them treat CR as their ECL. Whatever their HD, higher or lower, is irrelevant: the monster "package" is balanced as a CR-as-level character.

So an Ogre would be ECL 3 before any class levels. Ignore the +2 LA, and that he has 4 HD.

When you think about it, this is pretty logical. An ogre is supposed to be a CR3 monster, and so is a 3rd-level human wizard. Of course, whether either succeeds at that is another matter.

[Fouredged Sword]

When you think about it, this is pretty logical. An ogre is supposed to be a CR3 monster, and so is a 3rd-level human wizard. Of course, whether either succeeds at that is another matter.

Pathfinder does basically this. It gets weird that monsters become the best skill monkies because they have higher skill caps than the rogue due to having HD higher than their ECL.

Here is how I would play it.

A monster has a ECL that equale to the highest value of the following.

His or her HD. A 3HD creature is a 3HD character is at least ECL 3.

His or her CR. A 3CR creature is the same threat as a 3CR character is a level 3 character is ECL3.

or finally

His or her spellcasting progression. A Nymph can cast as a 7th level druid and so is roughly as powerful as a 7th level druid and should not have a ECL lower than a 7th level druid.

This works out pretty well to balance things as well as they can be balanced. No system is one size fits all though, so a DM needs to be willing to work with players to make things happen.

[Demidos]

Pathfinder does basically this. It gets weird that monsters become the best skill monkies because they have higher skill caps than the rogue due to having HD higher than their ECL.

Here is how I would play it.

A monster has a ECL that equale to the highest value of the following.

His or her HD. A 3HD creature is a 3HD character is at least ECL 3.

His or her CR. A 3CR creature is the same threat as a 3CR character is a level 3 character is ECL3.

or finally

His or her spellcasting progression. A Nymph can cast as a 7th level druid and so is roughly as powerful as a 7th level druid and should not have a ECL lower than a 7th level druid.

This works out pretty well to balance things as well as they can be balanced. No system is one size fits all though, so a DM needs to be willing to work with players to make things happen.

(except undead, for which 1/2 HD is used) /nitpick

[Zanos]

A slightly better metric to use when permitting monsters-as-characters is to consider just letting them treat CR as their ECL. Whatever their HD, higher or lower, is irrelevant: the monster "package" is balanced as a CR-as-level character.

So an Ogre would be ECL 3 before any class levels. Ignore the +2 LA, and that he has 4 HD.

This isn't perfect. Even ignoring the fact that CR is not always well-designed for estimating the power level and challenge of a monster, there are things which have CR adjustments that don't work well on their own. Lycanthropes, for example, really do require something more than the template's inherent LA or CR to be fairly judged; the HD of the animal are important. (You could just take the CR of the animal and add it to the CR of the template, though.)
As pedantic as this is, you might want to go with CR+1 or +2. A CR 3 monster is roughly equal to a Level 3 PC, but by making that monster a PC, you're giving it PC base ability scores on top of its racial modifiers, and PC WBL with which to outfit itself.

[ZamielVanWeber]

As pedantic as this is, you might want to go with CR+1 or +2. A CR 3 monster is roughly equal to a Level 3 PC, but by making that monster a PC, you're giving it PC base ability scores on top of its racial modifiers, and PC WBL with which to outfit itself.

Some of the particularly effective anthropomorphic animals do this anyways. At CR 3 vs baleen whale's ECL 3 the ogre only comes out ahead on skill caps. Whale gets larger buffs to more stats, no penalties to stats, larger natural armor, and monstrous humanoid hitdice are better than giant hitdice.