Why are Savage Species monster classes so underpowered?

[Conradine]

I can understand that the book does not take in account optimization and minmaxing, but making a basic frost giant a level 18 character? Or a fire giant a level 19? Almost every monster class is leagues behind even a non optimized standard character. Has anyone else noticed that?

[Nousos]

I'm sure everyone has noticed that. It's literally HD+LA stretched across a bunch of levels. Taking a monster at full HD and LA isn't likely to be very good at that ECL, why would dividing it for lower levels be any better?

Edit-Savage species is 90% crap anyway, the only reason I ever open it is to double check the rules for necklace of natural attacks or to glance at the forgettable prcs.

[liquidformat]

I can understand that the book does not take in account optimization and minmaxing, but making a basic frost giant a level 18 character? Or a fire giant a level 19? Almost every monster class is leagues behind even a non optimized standard character. Has anyone else noticed that?

The issue is really 1, most monsters suck for their RHD, and 2 most monsters suck even more for their LA. If you look at the LA adjustment threads it highlights this fact very well.

[Troacctid]

They're not intended to be used by PCs, so they're not balanced for PCs. Or rather, they're actively underbalanced to disincentivize PC use. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

[NomGarret]

Savage Species is one of many, many 3.x books that tried new and interesting things and, since they were new and didn’t have a lot to compare it against, underpowered them. ToM and MoI are good examples of this, as is the Hexblade.

[Darg]

Just do what a lot of other people do, remove the LA. Or be like me and give the LA HD with no class features. If the race is extra weak I like to throw in a bonus feat for every odd level of LA HD (usually fighter/monster feats, but I have been convinced to allow others for RP reasons).

I don't like removing LA, but I also think it is too harsh of a penalty as is. Especially as others have pointed out that monster HD is 99% of the time underpowered vs PC classes. I do the same for racial LA. The delay in class progression is enough of a penalty to gain the benefits of a race with LA.

[Rater202]

In the 3.5 days, the designers wanted to give people the option to be monsters or non-traditional races but didn't actually want people to do it.

Hence absolutely punishing amounts of LA and/or racial hit-dice for any race that was even slightly better than the core ones.

[NomGarret]

Just do what a lot of other people do, remove the LA. Or be like me and give the LA HD with no class features. If the race is extra weak I like to throw in a bonus feat for every odd level of LA HD (usually fighter/monster feats, but I have been convinced to allow others for RP reasons).

I don't like removing LA, but I also think it is too harsh of a penalty as is. Especially as others have pointed out that monster HD is 99% of the time underpowered vs PC classes. I do the same for racial LA. The delay in class progression is enough of a penalty to gain the benefits of a race with LA.

This method is nice since it keeps high powered abilities level gated by default. No one gets Plane Shift faster. It has the extra plus of making things easier to understand. You get the same feat progression, ASI progression, and skill progression as everyone else. And yeah, dragon or outsider hd are pretty good, but a few extra hd of giant over the course of 15 levels isn’t going to break anything.

[Conradine]

Although a Feral Treant could be almost competitive, all in all.

[Malphegor]

I’ve always felt the fix would be to make it like of the web savage progressions stuff and let players be ‘incomplete’ monsters who only possess a small chunk of their racial abilities.

That way you can play something cool but without feeling forced to take what increasingly feels like a waste of levels

[Dalmosh]

I’ve always felt the fix would be to make it like of the web savage progressions stuff and let players be ‘incomplete’ monsters who only possess a small chunk of their racial abilities.

When I first used SS I thought that was the rule anyway, and with hindsight that was way more balanced and fun to play with than any subsequent legal monster PCs in my games have been.

I've used... illegally built wizard/incubus - was a great and very memorable PC Succubus/incubus is one of the most playable classes in SS though, to be fair.
Ogre... mechanically effective powerhouse for first three levels, but player was frustrated at how slow it took to attain Large size, and how limited it was vs his character concept. He wanted a wizard's apprentice ogre savant that aped other classes, so with hindsight, a gestalt with Factotum would have been a better (if even slower) way to go.
Complete Psionic Thri-kreen racial progression... level 1 was unplayably weak.
Libris Mortis Wight... this one felt way too weak too, player wanted to be a barbarian wight, so again, gestalting would have helped balance this and better represented his character concept.

These days I try to modify and realign these classes with the LA reassignment thread when they come up. I like the idea behind SS, but its execution is atrocious.
Notably, the LM monster classes don't actually specify that you need to complete them before taking other levels - which makes them much more useable.

[Darg]

When I first used SS I thought that was the rule anyway, and with hindsight that was way more balanced and fun to play with than any subsequent legal monster PCs in my games have been.

I've used... illegally built wizard/incubus - was a great and very memorable PC Succubus/incubus is one of the most playable classes in SS though, to be fair.
Ogre... mechanically effective powerhouse for first three levels, but player was frustrated at how slow it took to attain Large size, and how limited it was vs his character concept. He wanted a wizard's apprentice ogre savant that aped other classes, so with hindsight, a gestalt with Factotum would have been a better (if even slower) way to go.
Complete Psionic Thri-kreen racial progression... level 1 was unplayably weak.
Libris Mortis Wight... this one felt way too weak too, player wanted to be a barbarian wight, so again, gestalting would have helped balance this and better represented his character concept.

These days I try to modify and realign these classes with the LA reassignment thread when they come up. I like the idea behind SS, but its execution is atrocious.
Notably, the LM monster classes don't actually specify that you need to complete them before taking other levels - which makes them much more useable.

How well do you think normal HD monster class progression and then add extra monster HD for LA would do? I've never done the SS monster progression. I was thinking this would speed up the progression, have feats at the appropriate levels and wouldn't mess with BAB progression. Sadly the SS minotaur example left out powerful charge as a benefit which I think is important to a minotaur.

To clarify, you would get the benefits of a minotaur over 6 levels with 2 extra HD with no class special abilities for a total of 8 levels as an example.

[Dalmosh]

Sounds great to me. Its still likely going to be on the low optimisation side, but much more playable. Depending on your party, I'd compare level to level how well your adjusted Minotaur stacks up against an equivalently levelled Barbarian, as a point of balance. If it's looking clearly worse, you may need to tweak further.

I've also fiddled around with Pixie a bit, which is salvageable. Pixie is just about playable as is, since it gets some quite powerful low-level spell-likes other classes can't pull off.

[AvatarVecna]

Savage Progressions are HD + LA stretched out from lvl 1 to lvl X. They're built on the assumption that WotC-assigned LA is always worth what you're getting in exchange. It's the idea that the racial features and stat boosts are so good that it makes up for not having class features, that (for example) playing a 6 HD/LA +6 monster will be just as useful as Wizard 12, that the same monster with 8 levels of cleric will be just as useful as a cleric 20.

That's not to say that LA is always bad or unwarranted, but...well, there's a reason the LA assignment thread rarely gives a monster the same LA that WotC did.