Racial Level Adjustment - Bad Idea or Poorly Implemented? [Archive]

AmberVael

2021-06-06, 05:30 PM

I've seen a lot of people on this forum complaining about level adjustment, and treating any creature with more than LA +1 or so as pretty much unplayable unless you can do something to get rid of your LA at some point.

Do you think the idea of level adjustment is just plain bad? Or was it implemented poorly (ie assigning the wrong LA to races)?

How would you recommend balancing things when one PC's racial features are substantially stronger than another's?

It's just a bad idea, yeah. Even if the amount of adjustment was very carefully balanced (it isn't) and the actual benefits of level adjusted templates/monsters/etc didn't frequently throw the math out of balance (they do), it would be a clunky and imperfect fit. No matter how well you craft a square, it's not going to be the right fit for a round hole.

So the main problem is not having the same hit dice as everyone else?

That's a good chunk of it. D&D is really built around classes and their math (things like HD, saves, BAB progression, caster progression, etc), and LA just throws that out the window. LA then alters the math in its own way (higher than expected abilities is a real big one here) which just skews things worse.

There's a number of ways to tackle this problem, but one way or another they really just involve converting things that aren't intended for players into things they ARE intended for players - monster classes are the big one, which makes sense. If the problem is that it doesn't follow the format of a class, just make it a class. But don't do it like the silly Savage Species ones, you need to go the full mile and make an actual class that works like all the other classes, not try and divide HD and LA into a class-like format. Rite Publishing has a line of products called In The Company Of that does this fairly well, and there's a number of homebrewed monster classes I've seen floating around.

My favorite take on this was from the now defunct Legend RPG, which divided classes into ability sets called Tracks (so as a quick example, a Rogue might have three tracks, one that had a bunch of Sneak Attack features, another for stealth related abilities, and a third for... I dunno, lets say social skills.) You could mix and swap these tracks in a system similar to multiclassing. A character with a bunch of traditionally monster related abilities would just pick up a track that had monster abilities in it. No LA, not even a monster specific class - you could be a monstrous spellcaster or fighter or rogue, you'd just be giving up one set of class abilities for a set of monster abilities instead.

Elves

2021-06-06, 05:43 PM

Savage Species style monster classes are the way to do it IMO. Attaching HD, skill points and base bonuses to all LA makes it easier to balance against traditional classes, and the distinction between RHD and LA can be confusing for new players.

loky1109

2021-06-06, 06:20 PM

Why did you say "or"?

Darg

2021-06-06, 06:40 PM

LA is definitely poorly implemented. The loss of HD is the most crippling factor. Considering you have tier 4-5 classes, missing out on caster levels is not a big factor in balance.

For a while now I have been using level adjustment as progression HD for level progression. Basically, the PC has all the racial traits from level 1 (screw savage progression) and gains additional racial HD or featureless HD. If the creature has RHD, then the LA HD increase the RHD like bonus HD would. If the creature does not have RHD, then it gives class HD minus feature progression and does not count toward HD limits or class level adjustments.

As an example is a 3rd level drow fighter would be the equivalent of a 3rd level fighter minus a bonus feat and the next level progression would look like fighter1/drow2/fighter1. At 3rd level they would still be under the "2HD or less" category of color spray and their spell resistance would be 12. They are also unable to multiclass until they max out the racial LA levels.

So far it has been doing well, but we have not tried anything ridiculous beyond half-dragon or lizardfolk.

AvatarVecna

2021-06-06, 06:56 PM

Level Adjustment is inherently unbalanced (barring some edge cases that largely don't exist in RAW) because it's a linear adjustment in a game where progression is expected to be exponential. Even if LAs were correctly calibrated, which they are mostly not, the value of a level is simply not the same when that level is level 14 as when it is level 7. For a 5th level character, a +2 LA means going from facing Trolls to facing Hill Giants. For a 14th level character, it means going from facing Astral Devas to facing Horned Devils. There's no template or race out there that does both of those things, and it's difficult to imagine one that could (incidentally, this is the same reason PrCs that nerf your casting progression tend to suck).

You'd basically need a rework of how monsters are designed entirely - like every monster having its own "savage progression" that gives a bunch of abilities based on attributes and Hit Dice, such that they will continue to improve even if you start taking levels in PC classes instead of monster levels. And even that's not going to be perfect because honestly a lot of monsters just aren't complicated or capable enough to earn their HD or their CR on the PC side of things. Case in point: the tarrasque is CR 20 and HD 48, but calling it equivalent to a 20th/48th lvl character is laughable. If you tried to make a playable tarrasque class, it would need a major overhaul to be viable.

...so basically you'd need something that looks like Oslecamo's homebrew. Which...anybody familiar with that stuff probably already knows that there's still some pretty significant power/versatility disparity in those, such that some monsters are barely worth even considering.

Darg

2021-06-06, 07:24 PM

Elves

2021-06-06, 07:27 PM

AvatarVecna

2021-06-06, 07:35 PM

HD =/= LA. LA is the annoying XP tax that cripples playable races and significantly reducing the level appropriate CR of encounters without a rule stating such. It works fine for opponents, but for players it is a major penalty that does more to unbalance negatively than to actually balance anything.

Yes I am in fact aware of what Level Adjustment is, I did not jump into a thread about it to give unrelated advice. I am saying that assigning a flat number for LA can't really work if the monster overall isn't really comparable to the right number of class levels, and that making them comparable would require a more or less complete overhaul of how monsters are designed.

Using the tarrasque as an example, it doesn't matter what LA you give it: it it not equivalent to a lvl 48 character as-is, so you couldn't do HD + LA to approximate power, not unless LA was some big negative number. Even if this were Pathfinder and we were basing things on CR (the way PF handles templates), the tarrasque doesn't really earn its CR either - a tarrasque with no class levels is not equivalent to a wizard 20, and a tarrasque with 10 wizard levels is not equivalent to a wizard 30. Again, the template-like CR adjustment could only work if either the monster was changed or the LA-equivalent of CR change was a negative number.

Morphic tide

2021-06-06, 08:11 PM

I'd say it's primarily poorly implemented, as monster-math overlaps PC-math, so in any situation where a monster operates directly in a PC space it's double-dipping on number boosters somewhere. Virtually always AC and health because of Natural Armor and Constitution bonuses, often accuracy and damage from Strength modifiers and size, loads of monsters have abilities that are feats elsewhere. Most people look at a +2 Strength advantage on a melee character as +1 to attack, damage, and Grapple checks, but in point-buy +2 Strength turns into 6 freed-up points.

A +4 Strength advantage? You can literally take a dumped Intelligence to 16 and lose nothing. +4 Strength is a very small number for monsters. +8 Strength to have +4 over a Water Orc is still small! Even after the takings of BAB disadvantage this often kicks in!

To demonstrate this, let us look a an Awakened Brown Bear in the capacity of a Martial. 8 Animal RHD for +16 Str, +2 Dex, +8 Con, +0 Int, +2 Wis, and -2 Cha. On top of having +8 to attack and damage in exchange for your -2 BAB, should you wish to simply keep your assigned 18 Str, you gain a further +5 Natural Armor and Improved Grab, which takes three feats to emulate.

But since the point of this is to bring up how monsters start twisting game assumptions when you bleed off your peaks, let's say you only put a 14 in Strength and Constitution against a Water Orc's 18 and 16, giving you 30 and 22 while the hyper-specialized Water Orc frontliner has 22 and 18, rounding out 28 point-buy with 10 Dex on the Orc. Still +2 to attack rolls, +4 to damage and +2 hp/hd, while you've banked 14 points to put elsewhere. You take your Intelligence to 13 for 5 points, Dexterity to 13 for 3, and Wisdom to 16 for 6, for a final array of Str 30/Dex 13/Con 22/Int 13/Wis 16/Cha 6, against the Water Orc's Str 22/Dex 10/Con 18/Int 6/Wis 6/Cha 6.

The Water Orc must be a very blunt Big Dumb Fighter, most likely a Barbarian to close the Strength gap, and a significantly more fragile one for all they possess the wonder of two-handing thanks to the Natural Armor and Rage HP being lost first. The Bear, meanwhile, has free access to Wisdom-based classes, including the Swordsage and Psychic Warrior. Note that those two classes lose exactly zero BAB for doing this, as does any other 3/4ths BAB class. Full BAB is there for Power Attack and iteratives, not for being able to hit things.

Again, this is an Awakened Brown Bear. A freaking Bear, after actual Hit Dice boosting Awaken. And it is perfectly able to half-ass its Strength with a fourteen, ignore Improved Grapple, and still be a sensible Grappler as PCs go, to put all those savings into broadening your activities so you aren't suffering the horror of being a Grappler in 3.5.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-06, 09:45 PM

You'd basically need a rework of how monsters are designed entirely - like every monster having its own "savage progression" that gives a bunch of abilities based on attributes and Hit Dice, such that they will continue to improve even if you start taking levels in PC classes instead of monster levels.

I think you want to go the other way. Most of the monsters that it's reasonable to play as PCs are reasonably close to PCs already. You don't want to write a Hill Giant class that you can take levels in to keep a Hill Giant PCs up with the rest of the party, you want to arrange the rules so that a Hill Giant can simply be a 7th level Warrior with the "Hill Giant" race (which, rather than a level adjustment, has a level minimum and charges you a number of feats or something). That leaves you with three big problem areas:

A) Monsters That Are Not Suitable As PCs. An Iron Golem does not have free will (or intelligence). A Warg does not have thumbs. A Roc is too big to feasibly operate in the majority of adventuring environments. Even if you can elegantly join creatures like this to a PC power progression, they don't really make sense as PCs. My inclination here is to not worry too much about it.
B) Puzzle Monsters. A Troll is intelligent, has free will, has thumbs, and can navigate pretty much anywhere a human can. But the only things that threaten a Troll are Fire and Acid. That means that any encounter a Troll PC faces has to either negate his regeneration (which is presumably the reason to play a Troll in the first place), or has its threat level sharply reduced. Creatures like the Medusa have similar issues. I'm not really sure what to do here.
C) Full PC Monsters. Unlike a Hill Giant or even a Babau, a Dragon or Mind Flayer is difficult to conceptualize as a member of a PC class that is anything other than "Dragon" or "Mind Flayer". I think here you have to kind of suck it up and do the work of writing full progressions for the monsters, but fortunately these sorts of creatures are relatively rare.

If you tried to make a playable tarrasque class, it would need a major overhaul to be viable.

The problem with the Tarrasque isn't that it's mechanically unworkable as a PC, it's that it's conceptually unworkable as a PC. The Tarrasque is too big to go in a dungeon, basically an animal, and just generally unsuited for the overwhelming majority of campaigns. I don't think it's a failure for your "monsters as PCs" system to not support the Tarrasque. The issue is when it's impossible to play a Stone Giant or a Erinyes, creatures that conceptually little different from a PC with some pre-determined magic items.

Quertus

2021-06-07, 10:07 AM

Bad idea, or poorly implemented? Hmmm… both? Neither?

So, let's look at 2e. In 2e, Multiclass characters took the best of both classes (or, occasionally, the average of both classes, or "whatever they took first", but, for simplicity, let's just pretend it was "best"). But monsters? Monsters with levels took the sum of both their monster abilities and their class abilities. So, in 3e parlance, a Fighter 4 Wizard 4 would have +4 BAB, and 4/1/4 base saves. But a 4 HD Dragon / Wizard 4 would have +6 BAB, and 5/5/8 saves.

They weren't playing by the same rules.

But when a player was playing a monster as a PC? The ones that were converted to "playable races" lost everything that they got from being a monster. So, one would expect a Dragon Wizard 4 PC to have +2 BAB, and 1/1/4 base saves.

Obviously, this meant that you had to change a creature's stats based on whether it was a PC or an NPC. Which was bad.

3e developers went in with a "balance is king" mindset. They trampled on a lot of fun in the name of balance (and *mostly* failed horrifically (while succeeding in a way that they didn't intend)), and tried to make monsters both playable (as their 2e base had shown interest in such), and make leveled monsters play by the same rules. For this, it was obvious that an ancient Dragon wasn't balanced as a 1st level character.

Which led to the obvious question, at what level *was* it balanced?

The problem with this line of thought is, even if the Tarrasque were balanced as a level 20 character, a Tarrasque Wizard 10 *wouldn't* be balanced as a level 30 character. This is a problem with their unified, "total level" XP chart, compared to the 2e "current class" XP charts.

Concerns about them not being able to play the same game are… something of a red herring. The BDF can't get to another Plane, the Pyromancer can't get to another plane *or* hurt fire creatures. Characters are rarely playing the same game as one another. That's more what "Tier" they are, than how they balance against one another in actual play.

Psyren

2021-06-18, 01:15 PM

Pathfinder's solution was pretty simple - raise the floor. By powering up the core races, you expand the design space for less common/more exotic races with a wider range of interesting or iconic racial abilities to still be "LA 0" and thus not punitive to play.

The primary way it did this was having most base races give an overall/average stat adjustment of +2, rather than 3.5's +0. This gives more design space because you can now have something with an overall of 0 (or even -2) that has advantageous or unique abilities in other areas. It also differentiates between races that have the +2 somewhere specific vs. the ones who can float it to any stat, another advantage.

I don't think the idea of a racial LA is inherently bad; you need to give a GM some way of determining what level of party a Minotaur Fighter or Pixie Rogue can reasonably fit into. But 3.5 has the twin problems of "acceptable player race" having too narrow a band at low levels, while simultaneously causing them to fall too far behind at high levels when Class begins to >>> Race. PF1 isn't perfect, but their refinement of the system is definitely a point in their favor.

liquidformat

2021-06-18, 01:30 PM

Zanos

2021-06-18, 01:31 PM

I don't think LA was a bad idea. Actually, a system that allows you to play a dragon with a human fighter is a great idea. But I do think abilities were overvalued in many cases and the way its applied is not good because of the way HD work. A +4 LA character is legal in a level 5 party, but he's probably not going to get very far with 1 HD worth of hit points. But the idea of LA in general opens the floor for characters who have more natural strengths being balanced against parties that have more acquired abilities(aka class levels). Savage progressions were a good idea and work much better, but I think they would be better tweaked in most cases by replacing LA levels with dead levels that still grant a hit die so you at least are keeping up on skills/hp/bab. The games balance falls apart a lot when characters have many fewer HD than their ECL. But a dragon is just more powerful, baseline, than a human. If you want to include one in a party you need playing a dragon to have some cost to keep it in line with the others.

TL;DR: less LA, more monster classes. The issue is that building out a class for every monster is hard.

B) Puzzle Monsters. A Troll is intelligent, has free will, has thumbs, and can navigate pretty much anywhere a human can. But the only things that threaten a Troll are Fire and Acid. That means that any encounter a Troll PC faces has to either negate his regeneration (which is presumably the reason to play a Troll in the first place), or has its threat level sharply reduced. Creatures like the Medusa have similar issues. I'm not really sure what to do here.
I get what you're saying here, but I don't think trolls are a good example. Regeneration is actually pretty limited. Once the trolls allies are dead it's pretty trivial to keep him down until you can use a torch coup de grace to finish him off, cut off his limbs, stick his head in a bucket of water, or just chain him up and let him starve to death. Something like a ghost might be a better example, where it's basically impossible to permanently keep down without resolving its trauma.

Concerns about them not being able to play the same game are… something of a red herring. The BDF can't get to another Plane, the Pyromancer can't get to another plane *or* hurt fire creatures. Characters are rarely playing the same game as one another. That's more what "Tier" they are, than how they balance against one another in actual play.
To be a bit snide for a moment, D&D doesn't have Pyromancers. If you've locked all of your spell selection and learning to fire spells and find yourself unable to harm fire elementals, that's your fault, not the systems. You can have a character concept that specializes in fire spells without being cripplingly overspecialized to the point that where your main trick doesn't work you are literally useless.

The fighter not being able to transit planes I think is a more serious issue. Arguably a balanced system would defend character niches, so maybe it's okay that the fighter can't transit the cosmos on his own power. But he should be good at something else to compensate, and usually, well, isn't.

Pathfinder's solution was pretty simple - raise the floor. By powering up the core races, you expand the design space for less common/more exotic races with a wider range of interesting or iconic racial abilities to still be "LA 0" and thus not punitive to play.
It depends on how you want your game to look. Should a more substantial portion of your characters strength come from their race? There are arguments in both direction, but I personally think your species should be a minor factor for most PCs.

Doug Lampert

2021-06-18, 01:53 PM

I rather think dumping LA and making them instead worth x amount of experience, more like necropolitan. That does a better job of representing the fact that its powerful and expensive at level 1 but rather cheap at level 15.

That was how the 3.0 DMG did it, from experience in play, it's WORSE than the 3.5 LA method.

The one time XP cost leaves you with massive ability improvements, when does +4 Int for a wizard or +8 strength for a fighter become useless or trivial in value?

If it did NOT stack with ability enhancers, then it would in fact become low value, but things like higher scores and natural armor stack with everything else and are golden forever.

Having LA be too high at high levels is less of a problem than having all your character's played from level 1 be completely overshadowed by a new character introduced at level 10 with 1 level worth of XP cost for a half-celestial template.

Psyren

2021-06-18, 02:24 PM

It depends on how you want your game to look. Should a more substantial portion of your characters strength come from their race? There are arguments in both direction, but I personally think your species should be a minor factor for most PCs.

Even in Pathfinder, it is minor, though. It just happens to be less minor early on.

Having race matter early in a character's career is important for verisimilitude, because it helps to explain the state of the world and make it feel more real and immersive. If for example dwarves don't make great sorcerers mechanically, that helps support the setting element that few dwarves become sorcerers. Note that this isn't saying YOUR dwarf can't become a sorcerer, but it does inform how your family or clan or even random dwarves you meet out in the world might treat you.

The same is true of elven wizards and halfling rogues being naturally good at those jobs, thus resulting in more of them in the setting, more organizations containing or even started by them, etc.

Zanos

2021-06-18, 02:45 PM

Even in Pathfinder, it is minor, though. It just happens to be less minor early on.

Having race matter early in a character's career is important for verisimilitude, because it helps to explain the state of the world and make it feel more real and immersive. If for example dwarves don't make great sorcerers mechanically, that helps support the setting element that few dwarves become sorcerers. Note that this isn't saying YOUR dwarf can't become a sorcerer, but it does inform how your family or clan or even random dwarves you meet out in the world might treat you.

The same is true of elven wizards and halfling rogues being naturally good at those jobs, thus resulting in more of them in the setting, more organizations containing or even started by them, etc.
I think you can still provide that with less meaningful adjustments to PCs. Dwarves are master craftsmen because they get +2 to craft skills related to metal, you could maybe make elves more common as wizards by giving them +2 to spellcraft to scribe spells or something like that. Minor skill bonuses can go a long way to hitting important skill DCs at low levels but probably aren't going to impact PCs much, while stuff like stackable attribute bonuses are always going to be a big deal. But the skill bonuses can impact the setting significantly; it means a dwarf could get the same results as a human without assistance or masterwork tools, or a an elf wizard can scribe spells in their book without failure with less skill ranks or intelligence.

Psyren

2021-06-18, 03:41 PM

Eh, if you restrict racial differences to just be tiny skill bonuses then that's pretty boring from where I'm sitting. I'd rather have both the skill bonus AND the ability score adjustment (and saving throw boost, weapon familiarity, magic affinity etc.).

In addition, skill bonuses aren't good for encompassing every cultural or ancestral difference. Gnomes have an affinity for illusion magic, but simply giving them an Arcana bonus doesn't work for that, while giving them bonuses to spellcraft and arcana but only for illusion effects is too granular. (I don't know which would be more annoying, the player constantly asking "is that an illusion?" before rolling every time, or the GM now forced to look up the schools involved with any magic effect they want to introduce to make sure no illusions are involved, for as long as the gnome player is present.)

More racials also means more things that can be swapped out to create textured subraces.

Elves

2021-06-18, 06:29 PM

The primary way it did this was having most base races give an overall/average stat adjustment of +2, rather than 3.5's +0. This gives more design space because you can now have something with an overall of 0 (or even -2) that has advantageous or unique abilities in other areas.
That's a good point. And I agree, there is really no reason to minimize the advantage of race when it's something everybody will have.

4e, in my view, had the best iteration of races in D&D with its racial powers. Race brings you an active ability that you'll use regularly, but that in no way overshadows your class abilities. Everyone can tell by looking at your turn-by-turn gameplay that you're an elf because you used elven accuracy -- they don't have to scrutinize your character sheet for bonuses to this and that. Racial abilities also let you nudge someone toward certain classes with inbuilt synergy, but in a less heavy handed way than stat mods, which overtly create 'wrong' and 'right' wrong race-class combos.

That said if you're going to keep stats as they exist in D&D, getting rid of racial stat mods entirely like they do now in 5e is dumb. Here again 4e pioneered the solution of stat mod choice which I think works fine. Ok, your orc is never going to be the brightest skunk on the block, but you should be able to choose whether to be a +str orc, a +con orc or a +wis orc, opening a broad swath of classes. 3e sort of does this with subraces but too clumsily.

Darg

2021-06-18, 07:50 PM

Ok, your orc is never going to be the brightest skunk on the block, but you should be able to choose whether to be a +str orc, a +con orc or a +wis orc, opening a broad swath of classes. 3e sort of does this with subraces but too clumsily.

I like to roll stats and distribute them how I wish. I don't generally use point buy where this has a lot more weight. Like if I roll 16/12/11/10/10/9 I can make it look like 13/10/11/8/14/10 if I want a cleric Maybe I want to be a rogue so I switch it around to 14/16/11/10/8/7. I personally think it is ok to have static differences between races and 3e works just fine. LA though, is just plain handicapping for a good reason but with terrible execution.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-18, 08:29 PM

One solution to the racial ability modifiers thing is to make them minimums rather than modifiers. If you're willing to put 14 points in STR, you can be an Orc (and get whatever mechanical benefits that gives). That would reduce the penalty for playing a race/class combo where the stats don't match up, while allowing you to preserve things like "elves are graceful" or "dwarves are tough" if that was something you wanted to do.

TL;DR: less LA, more monster classes. The issue is that building out a class for every monster is hard.

Building out a class for every monster isn't just hard, it's intractable. We're talking about more content than any version of the game has ever had, and the overwhelming majority of it is going to be dead in every game anyone ever plays. It doesn't even really solve the problem, because people are going to want to do things like play Ogre Druids or Medusa Fighters, where the baseline monster doesn't transition properly into the class they want.

The better solution is to write monsters in a way that they can trade off with things PCs have normally. Sometimes that will be the class, but that'll be for things like high-end outsiders, or dragons, where "I'm a dragon" can be the whole character concept without causing problems. But other times you'll do things like "to be an Ogre you have to be at least 4th level and spend one of your feats on Large Size and another on Giant Strength", or "to play a Medusa you have to be high enough level that you can afford a magic item that's a passive AoE save-or-lose", and then you can build an Ogre or Medusa that has whatever normal character abilities you want, as long as they pay for the racial package. But if you try to write a Medusa class, you're going to run right into the problem we have now the second anyone gets to the end of that class, or wants to play a Medusa character that doesn't synergize with the Medusa class.

I think the only way you can salvage "monsters as classes" is if you radically change what "class" means. Even more than 4e did. If a Medusa class is going to work, you need to have a system where everyone is on the same resource management so that the second the Medusa runs out of Medusa abilities they can smoothly transition into Death Knight or Warmage abilities. And while that system is potentially interesting, the lessons of 4e suggest that it would be very hard to sell to D&D players.

It depends on how you want your game to look. Should a more substantial portion of your characters strength come from their race? There are arguments in both direction, but I personally think your species should be a minor factor for most PCs.

It also doesn't really solve the problem. It lets you have playable PC Drow or Gnolls, but that's pretty doable in 3e as well, it just requires homebrewing. It's not nothing, but it doesn't address the really challenging issues like "I'd like to play a Hill Giant Barbarian" or "I'd like to play a Pixie Ranger" or "I'd like to play a Werewolf Rogue". Those require a fundamental re-thinking of the system, and I think they're all concepts it's reasonable to support.

Learn34

2021-06-18, 08:53 PM

Gnaeus

2021-06-18, 09:10 PM

I’d go with very good idea, very badly executed.

I will absolutely say that if the game will not allow me to play monster PCs, it will be a huge factor in me not wanting to play that system. For example one of the reasons PF2 is such a pile of garbage is that their race system functionally prohibits nonstandard races without building an entire set of feats.

I also think that some of the complaints about it in 3.5 are overstated. Like it is difficult to balance 1-20. That’s just not an issue in any game I play. I very rarely see play over 15, and that rarely in games that started at level 1. And if it doesn’t balance 3-15, well, neither do fighter and wizard and we make those work. Balancing a centaur fighter just isn’t all that much harder than balancing an orc fighter or monk. I mean if we are shooting for T3 it could be as easy as tweaking the combat numbers and then dropping some fancy magic horseshoes when you notice them lagging.

My biggest complaint was the artificial LA inflation to discourage non standard races. There absolutely are good, playable monster races. Marrulurk for example is perfectly decent in many Skillmonkey builds. But they are so rare as to be more an accident than design. But the LA reassignment project is fantastic and proves the concept to my satisfaction.

How would you recommend balancing things when one PC's racial features are substantially stronger than another's?
Balance to the table. You don’t need to make it compatible with any game but yours. And then it’s no different from any other 3.PF game with stronger/weaker characters. Include encounters that play to weaker characters strengths or otherwise give them table time. Adjust rewards. Discuss with players about what power level is right for you and aim for that. Generally the nonstandard races are weaker, not stronger, than pc equivalent, which is good because it’s easier (more socially acceptable) to buff weak PCs than nerf stronger ones.

Remuko

2021-06-18, 09:20 PM

While I think this has probably been addressed else where, I would argue the simplest fix is to just hard-set ECL to CR, as PC classes are explicitly defined as having CR=HD. Then you have to separate CR/Power-level from Wealth level, by saying that PC's WBL is that of a PC of their ECL minus the CR of their monstrous race. E.g. An Erinyes (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/devil.htm#erinyes) (CR8) with 2 levels of Warblade would be ECL/CR 10, and have gained 30Kgp wealth (13K across the ECL/CR 8>9 transition, and 17K across the ECL/CR 9>10 transition).

I’d go with very good idea, very badly executed.

I will absolutely say that if the game will not allow me to play monster PCs, it will be a huge factor in me not wanting to play that system. For example one of the reasons PF2 is such a pile of garbage is that their race system functionally prohibits nonstandard races without building an entire set of feats.

I also think that some of the complaints about it in 3.5 are overstated. Like it is difficult to balance 1-20. That’s just not an issue in any game I play. I very rarely see play over 15, and that rarely in games that started at level 1. And if it doesn’t balance 3-15, well, neither do fighter and wizard and we make those work. Balancing a centaur fighter just isn’t all that much harder than balancing an orc fighter or monk. I mean if we are shooting for T3 it could be as easy as tweaking the combat numbers and then dropping some fancy magic horseshoes when you notice them lagging.

My biggest complaint was the artificial LA inflation to discourage non standard races. There absolutely are good, playable monster races. Marrulurk for example is perfectly decent in many Skillmonkey builds. But they are so rare as to be more an accident than design. But the LA reassignment project is fantastic and proves the concept to my satisfaction.

i agree pretty much entirely with these two comments. (especially that first one as anyone in the LA reassignment threads would know)

RandomPeasant

2021-06-18, 10:35 PM

Balancing a centaur fighter just isn’t all that much harder than balancing an orc fighter or monk.

But that's not really the hard part. Centaur HD are basically Fighter levels already. The Centaur fights with a weapon in physical combat, Fighters fight with weapons in physical combat. The hard part is balancing things where the monster does not flow directly into the class. Like a Stone Giant Wizard or a Minotaur Truenamer. You could probably massage LA into something vaguely workable for those kinds of simple transitions (though I would argue that if your proposal is anything along the lines of "CR=EL", you've already given up on the notion of LA). But fixing more complicated things requires you to solve the multicaster problem, and that is a problem that is as yet unsolved.

ThanatosZero

2021-06-19, 04:43 AM

I recommend to make 4 pools of XP

One for classes, one for Racial HDs, one for Level Adjustments and one to count all the XP together to determine the Effective Character Level.

The Class level and RHD pools uses the normal amount of XP needed for a increase in ECL.
1st 0 XP
2nd 1,000 XP
3rd 3,000 XP
4th 6,000 XP
5th 10,000 XP
6th 15,000 XP
7th 21,000 XP
8th 28,000 XP
9th 36,000 XP
10th 45,000 XP
11th 55,000 XP
12th 66,000 XP
13th 78,000 XP
14th 91,000 XP
15th 105,000 XP
16th 120,000 XP
17th 136,000 XP
18th 153,000 XP
19th 171,000 XP
20th 190,000 XP

The LA Pool uses this XP chart.
+1 1,000 XP
+2 3,000 XP
+3 6,000 XP
+4 10,000 XP
+5 15,000 XP
+6 21,000 XP
+7 28,000 XP
+8 36,000 XP
+9 45,000 XP
+10 55,000 XP
+11 66,000 XP
+12 78,000 XP
+13 91,000 XP
+14 105,000 XP
+15 120,000 XP
+16 136,000 XP
+17 153,000 XP
+18 171,000 XP
+19 190,000 XP
+20 210,000 XP

Let us take a Astral Deva for example.

They have 12 Outsider HDs and a Level Adjustment of +8.
Normally this makes them a ECL 20 Character.

But using the alternative method, the ECL will become lower.

Astral Deva
RHD 12 (66,000 XP)/LA +8 (36,000 XP) = ECL 14 (102,000 XP)
BAB 12, HP 12d8 + CON Modifier

TEOUltimus suggested, that for a creature to gain access to class levels, they need to earn the effective amount of XP needed for a normal level up +1,000 XP, by only taking the current ECL into account.
In this case for ECL 13 they need 14,000 XP, for to enable the class level pool.
[(ECL+1) x 1000 XP = Total XP needed]

Note: The XP collected for to activate the pool, doesn't count towards the ECL pool.

Rule of thumb using this system
The ECL determines how many HDs for Hitpoints may be active at any given time (always take the best). Also it limits maximum BAB, Skillranks in a skill, Spells per day and known, Caster and Initiator Levels, and so on with the exception of saves and new skillpoints with each level up in a class.

After earning 14,000 XP
Cleric 1 (0 XP)/RHD 12 (66,000 XP)/LA +8 (36,000 XP) = ECL 14 (102,000 XP)
BAB 12, HP 1d8+12d8 + CON Modifier

Reaching Cleric 8
Cleric 8 (28,000 XP)/RHD 12 (66,000 XP)/LA +8 (36,000 XP) = ECL 16 (130,000 XP)
BAB 16, 8/20 Cleric Spellcasting, HP 4d8+12d8 + CON Modifier

Reaching Cleric 14
Cleric 14 (91,000 XP)/RHD 12 (66,000 XP)/LA +8 (36,000 XP) = ECL 20 (193,000 XP)
BAB 20, 14/20 Cleric Spellcasting, HP 8d8+12d8 + CON Modifier

As for inherent spellcasting, these are normally covered by LA and RHD, but also limited by ECL.
If either inherent spellcasting or abilities are still too strong later in comparrison with normal PCs in the sessions, I recommend the DM to increase LA as they see fit.

A alternative is to treat paragon classes as special classes, which go towards the RHD instead and thus the RHD pool. Therefore humans and any other normal PC class can become as powerful as monster PCs, to even out the playing field.

If you have no RHD and have class levels, you need to activate the RHD pool, as done with the class level pool for characters without class levels.
[(ECL+1) x 1000 XP = Total XP needed]

(I will copy later these revisions into my homebrew thread. You can find the link to it in my signature)

Gnaeus

2021-06-19, 07:21 AM

But that's not really the hard part. Centaur HD are basically Fighter levels already. The Centaur fights with a weapon in physical combat, Fighters fight with weapons in physical combat. The hard part is balancing things where the monster does not flow directly into the class. Like a Stone Giant Wizard or a Minotaur Truenamer. You could probably massage LA into something vaguely workable for those kinds of simple transitions (though I would argue that if your proposal is anything along the lines of "CR=EL", you've already given up on the notion of LA). But fixing more complicated things requires you to solve the multicaster problem, and that is a problem that is as yet unsolved.

I don’t think that is truly necessary for concept. Why is stone giant/wizard an issue when fighter 17/wizard isn’t. Or if it is, you have a larger problem with 3.5 and multiclassing, not with nonstandard races.

It seems pretty obvious that in 3.5, if your goal is fairly optimized characters (and for many groups it isn’t) that all the elements in your build have to advance the focus of your build. “I can’t make a troll mage that plays at my tables op point without home brew” isn’t actually a worse problem or even a different problem than “I can’t make a Barbarian 8/sorcerer that plays at my tables op point without homebrew”. You could play an aranea sorcerer (if you adjusted the LA) or a marrulurk rogue and be on expected power level.

3.5 and to a greater extent Dreamscarred Press also had some multiclass friendly casting options. You can make a stone giant initiator or Akashic class without undue hardship.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-19, 07:57 AM

I don’t think that is truly necessary for concept. Why is stone giant/wizard an issue when fighter 17/wizard isn’t. Or if it is, you have a larger problem with 3.5 and multiclassing, not with nonstandard races.

Yes. 3e multiclassing does not work for that sort of thing (that's what I mean by "multi-caster problem"). The issue is not that LA is a separate problem, it's that LA locks you into having that problem. You're right that Stone Giant Wizard isn't going to be the optimal way to build a Wizard. But if your paradigm is LA, it's not even going to be a playable way to build a Wizard. It's the difference between Truenamer v Wizard and Sorcerer v Wizard. In the abstract, it's true that they're both class imbalances, but the latter is far easier to make work in practice.

Gnaeus

2021-06-19, 08:38 AM

Yes. 3e multiclassing does not work for that sort of thing (that's what I mean by "multi-caster problem"). The issue is not that LA is a separate problem, it's that LA locks you into having that problem.

I think the problems of 3.5 are pretty set in stone. It has been out of print for quite a while. So since your issue with LA is actually that it is in 3.5, please feel free to go write a different game.

You're right that Stone Giant Wizard isn't going to be the optimal way to build a Wizard. But if your paradigm is LA, it's not even going to be a playable way to build a Wizard. It's the difference between Truenamer v Wizard and Sorcerer v Wizard. In the abstract, it's true that they're both class imbalances, but the latter is far easier to make work in practice.

1. It isn’t a playable way to build a wizard at your table. Assuming that you tweaked Stone Giant to be playable at your table AT ALL (by reducing LA or improving what you get to balance with other stuff at table) wizard 1 still gives more utility than most choices.

2. Your position seems to be that all classes should be playable by all races and at the same balance point. That doesn’t seem at all viable. There are other games where I could play a giant, or a wizard, but I can’t think of any game where I could play an anything wizard and have that be as good AS A WIZARD as a race that makes good wizards. I could build a GURPS giant wizard. But he would spend so many points being a giant that he would be handicapped as a wizard compared to a human wizard. Of course, like in 3.5, he would have the advantages of being a giant. Being a giant is better in combat than being a human. If you could be as good a wizard as a giant as you can as a human, all players would play giant wizards.

3. Again, we have the tools to make giant caster types, just not giant vancian caster types. I can make a stone giant mystic (a PoW initiator class) and fly and throw lightning bolts and dispel magic and teleport and do all kinds of magic stuff.

If all races were equal at all classes, that would be a bug not a feature. If your design goal were implemented, you would get a worse RPG.

Melcar

2021-06-19, 08:47 AM

RandomPeasant

2021-06-19, 12:29 PM

I think the problems of 3.5 are pretty set in stone. It has been out of print for quite a while. So since your issue with LA is actually that it is in 3.5, please feel free to go write a different game.

The question posed by the thread is "is LA a bad idea or just poorly implemented". I question what you think the point of the thread is if not to talk about whether 3e's design decisions are problematic or not.

1. It isn’t a playable way to build a wizard at your table. Assuming that you tweaked Stone Giant to be playable at your table AT ALL (by reducing LA or improving what you get to balance with other stuff at table) wizard 1 still gives more utility than most choices.

What an utterly facile argument. Commoner is a playable class, it just isn't playable "at your table". Some things are bad. Beyond that, Stone Giant Wizard clearly fails at being a Wizard, even if you want to argue that some people are playing at a low enough power level that it's viable.

2. Your position seems to be that all classes should be playable by all races and at the same balance point.

Depends what you mean by "balance point". I very clearly didn't say that all race/class combinations should be at the same exact power level, but generally when we talk about balance points we mean a range. The range of things that you could mean by "Wizard" is quite large. A core-only Evoker is a Wizard. A BFC/Utility-focused Master Specialist Conjurer is a Wizard. An Incantatrix with a laundry list of personal buffs is a Wizard. And the range of things that can reasonably hang with Wizards is also large. A Sorcerer or Dread Necromancer or Favored Soul can contribute to a party with a Wizard, and might even be MVP if they happened to be played by someone more skilled or if the challenges broke in favor of their character's skillset. But we can still acknowledge that those classes aren't as abstractly powerful as the Wizard.

It's entirely reasonable to design a system where the downside of being a Stone Giant Wizard vanishes into the variance that is always going to exist as a result of build choices, encounter design, player skill, DM pity, and the thousand other things that vary between games. That's a totally obtainable design goal. But it's not a design goal you can achieve if you marry yourself to LA, because LA is a bad idea, not merely something that was implemented poorly.

ThanatosZero

2021-06-19, 02:57 PM

Hm... A stone giant wizard.
Let me see what can be done with the homebrew variant rule.
(For context: https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25091916&postcount=33)

Stone giant RHD 14 (Giant) and LA+4
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 14 (101,000 XP)
10 BAB, HP 14d8 +Con Modifier

After earning 15,000 XP
Class 1 (Wizard 1) (0 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 14 (101,000 XP)
10 BAB, 1/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 14d8 +Con Modifier

Reaching 7th level
Class 7 (Wizard 2/Abjurant Champion 5) (21,000 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 16 (122,000 XP)
16 BAB, CL 16, 7/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 5d10+11d8 +Con Modifier

Reaching 14th level
Class 14 (Wizard 2/Abjurant Champion 5/Dragonslayer 1/Spellsword 1/Sacred Exorcist 5) (91,000 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 20 (192,000 XP)
20 BAB, CL 20, 14/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 6d10+14d8 +Con Modifier

No 9th level spells, but access to 7th level arcane spells.

What do you think? Too strong or acceptable compared to a Militia Wizard 5/Knight Phantom 10/Abjurant Champion 5?

ThanatosZero

2021-06-19, 03:27 PM

Arent you forgetting the wizard 1d4 HD?

Not at all. That is why I added the link on my post for context.

Rule of thumb using this system
The ECL determines how many HDs for Hitpoints may be active at any given time (always take the best). Also it limits maximum BAB, Skillranks in a skill, Spells per day and known, Caster and Initiator Levels, and so on with the exception of saves and new skillpoints with each level up in a class.

Psyren

2021-06-19, 05:20 PM

That said if you're going to keep stats as they exist in D&D, getting rid of racial stat mods entirely like they do now in 5e is dumb.

Isn't that rule optional? (And yeah I know, technically every rule is optional, but I'm pretty sure that one got labelled especially as such.)

BioCharge

2021-06-19, 06:49 PM

Here's an idea that struck me: what if we use some form of Pathfinder's Simple Class Templates (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/templates/simple-class-templates/) to make monster's more playable? We'd need to make a template for each base class, sure, but that seems infinitely easier than adjusting every monster printed.

We apply the template (with CR adjustment), adjust the hit dice up or down to equal the CR and then call it a day. This may be more viable with Pathfinder base classes having more features than their 3.5 counterparts, and thus the abilities lost would, theoretically, be replaced by whatever abilities the monster has.

Given, it doesn't solve the problem of high CR monsters for low-level play, but I honestly think that's laregly impossible to solve without designing a whole monster class, as has already been discussed. It also doesn't mesh well with multiclassing before the monster's hit dice (i.e. a 10 hit die creature can't start with, say, 5 wizard/5 rogue) or prestige classes before then. But it could be a decent ish start?

Remuko

2021-06-19, 11:18 PM

RandomPeasant

2021-06-20, 08:55 PM

Stone giant RHD 14 (Giant) and LA+4
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 14 (101,000 XP)
10 BAB, HP 14d8 +Con Modifier

Right off the bat that seems unworkable. If your system outputs that a CR 8 monster is appropriate as a level 14 character, your system is broken. Especially if that monster is a dumb melee bruiser.

After earning 15,000 XP
Class 1 (Wizard 1) (0 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 14 (101,000 XP)
10 BAB, 1/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 14d8 +Con Modifier

So you gained a level but are the same ECL? That seems almost definitionally broken. Beyond that, this is a pretty crappy Wizard. You're almost exclusively reliant on your giant-based combat abilities, with your spellcasting being a curiosity at best, even if those combat abilities are adequate to your level. If we grant that this is a playable character that is both a Stone Giant and a Wizard, it would still seem like a failure to me if my goal was to play something like one of the Gigantes from A Practical Guide to Evil (a reasonable reference point for "magic-user giant", I think).

Reaching 7th level
Class 7 (Wizard 2/Abjurant Champion 5) (21,000 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 16 (122,000 XP)
16 BAB, CL 16, 7/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 5d10+11d8 +Con Modifier

This seems... really bad. As an ECL 16 character, a 7th level Wizard would be a trash mob for you, relying on that kind of casting is unlikely to be adequate.

Reaching 14th level
Class 14 (Wizard 2/Abjurant Champion 5/Dragonslayer 1/Spellsword 1/Sacred Exorcist 5) (91,000 XP)/
RHD 14 (Giant) (91,000 XP)/
LA +4 (10,000 XP)
= ECL 20 (192,000 XP)
20 BAB, CL 20, 14/20 Wizard Spellcasting, HP 6d10+14d8 +Con Modifier

That's probably the best you're doing relatively speaking, but I don't really care what results any system outputs at 20th level. People have been able to cast wish, shapechange, and gate with their spell slots for four levels at this point, if the game is still functional what's being played is so far removed from the written rules that it's not really meaningful.

What do you think? Too strong or acceptable compared to a Militia Wizard 5/Knight Phantom 10/Abjurant Champion 5?

It's definitely not too strong. My alternative proposal would be something like this:

Stone Giant
Minimum Level: 6
* Your 1st level feat is "Large Size".
* Your 3rd level feat is "Giant Racial Stat Boosts".
* Your 6th level feat is "Stone Giant Racial Stat Boosts".
* Rock Throwing
* Rock Catching
* Maybe a WBL penalty if you don't think the feats balance all the stat boosts

That seems way more playable as a Wizard, Rogue, or anything other than a front-line melee class than any kind of LA-based muckery. It's not, despite what Gnaeus seems to think I want, an optimal choice for a Wizard, but it's going to produce a Wizard that casts level-appropriate spells, and that's going to be acceptable in the overwhelming majority of games. A Stone Giant Wizard built in this way is also going to feel like a Wizard in a way that one that tries to layer 1st level Wizard casting on top of an 8th (let alone 14th) level character will not.

Morphic tide

2021-06-20, 10:16 PM

Right off the bat that seems unworkable. If your system outputs that a CR 8 monster is appropriate as a level 14 character, your system is broken. Especially if that monster is a dumb melee bruiser.
Monster math stacks with PC math. Monsters build in the numbers of magic items to compete against PCs who actually have them on relatively even footing. This is why LA needs to be a thing, because any "Big Dumb Melee Brusier" at its CR has approximately double the bonuses over a base humanoid of a normal PC Big Dumb Melee Bruiser. If not considerably more from equalizing damage with raw Strength.

So you gained a level but are the same ECL? That seems almost definitionally broken. Beyond that, this is a pretty crappy Wizard. You're almost exclusively reliant on your giant-based combat abilities, with your spellcasting being a curiosity at best, even if those combat abilities are adequate to your level. If we grant that this is a playable character that is both a Stone Giant and a Wizard, it would still seem like a failure to me if my goal was to play something like one of the Gigantes from A Practical Guide to Evil (a reasonable reference point for "magic-user giant", I think).
Yeah, that's a big mess covered in abuse, particularly given the thing above about over-stacking bonuses. The Aranea is bragging about its +6 Cha with CL=RHD, and Huge monsters of all stripes show vicious contempt for the normal races with their massive Natural Armor and wide-ranging damage amplification.

This seems... really bad. As an ECL 16 character, a 7th level Wizard would be a trash mob for you, relying on that kind of casting is unlikely to be adequate.
You have at worst the melee abilities of an 8th-level Martial, and more likely something like a 12th-level Martial if you can get appropriate gear because you're then just flat adding all the items of a Marital on top of a Stone Giant. And 7th-level Gish spellcasting is quite the sizable boon to an already passable Martial when it's at the cost of but two levels. Plenty enough low-level buffs on Wizard to make a viable Gish, and the framework being suggested is horrifyingly efficient at such shenanigans.

That's probably the best you're doing relatively speaking, but I don't really care what results any system outputs at 20th level. People have been able to cast wish, shapechange, and gate with their spell slots for four levels at this point, if the game is still functional what's being played is so far removed from the written rules that it's not really meaningful.
Three levels, not four, and viciously demolishing the insane game-shattering peaks of casters in practice is a very old time-honored tradition of GMs. Any situation where that comes up is a situation not worth designing for because, as you've mentioned, the game doesn't function with those particular things in play.

It's definitely not too strong. My alternative proposal would be something like this:

Stone Giant
Minimum Level: 6
* Your 1st level feat is "Large Size".
* Your 3rd level feat is "Giant Racial Stat Boosts".
* Your 6th level feat is "Stone Giant Racial Stat Boosts".
* Rock Throwing
* Rock Catching
* Maybe a WBL penalty if you don't think the feats balance all the stat boosts

That seems way more playable as a Wizard, Rogue, or anything other than a front-line melee class than any kind of LA-based muckery. It's not, despite what Gnaeus seems to think I want, an optimal choice for a Wizard, but it's going to produce a Wizard that casts level-appropriate spells, and that's going to be acceptable in the overwhelming majority of games. A Stone Giant Wizard built in this way is also going to feel like a Wizard in a way that one that tries to layer 1st level Wizard casting on top of an 8th (let alone 14th) level character will not.
But then you're not actually playing a Stone Giant in any meaningful capacity, you have a thin emulation of a Stone Giant. Your statistics have literally nothing to do with the monster. This is, to my understanding, a major complaint with the way PF handles Polymorph effects, because you don't get to actually be the creature in question, you get to borrow a bare handful of properties that vaguely suggest the creature. And worse, this becomes something that must be defined for every monster separately rather than being a genericized mass like the PF Polymorph.

Some form of level adjustment system is required if PCs and monsters get their numbers in ways that combine, simply because the monsters are going to end up at an advantage when you then add PC characteristics to them.

Dante & Vergil

2021-06-20, 10:28 PM

Wasn't there people on these forums that had created monster classes from the ground up? I remember them being well received, as they did away with LAs.

Silly Name

2021-06-20, 11:10 PM

LA has always struck me as a very weird situation where the designers didn't want to let certain creatures be PCs, yet gave the players rules to technically make them PCs. Except they suck, so you either don't bother with those rules and make your own, or you never play those unusual creatures.

If you don't want players to have access to a thing, just don't give it to them.

Something with 14 RHD is already pretty bad because unless you play exactly in the creature's strengths, there's just too little you can do so with few levels open, so you're very much stuck in playing those creatures to type: melee bruisers will remain melee bruisers, casters will remain casters, roguish assassins will stay roguish assassins. Sticking LA on top of this is just silly.

And most games don't start at that high a level in the first place anyway, which gates potential cool concepts from the get-go.

sreservoir

2021-06-21, 02:47 AM

Yes. 3e multiclassing does not work for that sort of thing (that's what I mean by "multi-caster problem"). The issue is not that LA is a separate problem, it's that LA locks you into having that problem. You're right that Stone Giant Wizard isn't going to be the optimal way to build a Wizard. But if your paradigm is LA, it's not even going to be a playable way to build a Wizard. It's the difference between Truenamer v Wizard and Sorcerer v Wizard. In the abstract, it's true that they're both class imbalances, but the latter is far easier to make work in practice.

If you start your build with Fighter 18, are you going to build a "playable" Wizard?

There are two problems here. One is that an awful lot of LAs are assigned "conservatively": they're assigned something needlessly high, not because they're consciously balanced against that many levels, but basically to throw a number on there that's intentionally high enough to deter players from taking it. That's mostly an issue of, well, not really wanting players to play certain races, but someone along the way feeling obliged to fit them into the rules that allow that anyway? It's a self-contradictory design-by-committee probably, probably.

The other problem is that the value of a single class level isn't uniform, and in particular a lot of classes have abilities placed at class level X that are expected to be effective around character level X. Worse, there are then other classes whose core features basically scale linearly, without no allowances for what other characters of the same level are doing. And the former are the more powerful options.

Crake

2021-06-21, 04:47 AM

RandomPeasant

2021-06-21, 06:54 AM

Monster math stacks with PC math. Monsters build in the numbers of magic items to compete against PCs who actually have them on relatively even footing. This is why LA needs to be a thing, because any "Big Dumb Melee Brusier" at its CR has approximately double the bonuses over a base humanoid of a normal PC Big Dumb Melee Bruiser. If not considerably more from equalizing damage with raw Strength.

I agree that you can't simply give someone the racial bonuses of a Stone Giant or Couatl for free. That would pretty obviously be broken. But I don't buy the conclusion that you need LA to balance things. Because (as I said in the very first post in this thread) the value of a level isn't constant. The difference between 5th level and 6th level is not the same as the difference between 6th level and 7th level, let alone 15th level and 16th level.

LA can't work. It just mathematically can't. If you're buying fixed benefits, you have to buy them with fixed costs. That means either you need monsters to smoothly transition into PC classes (I am skeptical that this is possible) or you need monster abilities to be bought with something other than levels (feats or WBL are good choices, and the latter addresses your concerns quite directly). Or, I suppose, you need to go to a model where the value of a level is supposed to be linear. But if your system maintains 3e's exponential level scaling. LA is mathematically unworkable even before you consider how well it works for any particular build.

Three levels, not four

I was counting the current level in my math.

But then you're not actually playing a Stone Giant in any meaningful capacity, you have a thin emulation of a Stone Giant.

That depends what you think the Stone Giant is. The MM entries for Orcs or Goblins or Kobolds come with a level of Warrior by default. If you had to keep that to play an Orc Barbarian or a Goblin Rogue or a Kobold Sorcerer, those characters would be much worse than they are using the normal rules. But no one thinks that you aren't really playing a Kobold when you give up that level of Warrior. I view the Stone Giant's racial hit dice in the same way. Ideally, the system would be written in such a way that the Stone Giant wouldn't have any racial hit dice, and would simply be an 8th level Warrior with the Stone Giant race, in the same way that generic Orc warriors are represented by the Warrior class rather than racial hit dice.

And worse, this becomes something that must be defined for every monster separately rather than being a genericized mass like the PF Polymorph.

That's going to be true for whatever monsters-as-PCs system you choose. There's simply no general rule that can cover all the ways for a monster to be. Consider the Medusa or the Bodak. They get most of their power from a passive ability, making PC classes a much greater upgrade for them than for Hill Giants or Couatls whose active abilities trade off with a Warblade's Maneuvers or a Warlock's Invocations. And a system like this wouldn't be all downside. It would make it much easier to generate advanced monsters, as they could simply use the PC/NPC advancement rules without any modification.

If you start your build with Fighter 18, are you going to build a "playable" Wizard?

If the system is going to present Fighter 18/Wizard 1 and Fighter 19 as equal choices, they would be. It's not clear to me why imbalance here is any more acceptable than class imbalance, which people are rightly upset about.

The other problem is that the value of a single class level isn't uniform

This is the thing that sinks LA as a concept more than anything else. The difference between the 7th level of Wizard and the 8th level of Wizard is a 3rd level spell slot and a 4th level spell slot, plus some stuff that Wizards get at every level. The difference between the 14th level of Wizard and the 15th level of Wizard is a 5th level spell slot, access to 8th level spells at all, an 8th level spell slot, and a bonus feat, plus the same stuff that Wizards get at every level. There's no +1 LA race or template in the world that's balanced against both of those things.

Morphic tide

2021-06-21, 08:16 AM

I agree that you can't simply give someone the racial bonuses of a Stone Giant or Couatl for free. That would pretty obviously be broken. But I don't buy the conclusion that you need LA to balance things. Because (as I said in the very first post in this thread) the value of a level isn't constant. The difference between 5th level and 6th level is not the same as the difference between 6th level and 7th level, let alone 15th level and 16th level.

LA can't work. It just mathematically can't. If you're buying fixed benefits, you have to buy them with fixed costs. That means either you need monsters to smoothly transition into PC classes (I am skeptical that this is possible) or you need monster abilities to be bought with something other than levels (feats or WBL are good choices, and the latter addresses your concerns quite directly). Or, I suppose, you need to go to a model where the value of a level is supposed to be linear. But if your system maintains 3e's exponential level scaling. LA is mathematically unworkable even before you consider how well it works for any particular build.
Not in the Martial space. From a powergaming "Cannot Lose 9ths" perspective maybe, but the vast majority of Martial routes have enormously more limited value from further levels. At 11 RHD you still have room for the premier Grappler PRC's big selling point (Black Blood Cultist 8 for every Natural Attack's damage on every successful Grapple check). Size bonuses are obscene value propositions to such builds, making them legitimately viable where they aren't previously.

I have run the numbers quite a few times on Psychic Warrior 4, for quite a number of monsters, and it is rather consistent that the only point monster math doesn't make a solidly competitive Natural Attack PsyWar is when you start considering Form of Doom and Combat Transformation at level 16, and even then it remains a genuine question because you can run through a lot more fights as the monster than the Humanoid. And are virtually always and forever a vastly better Grappler, because the reason Grapplers are bad is because monster-math is better at it than PC-math.

My own point is specifically that monsters already aren't paying the costs. Because monsters are not meant to be paying such costs. You can't balance it out with WBL because item costs are exponential. Do you judge the +6 Strength by its low-level 4k GP, or the fact it saves you 20k GP if you stick to the +4 Belt of Giant's Strength? Do you judge +2 Natural Armor as 8k or 32k? What about the lunatic +20s to ability scores or double-digit natural armor values? The overall system is not constructed in a way conductive to directly using monster statblocks for PCs, because monster statblocks operate differently in very basic fashions, because monsters are built from very blunt raw numbers and not bundles of magic items that mesh together to generate large numbers.

LA costs you BAB, skill points, HP, and delays feats. BAB is directly compensated by the enormous Strength bonuses and size increases, skill points can be exceeded with point-buy by taking the top 2 off an 18 or "dumping" Constitution to jump Intelligence for more skill ranks for every class level you do get, the HP is made up for by Natural Armor turning into AC advantage and the Con bonuses, and many, many monsters have a Special Attack or Special Quality far more valuable than a single feat unless you're desperately digging for the spectacular outliers. LA is a fixed cost that can have its impact measured to derive the point where something is better or worse than an example Human.

That depends what you think the Stone Giant is. The MM entries for Orcs or Goblins or Kobolds come with a level of Warrior by default. If you had to keep that to play an Orc Barbarian or a Goblin Rogue or a Kobold Sorcerer, those characters would be much worse than they are using the normal rules. But no one thinks that you aren't really playing a Kobold when you give up that level of Warrior. I view the Stone Giant's racial hit dice in the same way. Ideally, the system would be written in such a way that the Stone Giant wouldn't have any racial hit dice, and would simply be an 8th level Warrior with the Stone Giant race, in the same way that generic Orc warriors are represented by the Warrior class rather than racial hit dice.
But that isn't how monsters are constructed. Stone Giants are not Orcs or Goblins or Kobolds. They have a "for player characters" entry as a formality, not something intended to be used. Monsters are built as statblocks that challenge PCs directly without requiring itemized equipment. I have run numbers for a by the book Awakened Bear in this very thread to show that it quite readily dumpsters a Water Orc Barbarian for versatility. The pressures are fundamentally different, you can't properly construct the vast majority of theoretically-playable monsters as a racial statblock with so many class levels, because they do huge numbers of things there aren't classes for and have to compete with kitted-out PCs on the average aray of 10s and 11s.

In literally every single space but caster-likes, including Incarnum and certain applications of Initiators and Psychic Warrior, the vast majority of monsters can do very ridiculously more than a standard PC race, because they can trade a small part of their enormous bonuses for a huge chunk of versatility. Taking the top + off half a dozen of your magic items is a huge amount saved for much more niche functionalities to make up for lacking class features, where you aren't getting very expensive stuff like Huge size or Good-maneuverability Flight. If monster statblocks are for average members of a kind of creature and simultaneously meaningfully challenge PCs, they will always end up able to wildly diverge from PC build constraints, because they're competing with PCs without using PC bonuses.

For a by-the-book Stone Giant to be usable as a CR 8 monster for the whole party to go to town on, it has to be competing with a very unusually durable level 8 Barbarian with the standard array of 10s and 11s, no magic items, and the bluntest feats imaginable. If it were 8 RHD, it would become wildly strictly superior to a regular PC, because it has numbers to compete with magic items, that stack with magic items. Orcs, Goblins, and Kobolds, meanwhile, are all PC races. Their default statblock carries class levels, that are specifically mentioned as replaceable. They have no level adjustment. They have distinct advantages and disadvantages to other normal races, even if such is slanted against them. They even have specific splatbook support. None of this is true of any Giant in particular, and incidental PC-friendly type support can be mostly traced to the Goliath or Half-Giant, or is shenanigans like Alter Self.

To not need Level Adjustment, you must have monster-math actually be directly equivalent to PC-math. With exponential cost to improve magic items stacking with racial bonuses, this cannot be the case. Basic functions of how characters differentiate early and scale later on result in the problem I mention. You'd need to carefully weigh extra RHD to match the value of WBL and the Elite array, and doing that for Dungeons and Dragons revised third edition is simply logistically impossible. The way the product design was handled could not have allowed such a delicate measure of functionality. The way the game is constructed is not conductive to any consistent translation. You have to radically rewrite every technically-playable monster in the game to have them operate on PC math. They're just too different to have a clean framework for playability without lopping off levels to give a chance to catch up on raw numbers.

Psyren

2021-06-21, 08:50 AM

"Transition monsters into PC classes" is pretty much what LA buyoff is meant to simulate. The monster LA starts out higher when their abilities are more valuable than class levels, and over time erodes as this balance shifts in favor of the greater value higher level class features provide.

The PF1 Monsters as PCs system is that as well, but with the buyoff being automatic/built into the progression.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-21, 01:15 PM

Not in the Martial space. From a powergaming "Cannot Lose 9ths" perspective maybe, but the vast majority of Martial routes have enormously more limited value from further levels. At 11 RHD you still have room for the premier Grappler PRC's big selling point (Black Blood Cultist 8 for every Natural Attack's damage on every successful Grapple check). Size bonuses are obscene value propositions to such builds, making them legitimately viable where they aren't previously.

I agree that martial builds are underpowered, and martial classes offer insufficient returns at high levels. Changing the game so that those characters end up more viable is a good thing. I agree that aesthetically it may be weird if all martial characters are Ettins or Ogres or Storm Giants, but if that produces melee combatants who are reasonably effective, it's not mechanically problematic.

But that isn't how monsters are constructed. Stone Giants are not Orcs or Goblins or Kobolds. They have a "for player characters" entry as a formality, not something intended to be used.

Yes, I agree that the monsters-as-PCs rules are broken by design. I am proposing that they should instead be written in a way that is not broken by design so that monsters can be playable as PCs instead of that not being true. Again, the question posed by the thread is "is LA a bad design choice", and my view is that the answer to that question is "yes" because it locks you into a bunch of decisions that make monsters unworkable as PCs.

you can't properly construct the vast majority of theoretically-playable monsters as a racial statblock with so many class levels, because they do huge numbers of things there aren't classes for and have to compete with kitted-out PCs on the average aray of 10s and 11s.

It seems like you're making a couple of unnecessary assumptions there. First, who says that monsters and PCs have to use different basic stat arrays? Second, your argument would benefit from an example of a monster that A) is reasonably playable as a PC and B) doesn't work as a PC class. Third, while it's true that the math behind monsters differs from the math behind PCs, much of that is a result of contingent design decisions -- there's no reason a Giant needs to have average BAB and an outsized pile of HP and STR.

For a by-the-book Stone Giant to be usable as a CR 8 monster for the whole party to go to town on, it has to be competing with a very unusually durable level 8 Barbarian with the standard array of 10s and 11s, no magic items, and the bluntest feats imaginable.

I think you're overestimating the amount of challenge a CR 8 monster is supposed to be for an 8th level party.

If it were 8 RHD, it would become wildly strictly superior to a regular PC, because it has numbers to compete with magic items, that stack with magic items.

Who says those numbers have to stack with magic items? It's called a Belt of Giant Strength because it used to literally give you the strength of a giant.

and doing that for Dungeons and Dragons revised third edition is simply logistically impossible.

Well, sure. But so is every other solution. There isn't any easy fix in the context of the rules we have now. The only way to make monsters-as-PCs work in the system we currently have is to look at the monsters your players want to play and create bespoke homebrew to make it work. That scales horribly, but it's the only solution that works at all in the 3e rules framework. And maybe the way you choose to create your bespoke homebrew is based on LA. If you hammer at it enough in the context of the one to four specific characters it is going to need to work for in whatever limited level range your campaign covers, I'm sure you can get something that is no more problematic than Greg wanting to play a Monk while Sally wants to play a Druid. But there's no general solution.

"Transition monsters into PC classes" is pretty much what LA buyoff is meant to simulate. The monster LA starts out higher when their abilities are more valuable than class levels, and over time erodes as this balance shifts in favor of the greater value higher level class features provide.

The PF1 Monsters as PCs system is that as well, but with the buyoff being automatic/built into the progression.

LA buyoff has problems of its own, as it makes LA power-for-nothing in the long run. This is less bad than monster PCs being flatly unplayable, but such a system can clearly be improved upon. Last I checked (which was admittedly a while ago, perhaps this has been fixed), PF monsters-as-PCs had the same problem, with it being a suckers bet not to pick a synergistic monster as the base for your character if you expected the game to run long enough. LA is too punishing of a cost, but there does need to be some cost.

HouseRules

2021-06-21, 02:23 PM

The maximum amount of automatic "LA payoff" in PF1 is half CR rounded down.

PF1 Monsters as NPC buys at a rate of 3 class levels per 2 ECL.
PF1 Monsters as PC buys at a rate of 4 class levels per 3 ECL.

Necroticplague

2021-06-21, 03:08 PM

It was a bad idea that was then poorly implemented.

I think that something along the line's of PF's 'create a race' system should be used in place for all PCs. And as you level up, you get more points to spend in it. Monster abilities merely have point costs and prerequisite, you can pick them up using these points. This creates an effective minimum level to be a full-fledged member of a race (when you'd have enough points for all their abilities), while allowing play to be technically available from any level, or to easily make variants (who have merely spent their points differently).

Morphic tide

2021-06-21, 05:08 PM

I agree that martial builds are underpowered, and martial classes offer insufficient returns at high levels. Changing the game so that those characters end up more viable is a good thing. I agree that aesthetically it may be weird if all martial characters are Ettins or Ogres or Storm Giants, but if that produces melee combatants who are reasonably effective, it's not mechanically problematic.
Can we stop moaning about spellcaster supremacy? Again, it is a time-honored tradition for DMs to navigate this problem, it's been there from the start, there are loads of remarkably low impact methods that cut off the staggering abuses, including such things as just flat nuking the bypasses to risk and distended utility functions by doing stuff like banning the secondary Charisma check modifiers that make Planar Binding trivial and mandating the Specific Summon Monster variant. It is vastly easier to clear out the tools that render casters absurd than it is to rebuild literally the entire rest of the system to make those outliers few players can actually execute in practice "balanced".

Because those caster tools are well-analyzed and catalogued to tone down piece by piece, whereas the phenomenon of monster-math is constantly swept under the rug unless one speaks of why Transmutation is overpowered or why Grappling is terrible. I have participated in the LA reassignment thread, I am literally the only person who habitually looks at direct build comparisons to actually try to measure monster-math. Nobody else goes at the numbers of how much PP a PsyWar is burning to keep up. Nobody else is citing progression breakpoints. Not on a regular basis. I am still intensely angered by the Glaistig getting a -0. Go to the LA reassignment threads and run Advanced Search for my username from the Search Thread drop-down menu. I do it nearly every time I decided to comment on a monster. I never get hard numbers disproving me. Literally never.

I will literally cite combinations of metamagic shenanigans involving three different sourcebooks to point out a 4rhd Undead (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25074722&postcount=67) is a perfectly capable Necromancer-backing Paladin of Slaughter, irrespective of how viable such a specific character build "really" is, going so far as to specifically measure Deadly Touch pools and total spell slots. Inbuilt metamagic reduction and a significant boost to casting scores alleviates enormous swaths of the downsides to going full spellcaster, provided you actually build for what you are. You're not the big game-shaking do-everything Wizard, you're the Corpsecrafter with a bucket of metamagic to make the top-quality Undead and keep them from breaking.

Yes, I agree that the monsters-as-PCs rules are broken by design. I am proposing that they should instead be written in a way that is not broken by design so that monsters can be playable as PCs instead of that not being true. Again, the question posed by the thread is "is LA a bad design choice", and my view is that the answer to that question is "yes" because it locks you into a bunch of decisions that make monsters unworkable as PCs.

Most monsters are perfectly fine PCs with all of one or two less RHD or LA +1 or +2, and usually have an acceptable combat niche right at their statblock RHD. Level Adjustment is the answer to the design choices that make monsters poor PCs, because those design choices came first and level adjustment was the decision to resolve the issue in question. Monsters do not make good spellcasters, because monster-math virtually always needs to answer the question of how you handle fighting a party of four. Which has generally been large durability skews until 5e introduced Legendary Actions to directly address the action economy issue.

It seems like you're making a couple of unnecessary assumptions there. First, who says that monsters and PCs have to use different basic stat arrays? Second, your argument would benefit from an example of a monster that A) is reasonably playable as a PC and B) doesn't work as a PC class. Third, while it's true that the math behind monsters differs from the math behind PCs, much of that is a result of contingent design decisions -- there's no reason a Giant needs to have average BAB and an outsized pile of HP and STR.
The fact that PCs are meant to be exceptional? It's why the Elite array even exists at all? For a monster that doesn't properly work as a PC, look at the Aranea. Its racial hit dice are literally Warrior gestalted on Sorcerer with a side-order of Monstrous Spider and +4 to three relevant ability scores. An inherent poisonous bite is not how the extremely vast majority of PC classes work, because PC classes are nearly always learned abilities. A Giant does need outsized Strength if it is to compete with PCs, unless you give the Giant the same Standard Magic Items to get the same resultant to-hit bonus, or painstakingly design a system to have monster-math take up the same positions as PC-math, which is an extremely large workload of overhauling the actual system itself.

The game was not designed from the start with monster PCs in mind. Monsters are not designed with being PCs in mind. Therefore, playability of monsters must be an add-on, and level adjustment works with this question very bluntly by directly asking what level of PC a monster is roughly equivalent to as a question of comparing raw outputs. It is the natural answer, and the most straightforward, because it's a direct mathematical comparison of the value of playing a monster versus a typical Humanoid.

I think you're overestimating the amount of challenge a CR 8 monster is supposed to be for an 8th level party.
No, it's that a Big Dumb Bruiser monster has to have the raw meat to survive two or three rounds so it's an actual fight, which sets the design towards the durability end of the spectrum. How often do you see a Raging Barbarian who has more health than a same-CR melee beater Giant? How often do you see a Giant dealing more damage than that Barbarian? PCs tend to be glass cannons because there's a lot more damage content than defense content. Psychic Warriors accidentally have the tools to equalize with monster-math at staggering PP costs.

Who says those numbers have to stack with magic items? It's called a Belt of Giant Strength because it used to literally give you the strength of a giant.
Yes it used to, as a set to functionality, and this returned in 5e. This makes the character's base stats largely meaningless, with Orcs being actually disadvantaged at higher levels (even setting aside the level caps) because they payed a hefty opportunity cost for bonuses that completely stopped doing anything at all. The reason they end up stacking is to have the racial differences persist instead of going in the trash the moment the ability score items arrive. It's a result of commonplace magic items, an extremely fundamental premise of 3rd edition functionality, coexisting with your race always keeping its minor influences.

Well, sure. But so is every other solution. There isn't any easy fix in the context of the rules we have now. The only way to make monsters-as-PCs work in the system we currently have is to look at the monsters your players want to play and create bespoke homebrew to make it work. That scales horribly, but it's the only solution that works at all in the 3e rules framework. And maybe the way you choose to create your bespoke homebrew is based on LA. If you hammer at it enough in the context of the one to four specific characters it is going to need to work for in whatever limited level range your campaign covers, I'm sure you can get something that is no more problematic than Greg wanting to play a Monk while Sally wants to play a Druid. But there's no general solution.
LA is the easy solution. It's not rewriting huge chunks of the game to overhaul its assumptions, it's not making enormous piles of "technically-this-monster" content, it's looking at the monster, going over the numbers to see how many levels ahead or behind a PC in the same niche it is, and declaring its effective ECL in light of how its capabilities affect a PC. It is literally "What level PC does this most reasonably equal?"

Oh, and funny thing about the Druid/Monk comparison, the Monk is actually almost functional all over the place, but is cursed by the way the system splits its needed values among ability scores and having bad frontloading to compensate for its gear restrictions. The commonplace wide bonuses of monsters, including size increases and Natural Armor, do spectacular wonders to Monk viability. There are many monsters that'd love to be a straight-up Monk. Because everything Monks need to be viable is commonplace monster-math.

Psyren

2021-06-21, 05:25 PM

LA buyoff has problems of its own, as it makes LA power-for-nothing in the long run. This is less bad than monster PCs being flatly unplayable, but such a system can clearly be improved upon. Last I checked (which was admittedly a while ago, perhaps this has been fixed), PF monsters-as-PCs had the same problem, with it being a suckers bet not to pick a synergistic monster as the base for your character if you expected the game to run long enough. LA is too punishing of a cost, but there does need to be some cost.

The maximum amount of automatic "LA payoff" in PF1 is half CR rounded down.

PF1 Monsters as NPC buys at a rate of 3 class levels per 2 ECL.
PF1 Monsters as PC buys at a rate of 4 class levels per 3 ECL.

As HouseRules said, the buyoff is capped, so there is still a tradeoff for many monsters. I agree it's not perfect however, e.g. if you pick a Lillend Bard nothing keeps them from getting full progression, so the GM still has to wade in, but it's a better starting point than both 3.5 and "no."

RandomPeasant

2021-06-21, 07:18 PM

Monsters do not make good spellcasters, because monster-math virtually always needs to answer the question of how you handle fighting a party of four.

Monsters don't make good spellcasters because monsters that fight "like spellcasters" arbitrarily have mechanics that do not scale or transition neatly into any class. A Beholder is a caster. A Mind Flayer is a caster. Many fiends are casters (though obviously it varies a lot because there are many, many types of fiend). The idea that monsters can't fight like a Wizard or a Cleric is just not supported by the range of monsters that exist.

The fact that PCs are meant to be exceptional? It's why the Elite array even exists at all?

PCs are exceptional because they are higher level than other people. The fact that your 10th level Warlock has marginally better base stats than a 1st level Commoner is not the reason he's awesome, it's the fact that he can fly, shoots blasts of eldritch power at his enemies, and calls on dark magics to do his bidding.

An inherent poisonous bite is not how the extremely vast majority of PC classes work, because PC classes are nearly always learned abilities.

So your big example of "asymmetry between PCs and NPCs" is "what if you had a poisoned dagger that couldn't be sundered or disarmed, but also couldn't be upgraded to a mace or a sword"? If that's the problem we need to solve, I think we're okay.

The game was not designed from the start with monster PCs in mind. Monsters are not designed with being PCs in mind. Therefore, playability of monsters must be an add-on,

Therefore monster PCs are unplayable. They don't work in RAW 3e. They don't work if you tweak LA numbers. They don't work if you let people buy off small amounts of LA. They don't work if you do complicated XP accounting. All you can do in the 3e rules framework is get something that works okay for your game. There is no general fix, there are only bespoke fixes for the N~=4 version of the problem that happens at your table.

LA is the easy solution.

LA isn't a solution because it doesn't work. Monsters are universally unplayable for builds that do not directly synergize with them, and often unplayable anyway. There are monsters out there where the level at which LA says they are playable as PCs is higher than the level where ECL says they are no longer a challenge for PCs. It's true that you get something from WBL, but you're not closing that gap.

It is literally "What level PC does this most reasonably equal?"

Except that's not enough. Because PCs don't just stay one level. If you were doing a one-shot, then yeah I could see LA being workable. But people gain levels. And that changes the value of abilities they have. The pile of stats, SLAs, and random immunities that is worth being six or three or nine levels behind at 10th level is not the same as the pile that is worth being that many levels behind at 4th or 12th level.

As HouseRules said, the buyoff is capped, so there is still a tradeoff for many monsters. I agree it's not perfect however, e.g. if you pick a Lillend Bard nothing keeps them from getting full progression, so the GM still has to wade in, but it's a better starting point than both 3.5 and "no."

That's about what I remembered. I'm not saying you can't do better than the existing system, but there are structural problems with LA that mean any system will need that sort of DM intervention to a far higher degree than if you had a system that was good. That doesn't mean you need to write that system to have a functional game, but it's pretty obvious to me that a good (rather than merely "kind of okay, if the DM tunes it") monsters-as-PCs system would look absolutely nothing like LA.

sreservoir

2021-06-21, 07:24 PM

The fact that PCs are meant to be exceptional? It's why the Elite array even exists at all? For a monster that doesn't properly work as a PC, look at the Aranea. Its racial hit dice are literally Warrior gestalted on Sorcerer with a side-order of Monstrous Spider and +4 to three relevant ability scores. An inherent poisonous bite is not how the extremely vast majority of PC classes work, because PC classes are nearly always learned abilities. A Giant does need outsized Strength if it is to compete with PCs, unless you give the Giant the same Standard Magic Items to get the same resultant to-hit bonus, or painstakingly design a system to have monster-math take up the same positions as PC-math, which is an extremely large workload of overhauling the actual system itself.

Tragically, they hit one something very close to a solution to both this and the NPC wealth problem midway through 3.5e's run, in the form of Incarnum ... and then wrote it up a self-contained niche subsystem with like three reverse-deps in later books.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-21, 07:36 PM

Tragically, they hit one something very close to a solution to both this and the NPC wealth problem midway through 3.5e's run, in the form of Incarnum ... and then wrote it up a self-contained niche subsystem with like three reverse-deps in later books.

I don't think Incarnum really solved the problems, because while they made some noise about soulmelds conflicting with magic items, you could mostly avoid that if you dumpster-dived hard enough or used the optional rules for combining magic items from the MIC.

The big problem is, again, that 3e made a bad design choice: WBL. When 3.0 launched, WBL was an interesting experiment. But looking at it with the benefit of 20 years of playing the game, it seems pretty clear that random magic items was a better system. There are problems (particularly with the AD&D implementation), but overall they are lesser than the problems with WBL, and the constraints it puts on the game aren't worth the benefits it provides (incidentally, this is something you can fix with only minimal effort -- just put everyone on something like PF's ABP for their math fixes and hand out random magic items that do things players might care about as treasure).

There's a secondary problem where the magic item slots system rapidly became nonsensical, with slots proliferating in number, losing any meaningful identity, and slotless magic items making the whole thing a cruel joke. If you want to cap how many magic items people can have, just cap how many magic items they can have.

Darg

2021-06-21, 10:00 PM

Therefore monster PCs are unplayable. They don't work in RAW 3e. They don't work if you tweak LA numbers. They don't work if you let people buy off small amounts of LA. They don't work if you do complicated XP accounting. All you can do in the 3e rules framework is get something that works okay for your game. There is no general fix, there are only bespoke fixes for the N~=4 version of the problem that happens at your table.

Monster characters aren't unplayable nor is it hard to make them playable. A level 1 minotaur fighter at ECL9 would have a lot of advantages a level 9 human fighter would not have and the health difference is literally only on average 3 points from the fighter + they get a +5 natural armor bonus + a free extra attack that is separate from your normal weapon attacks.

Saying monster PCs are unplayable is like saying non-tier 1 classes are unplayable. Sure, you can't play a strong monster at level one, but to be honest I wouldn't want to play a monster that starts out at baby monster levels of strength in the first place. Even a vampire has a requirement to be 5HD or more before they get their +8 LA, but boy are those abilities worth the LA. Sure a 5th level vampire fighter would be level 5 at ECL 13, but infinite summons, DR 10/silver and magic, +6 natural armor, skill bonuses, tons of extra feats, increased ability scores, fast healing that prevents it from being killed by damage, energy drain, at will gaseous form, at will alternate form, and at will dominate seems better than anything a pure fighter could have by level 13 even with the drawbacks.

Psyren

2021-06-22, 12:44 AM

That's about what I remembered. I'm not saying you can't do better than the existing system, but there are structural problems with LA that mean any system will need that sort of DM intervention to a far higher degree than if you had a system that was good. That doesn't mean you need to write that system to have a functional game, but it's pretty obvious to me that a good (rather than merely "kind of okay, if the DM tunes it") monsters-as-PCs system would look absolutely nothing like LA.

Well, when you find/write that "good system," do let me know. Until then, I'm happy settling for "good enough."

It was a bad idea that was then poorly implemented.

I think that something along the line's of PF's 'create a race' system should be used in place for all PCs. And as you level up, you get more points to spend in it. Monster abilities merely have point costs and prerequisite, you can pick them up using these points. This creates an effective minimum level to be a full-fledged member of a race (when you'd have enough points for all their abilities), while allowing play to be technically available from any level, or to easily make variants (who have merely spent their points differently).

I don't disagree in theory, but coming up with reliable costs for every ability even just in core sounds like a lifetime of effort.

Clementx

2021-06-22, 01:46 AM

Level Adjustment takes several considerations to work:

1) Use a more sensible LA for poorly-assigned monsters. They are usually overinflated, and meant to discourage players from asking for wacky abilities.

2) Set a reasonable requirement for HD for each LA, so basic math works out. I find at least 4HD per LA works well.

3) Design your party and campaign to account for it. If you give each player the choice of +2 LA in race/and or templates to add to their 8HD character, the challenges wash out. Everyone gets cool abilities and/or inflated stats, so no one is jealous. You can just add 1 to all your target Encounter Levels to account for the boost. You can ignore the LA effect on XP by not adding that +1 EL into your XP calculator. You need to watch out for loss of key spells/items expected for a given CR, but a good DM needs to do that already.

Frankly, the best way to deal with exotic races is to make a campaign around them. If everyone starts as a Astral Deva and adds a martial class, or everyone is a Drow, most of the headaches go away. Trying to mash the numbers of a Hill Giant Wizard and Half-Dragon Pixie is the pain point. Don't struggle against the system in cases like this.

vasilidor

2021-06-22, 05:37 AM

Psyren

2021-06-22, 09:09 AM

In an article I can no longer seem to find, one of the designers of the game said that they intentionally skewed level adjustments to discourage players from playing monster races. so it was not that they were done poorly, they were intentionally sabotaged before they got out of the gate. As I can not find my original source at this time and I am unsure if my memory on this issue is 100%, go ahead and take that with a grain of salt.

If that's true I would still count that as "done poorly", just intentionally so. Setting out to overcost something instead of designing it properly, and succeeding, smacks of them wanting the positive PR of being able to say monsters are playable without putting any of the work in.

Darg

2021-06-22, 10:06 AM

Gnaeus

2021-06-22, 11:23 AM

Are there any monsters straight up worse than playing a pure fighter?

I think a lot of the perception of monsters as races is skewed by the expectation that the races need to be of the level of tier 1 classes to be seen as viable for play. I see the loss of HD as more of an inconvenience rather than debilitating. Even drow have racial features that make up for the level loss. Yeah, you aren't going to be as strong as an elf wizard in pure firepower, but after a few levels you have abilities that an elf fighter wishes they could have without much drawback.

Even pure fighter, maybe especially pure fighter, is optimization dependent. Just looking at common low power SRD trash. I would definitely take a fighter 4 I built over a bugbear (3rhd, 1 LA) or a fighter 6 I built over an ogre (4rhd, 2LA). Or even a fighter 11 I built over a troll (6 rhd, 5LA). But my fighters will be leveraging feats into a trip build or charge build. If we assume designer level fighters with TWF and toughness probably not so much.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-22, 01:01 PM

Well, when you find/write that "good system," do let me know. Until then, I'm happy settling for "good enough."

There's a difference between "settling for good enough" (a reasonable position) and the position that many people in this thread are taking that "good enough" means "actually good" because writing something better would take more work. The latter is how you get systems that never improve.

I don't disagree in theory, but coming up with reliable costs for every ability even just in core sounds like a lifetime of effort.

Again, that's true of every system. The only solution that is not a massive amount of effort is to not solve the problem. You pick a paradigm that is "kind of okay" and then you encourage DMs to wing it. And that works for individual games, but the whole point of having rules in the first place is to avoid the DM needing to wing it.

2) Set a reasonable requirement for HD for each LA, so basic math works out. I find at least 4HD per LA works well.

Monster HD are not created equal. The CR 9 Vrock has 10 HD, the CR 7 Hill Giant has 12. Unless you're normalizing to HD = CR (in which case you're already doing enough work that preserving LA doesn't win you anything), you can't really rely on any HD-based metric.

If you give each player the choice of +2 LA in race/and or templates to add to their 8HD character, the challenges wash out. Everyone gets cool abilities and/or inflated stats, so no one is jealous.

Well, not quite. It may be that someone really wants to play just an Orc or something, and that person will be less happy if you give everyone a free LA +2 template. The situation will almost certainly be less bad than if you used LA as the rules suggest it, but these things aren't costless. Ultimately, for the system to really, truly work, the cost you pay for something has to be the value you get from it. Everything else is going to cause a problem somewhere at some point, and all you can do is try to manage those problems.

Are there any monsters straight up worse than playing a pure fighter?

Well, a straight Fighter is something like the second-worst class in Core, so even if monsters were balanced against characters you'd expect that most of them would be better than the Fighter. But honestly I don't think a lot of them are. It depends on what gear and books you have access to, but I would say that even accounting for monsters getting PC gear, I would say that the tipping point (as a rule of thumb) is probably somewhere around 4 levels between when you get to play the monster and the monster's CR. I would expect, for example, that a 16th level Fighter could reliably mop the floor with a Hill Giant.

Darg

2021-06-22, 02:18 PM

Even pure fighter, maybe especially pure fighter, is optimization dependent. Just looking at common low power SRD trash. I would definitely take a fighter 4 I built over a bugbear (3rhd, 1 LA) or a fighter 6 I built over an ogre (4rhd, 2LA). Or even a fighter 11 I built over a troll (6 rhd, 5LA). But my fighters will be leveraging feats into a trip build or charge build. If we assume designer level fighters with TWF and toughness probably not so much.

So a natural large size, +12 str and con, regeneration, natural attacks, rend, +5 natural AC aren't worth 5 levels? Sure you miss out on 7 BAB (1 AB) and 7 feats, but you get more HP, are better at tripping than your trip focused fighter and do a lot more damage.

Don't forget that PC monsters start with 1 level of a class so that bugbear would be ECL 5 vs a 5th level fighter.

Well, a straight Fighter is something like the second-worst class in Core, so even if monsters were balanced against characters you'd expect that most of them would be better than the Fighter. But honestly I don't think a lot of them are. It depends on what gear and books you have access to, but I would say that even accounting for monsters getting PC gear, I would say that the tipping point (as a rule of thumb) is probably somewhere around 4 levels between when you get to play the monster and the monster's CR. I would expect, for example, that a 16th level Fighter could reliably mop the floor with a Hill Giant.

It would be a 17th level fighter vs a 1st level ECL 17 hill giant. I would say that the hill giant has the advantage thanks to the +9 natural AC and the large amount of strength that would let the giant overpower the fighter using special attacks. Not to mention the large size increasing reach.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-22, 02:46 PM

It would be a 17th level fighter vs a 1st level ECL 17 hill giant. I would say that the hill giant has the advantage thanks to the +9 natural AC and the large amount of strength that would let the giant overpower the fighter using special attacks. Not to mention the large size increasing reach.

Remember that the way to evaluate character power isn't 1v1 duels. It's comparing the character against expected opposition. Whether the Fighter 17 beats up the Hill Giant Fighter 1 or vice versa is of only marginal relevance. The question is how either character fares in the encounters a 17th level party might have, which are things like "a Marith" or "four Beholders" or "a 17th level Bard".

Psyren

2021-06-22, 04:46 PM

There's a difference between "settling for good enough" (a reasonable position) and the position that many people in this thread are taking that "good enough" means "actually good" because writing something better would take more work. The latter is how you get systems that never improve.

Again, that's true of every system. The only solution that is not a massive amount of effort is to not solve the problem. You pick a paradigm that is "kind of okay" and then you encourage DMs to wing it. And that works for individual games, but the whole point of having rules in the first place is to avoid the DM needing to wing it.

I guess the difference between us then is that I don't think every problem needs to be "solved." With enough time and resources I could probably "solve" systemic issues like Monsters as PCs, Martial/Caster Disparity, and the like. But given that I can have a functional (and dare I say, fun) game without having solved those things, my time is better spent elsewhere. YMMV.

Morphic tide

2021-06-22, 06:27 PM

Monsters don't make good spellcasters because monsters that fight "like spellcasters" arbitrarily have mechanics that do not scale or transition neatly into any class. A Beholder is a caster. A Mind Flayer is a caster. Many fiends are casters (though obviously it varies a lot because there are many, many types of fiend). The idea that monsters can't fight like a Wizard or a Cleric is just not supported by the range of monsters that exist.
The monsters applicable for this are rare because of the reliance on SLAs for somewhat opaque reasons, but even these "caster-type" monsters are very nearly universally much more capable in melee than actual PC casters, which is important power budget. Mind Flayers as PCs have +8 Intelligence, four Natural Attacks that Grapple together and permit a save-or-die on as little as three Grapple checks, has SR 25 to demand CL 15 spells to have a coin-flip success chance, and are RHD and CR 8. If they naturally scaled Sorcerer spellcasting, which they still have +6 to the casting score of for +15% saving throw failures, they would be heinously overpowered without absolutely gutting the casting progression to be "unplayable" by the standards you've lain out.

Virtually every monster above CR 1 in the entire game has the use-case of setting it alone against a group of four PCs to consider, and this demands a sizable distraction from mirroring the way PCs operate to survive long enough to apply their offensive abilities more than one round. An Illithid must be capable of operating in melee alone, something PC Sorcerers should not be needing because they're supposed to have a Fighter and Cleric in the way of enemies trying that (yes, the CoDzilla style was intentional, 3.5 screwed up the balance point of the TSR-era gameplay intent).

And as it turns out SLAs don't have components, so caster-type monsters using SLAs aren't completely shut off by a rather significant number of PC options in ways the beatsticks aren't. Sunder the material component bag, Grapple the not-an-enormous-beatstick, ready your counterspells, there are quite a number of ways to screw with actual spellcasters that don't work on SLAs, even without mentioning logistical issues with various monsters sometimes not actually meeting the requirements to cast the real spells and wildly overleveled SLAs for utility purposes.

PCs are exceptional because they are higher level than other people. The fact that your 10th level Warlock has marginally better base stats than a 1st level Commoner is not the reason he's awesome, it's the fact that he can fly, shoots blasts of eldritch power at his enemies, and calls on dark magics to do his bidding.
But then what are 1st-4th level PCs? In that range, even well-built PCs have difficulties with quite a lot of entirely ordinary animals like bears And those base stats carry forward, a Wizard with a 15 Int will be capable of casting 9th level spells unassisted right at level 17, while a standard array Wizard will require assistance for anything above 1st level. Those small differences actually do matter intensely in the math of the game, because they'll be adding up over time. An elite array Warlock will have +10% accuracy over a standard array Warlock, allowing them to be as accurate as a Warlock two levels higher, sometimes three. PC-WBL and NPC-WBL also differ, making it so that PCs gradually accrete more and more equipment advantage for another layer of numerical advantages that makes them compete with higher level NPCs.

NPCs aren't just your irrelevant rubes. The High Priest of Lolth is going to be a rather high level NPC unless you play an extremely niche game rather heavily about the politics of Drow society (which is actually a perfectly sensible campaign for 3.5, as assassination attempts are constant and broad daylight murder is hardly out of the question to fill your required diet of combat encounters). So PCs need to be better by some inherent factor that isn't built into the must-have for basic relevance of class levels. This is done early with ability scores, and later on maintained with gear, including ability enhancers.

PCs are higher quality characters, they aren't just "as NPC, but more levels". They have more equipment, they have better levels between never using NPC classes and frequent use of PRCs, they have higher ability scores, they choose better feats, they get bigger spellbooks, they have enormous swaths of very different options that make for an absurdly impractical bookkeeping nightmare to apply to commonplace things in the world. There are many, many, many things wildly wrong with your assumptions of why LA is wholly inappropriate for Dungeons and Dragons revised third edition. Very, very nearly every last part of the system forces monsters to operate differently to have the game be playable.

So your big example of "asymmetry between PCs and NPCs" is "what if you had a poisoned dagger that couldn't be sundered or disarmed, but also couldn't be upgraded to a mace or a sword"? If that's the problem we need to solve, I think we're okay.
*points at Soulknife* There's your precedence for your translation. PC classes exceedingly rarely do anything with direct gear substitutes like this, to the point it was the big selling point of a subsystem that it did exactly that and the designers flinched away from giving the casting-like subsystem to the Psionic example. All the attempts at doing so by WotC are infamously terrible classes, other than the Artificer just literally being an item-crafting class and ending up one of the few things able to meaningfully compare practical peaks with Wizard.

This hypothetical is to my knowledge totally unused, because the one class that messes around with having an unremovable weapon as a class feature is heavily based on shuffling what that weapon is. And also the example is "what if a Sorcerer had full BAB, d10 HD, +4 Con, and their melee attack did Constitution damage to boot?", not just such a simple bonus weapon. The Bite is an example of something that doesn't work the way PC classes do. So is the web. But the basic summation of having the racial Sorcerer casting in addition to the Monstrous Spider properties makes it utterly ridiculous to think of it being playable without level adjustment, because it's just flat bonuses on top of a PC class.

Therefore monster PCs are unplayable. They don't work in RAW 3e. They don't work if you tweak LA numbers. They don't work if you let people buy off small amounts of LA. They don't work if you do complicated XP accounting. All you can do in the 3e rules framework is get something that works okay for your game. There is no general fix, there are only bespoke fixes for the N~=4 version of the problem that happens at your table.
Something does not need to be exactly designed in line with another thing to be roughly interchangable. 3.5 as a system does not have anything resembling the fine balance required to make that claim. Indeed, there's been multiple attempts at cracking negative level adjustment mechanics specifically to resolve the problem of monsters genuinely unworkable at their statblock RHD. You have it right about the 3e rules framework. This is the damned d20 forum. In light of the game that was designed first, Level Adjustment is the cleanest, most straightforward, most enduring solution, because it places the least constraints on monster design and makes the least changes to how you'd build a player character.

It was poorly implemented with routine inflation, on purpose, and the monsters having it as an addon rather than any care at all to designing for it, such as the omnipresence of SLAs to deal with functional issues of having actual spellcasting on monsters. But with respect to how the d20 system was made, Level Adjustment is most likely the best answer to take monster statblocks and turn them into PCs. With respect to the surrounding game, it's definitely the most cost-effective option.

LA isn't a solution because it doesn't work. Monsters are universally unplayable for builds that do not directly synergize with them, and often unplayable anyway. There are monsters out there where the level at which LA says they are playable as PCs is higher than the level where ECL says they are no longer a challenge for PCs. It's true that you get something from WBL, but you're not closing that gap.
Water Orcs exist. Azurin exist. There are loads of "standard" races that are horrifying dog**** for all but the handful of things that directly leverage their properties or hideously extremely suited to their intended play space. "Universally unplayable for builds that do not directly synergize with them" is perfectly fine, because the premise of playing a Stone Giant is that you've got 14 hit dice of a big meaty frontliner, emphasis on "big" and "meaty". Complaining you can't get a usable Wizard is precisely like complaining a 14th level Barbarian can't metamorphize into a useful spellcaster in their last six levels. You are playing a Stone Giant, an enormous muscly beatstick monster, not a powerful Wizard.

Your innate physicality is bought at the cost of not getting high-level spellcasting, just as it is for a high-level Barbarian who wants some spellcasting, except you probably have a hell of a lot more physicality to show for it than that Barbarian once you've built the PC Stone Giant. The questionable state is on PRC access, you very much are just better than a 14th-level Barbarian once you get your Elite array, WBL, and handpicked feats.

Except that's not enough. Because PCs don't just stay one level. If you were doing a one-shot, then yeah I could see LA being workable. But people gain levels. And that changes the value of abilities they have. The pile of stats, SLAs, and random immunities that is worth being six or three or nine levels behind at 10th level is not the same as the pile that is worth being that many levels behind at 4th or 12th level.
Monster-math actually usually gets even better over time, especially in the mostly linear Martial space. Each time you get an additional attack, your higher Strength applies again, and multipliers go better with higher starting points. And skipping one layer of bonuses becomes a bigger saving over time to spend on more secondary effects. Melee beater monsters just carry forward their advantages as very nearly static bonuses over the regular example, and attack rolls and AC tend to distend exceptionally for monster PCs as things that really can't fall back behind. +12 Natural Armor will remain nearly immune to level-appropriate regular attacks forever.

It really is just the subsystems that care, and even then not all of them. Incarnum and Initiating are infamous for dippability, Psychic Warriors are spectacularly frontloaded to run on extremely few Manifesting levels with huge swaths of their powers being directly substituted by monster-math, you can emulate Martial-focused partial casters with full-caster levels into Gish PRCs, and anything 5 RHD or less has options to be a competitive full Manifester even if they'll be touchy about PP and high-level utilities thanks to the augmentation rules.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-22, 07:43 PM

But given that I can have a functional (and dare I say, fun) game without having solved those things, my time is better spent elsewhere. YMMV.

Man, how is it that every single person in this thread thinks "you could make this better" means "the only reasonable thing to do is completely solve this problem". I have repeatedly said that the thing you should do with your game is "wing it". My only objection is to the people insisting that systems that are demonstrably not consistent with the math the rest of the system is built on are good actually.

Mind Flayers as PCs have +8 Intelligence, four Natural Attacks that Grapple together and permit a save-or-die on as little as three Grapple checks, has SR 25 to demand CL 15 spells to have a coin-flip success chance, and are RHD and CR 8. If they naturally scaled Sorcerer spellcasting, which they still have +6 to the casting score of for +15% saving throw failures, they would be heinously overpowered without absolutely gutting the casting progression to be "unplayable" by the standards you've lain out.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, you get stuff for being a Mind Flayer. Yes, it would be broken to get that stuff for free on top of what you get for being a PC. But I never said the game should work that way. I said that because the benefits you get from being a Mind Flayer are fixed, their costs should be fixed. And there are plenty of ways for a Sorcerer to pay those costs without LA that will either be too cheap when you first get it, too expensive when the campaign ends, or both. You could have less feats. You could have less WBL. You could pay any of the various costs that Sorcerer ACFs pay. You could lose out on the value proposition of PrC levels. All of those are fixed costs that can be exchanged for fixed benefits without inherently causing balance problems. I also never said the Mind Flayer had to be playable from 8th level. You could make the level minimum to play one 12th or 16th or whatever number you thought was required for PCs to have resources that were a fair trade for what being a Mind Flayer got you. That would be just like what happens with LA, except you would get level-appropriate abilities instead of not doing that.

So PCs need to be better by some inherent factor that isn't built into the must-have for basic relevance of class levels.

That factor is called "there are four of them". The reason fights are supposed to be easy is not because PCs are supposed to be better than equal-level NPCs (they aren't, a level X PC is CR X). It's because four level X PCs are supposed to fight one CR X monster. The PCs in that fight represent an EL four higher than the thing they are fighting. A fight where the PCs are merely at EL parity with the opposition is described as "very challenging" by the DMG.

*points at Soulknife* There's your precedence for your translation. PC classes exceedingly rarely do anything with direct gear substitutes like this

That doesn't make it a hard problem. There's lots of stuff that isn't in the system, that doesn't mean it's difficult to balance, it just means no one bothered to write it. There's no PC precedence for "Fixed-List Conjuration Specialist" or "Tome of Battle Rogue" base class. That doesn't mean you couldn't balance one, or even that it would be particularly hard. It just means no one did.

because it's just flat bonuses on top of a PC class.

You mean like how PrCs advance every part of a Sorcerer you care about while giving extra bonuses? Or maybe it's like how feats or magic items give you abilities that you get in addition to what your class gives you. The idea that "you get Sorcerer spellcasting and some additional stuff" is an insurmountably hard problem is just not borne out by the way the rest of the system works.

Level Adjustment is the cleanest, most straightforward, most enduring solution,

Yeah, and the best treatment for symptomatic rabies is palliative care. Doesn't mean it's a good situation, just means you can put enough constraints on a problem that your best solution is still very bad. Again, the question OP asked was not "could you do better than LA without heavily modifying the 3e rules engine". It was:

Do you think the idea of level adjustment is just plain bad? Or was it implemented poorly (ie assigning the wrong LA to races)?

And the answer to that question -- which is the question we are talking about, no matter how much you would like to instead talk about a question that makes LA look better -- is "LA is a garbage design that tethers you to assumptions that do not work and means the best monster PCs can be is 'kind of okay if the class matches up well with the monster and the DM tunes things a bunch behind the scenes'". Even if we were talking exclusively about "what do you do in the 3.PF game you are running", the answer is not "use LA", it's "wing it based on the specific monster/class combos people want to play in your specific game".

With respect to the surrounding game, it's definitely the most cost-effective option.

No, it's not. The most cost-effective option is "wing it", because it costs you zero, and as LA is implemented you need to do it anyway. From the perspective of individual games, LA does not get you anything.

Water Orcs exist. Azurin exist. There are loads of "standard" races that are horrifying dog**** for all but the handful of things that directly leverage their properties or hideously extremely suited to their intended play space.

Honest question: do you think the difference between "Water Orc Wizard" and "Grey Elf Wizard" is anywhere near as large as the difference between "Hill Giant Wizard" and "Water Orc Wizard"? Because I certainly don't, and unless you do this argument seems like a total red herring.

Crake

2021-06-22, 08:00 PM

Honest question: do you think the difference between "Water Orc Wizard" and "Grey Elf Wizard" is anywhere near as large as the difference between "Hill Giant Wizard" and "Water Orc Wizard"? Because I certainly don't, and unless you do this argument seems like a total red herring.

If you view LA and RHD as being more interchangable with class levels rather than races, then hill giant wizard and water orc wizard compared to grey elf wizard and water orc wizard is a false equivalency. Hill giant wizard compared to barbarian/wizard would be a more appropriate comparison.

Gnaeus

2021-06-22, 08:48 PM

So a natural large size, +12 str and con, regeneration, natural attacks, rend, +5 natural AC aren't worth 5 levels? Sure you miss out on 7 BAB (1 AB) and 7 feats, but you get more HP, are better at tripping than your trip focused fighter and do a lot more damage..

Worth 5 levels? Maybe. Worth 11 levels, nope. Because the 5 LA comes with 6 trash RHD. The thing is, large size is pretty easily available from level 2-3. I would expect a trip fighter 11 to have something like:
Combat Expertise
Improved Trip
Knock Down
One devoted spirit maneuver
Thicket of blades stance
One white Raven maneuver
White Raven Tactics
Mage Slayer
Pierce Magical protection
Pierce magical concealment

So yeah, I’d much rather have that than the troll. It’s way better at its battlefield control job. More hp (troll has 63, that’s likely significantly worse). And no, the troll probably isn’t doing more damage either (its natural attacks are pretty pathetic, so probably one swing with a manufactured weapon and a bite at -5 for 1d6+3, vs a fighters 3 attacks with a glaive). (Although really, that kind of thing is kind of paradoxical, because no one who knows/uses those feats is likely to write fighter 11 on a sheet when fighter/ranger/Barbarian/Hexblade/etc will be better at virtually everything.)

The troll’s bigger problem is that everything he gets that is worth anything is easily replicable with a single 4th level spell. I would expect an 11th level formerly human fighter to BE a troll or better any time it mattered. If he can’t come up with a better solution, he could buy a wand of polymorph with 50 charges and give the wizard or rogue a free action every fight to polymorph him into a troll until well after the point where he could be PAOed or give the wizard some level 4 pearls of power. I can’t think of any equivalent use of 1/2 WBL without things I think are really high op that let the troll gain 7 BAB and 7 feats. Once our group’s martials are level 12 they spend most of their combat rounds as WAR trolls. Which the troll can’t even emulate with WBL because they won’t have enough HD until like ECL 17. It’s not like the martial is being a drag on the party when he is literally giving the caster the spell slots to cast and the action to cast with.

Crake

2021-06-22, 09:12 PM

Worth 5 levels? Maybe. Worth 11 levels, nope. Because the 5 LA comes with 6 trash RHD. The thing is, large size is pretty easily available from level 3. I would expect a trip fighter 11 to have something like:
Combat Expertise
Improved Trip
Knock Down
One devoted spirit maneuver
Thicket of blades stance
One white Raven maneuver
White Raven Tactics
Mage Slayer
Pierce Magical protection
Pierce magical concealment

So yeah, I’d much rather have that than the troll. It’s way better at its battlefield control job. More hp. And no, the troll probably isn’t doing more damage either. (Although really, that kind of thing is kind of paradoxical, because no one who knows/uses those feats is likely to write fighter 11 on a sheet when fighter/ranger/Barbarian/Hexblade/etc will be better at virtually everything.)

The troll’s bigger problem is that everything he gets that is worth anything is easily replicable with a 4th level spell. I would expect an 11th level formerly human fighter to BE a troll or better any time it mattered. If he can’t come up with a better solution, he could buy a wand of polymorph with 50 charges and give the wizard or rogue a free action every fight to polymorph him into a troll until well after the point where he could be PAOed or give the wizard level 4 pearls of power. I can’t think of any equivalent use of 1/2 WBL without things I think are really high op that let the troll gain 7 BAB and 7 feats. Once our group’s martials are level 12 they spend most of their combat rounds as WAR trolls. Which the troll can’t even emulate with WBL because they won’t have enough HD until like ECL 17.

There are many occasions where having an ability innately is worth significantly more than either a) spending an action in combat to gain the ability, or b) gaining the ability through a magical source which is subject to dispel and/or antimagic, so trying to compare the innate bonuses of a troll to that of the polymorph spell is not entirely applicable, especially since polymorph explicitly does not affect your hp via your modified consitution score.

By extension, the maneuvers and stances could be gained by the troll via magic items just as easily as the fighter could gain the troll's form via a wand of polymorph, only the maneuver items are far less subject to dispelling than the polymorph charges, and they don't eventually run out, diminishing in value in the process.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-22, 09:33 PM

If you view LA and RHD as being more interchangable with class levels rather than races, then hill giant wizard and water orc wizard compared to grey elf wizard and water orc wizard is a false equivalency. Hill giant wizard compared to barbarian/wizard would be a more appropriate comparison.

I don't think "this other thing is also bad" is a good defense of something being bad. That's just crab bucket mentality. Whatever the appropriate balance point is, things should hit that balance point. The fact that other things don't hit that balance point makes other things also problems, it doesn't make that thing not a problem.

There are many occasions where having an ability innately is worth significantly more than either a) spending an action in combat to gain the ability, or b) gaining the ability through a magical source which is subject to dispel and/or antimagic, so trying to compare the innate bonuses of a troll to that of the polymorph spell is not entirely applicable, especially since polymorph explicitly does not affect your hp via your modified consitution score.

That cuts both ways though. There are certainly advantages to something being a racial feature that can't be dispelled, doesn't cost actions, and is always on. But there are also advantages to something being a spell that can be used on other targets, used to produce other effects, or even be an entirely different spell tomorrow. It's not really obvious to me that either set of advantages is clearly better than the other.

Gnaeus

2021-06-22, 09:44 PM

There are many occasions where having an ability innately is worth significantly more than either a) spending an action in combat to gain the ability, or b) gaining the ability through a magical source which is subject to dispel and/or antimagic, so trying to compare the innate bonuses of a troll to that of the polymorph spell is not entirely applicable, especially since polymorph explicitly does not affect your hp via your modified consitution score.

By extension, the maneuvers and stances could be gained by the troll via magic items just as easily as the fighter could gain the troll's form via a wand of polymorph, only the maneuver items are far less subject to dispelling than the polymorph charges, and they don't eventually run out, diminishing in value in the process.

In this discussion the fighter has the action to give away. So the only reason he wouldn’t WRT the wand user to polymorph him is if he could WRT some party member to do something better than polymorph him, which is by definition better. (Or the fighter could also reasonably take IHS instead of WRT, which would just be a different form of superiority over the troll)

I’m AFB but I’m pretty sure the maneuver granting items still require you to meet the maneuver prerequisites. So the troll with his IL3 couldn’t WRT at any price.

I’ve never seen a martial 11 with anything like 63HP. With 10 con he would average 65.

There are more occasions when having the ability to fly, or be fireproof, or tiny, are useful than there are when you are staring at a dispel. The troll gets the benefits and drawbacks of a troll. The fighter gets the benefits of a troll only when a troll is the best creature under (7 or 11) HD to be. Which is probably actually never. It’s been years since I’ve switched to PF, but the fighter is at LEAST looking at the Bladerager Troll with Str 28 and better natural attacks, or the treant with Str 29 and +13 NA. Speaking of hostile magics, the troll’s 5LA hurts him there also. A holy word from a CR 13 cleric blinds the fighter for 2d4 rounds but paralyzes the troll for 1d10 minutes.

Even if the fighter isn’t using his WBL and his action to spark the polymorph, polymorphing the fighter is:
1. Almost always useful
2. The single biggest force multiplier of a fighter/wizard team in their level range.
Unless you have a tailored (this is the perfect spell to end this fight right now) prepped, it’s generally a fantastic idea. The fact that the troll receives virtually no benefit from it is a huge drawback. (The PF polymorph nerfs crippled PF melee more than anything good they got, you can’t convince me otherwise). So if you have an optimized muggle on your team, and the enemy spends a round and makes a check to dispel it, you CAST IT AGAIN and watch them buzzsaw through the enemy casters defense and concealment buffs. It’s literally the best use of the most powerful spell in its level range, other than planar binding, and with way less potential for DM screwage. And it empowers muggles rather than replacing them.

Morphic tide

2021-06-22, 09:59 PM

I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, you get stuff for being a Mind Flayer. Yes, it would be broken to get that stuff for free on top of what you get for being a PC. But I never said the game should work that way. I said that because the benefits you get from being a Mind Flayer are fixed, their costs should be fixed.
But the benefits of being a Mind Flayer aren't fixed. If Mind Flayer Wizards were properly supported, they would actually have new advantages later on because of getting extra bonus spell slots, and the value of passing saves becomes more intensive. Having the Intelligence bonus innately means you're getting the extra skill points for your earliest hit dice, which the process of rendering them perfectly functional would translate into enormously higher capabilities that just become more of an advantage as you gain yet more levels.

I also never said the Mind Flayer had to be playable from 8th level. You could make the level minimum to play one 12th or 16th or whatever number you thought was required for PCs to have resources that were a fair trade for what being a Mind Flayer got you. That would be just like what happens with LA, except you would get level-appropriate abilities instead of not doing that.
Can we instead burn literally everything involving Vancian spellcasting to the ground to eliminate the extremely vast majority of "level-appropriate abilities" having such paranoia about class levels and completely dumpster the cause of making monster statblocks "so unplayable"? Most everything that isn't Vancian or aping Vancian progression has remarkably little actual "level appropriate abilities" going on, just raw number scaling. It's why dips are such an omnipresent phenomenon for Martial builds, because there really just flat-out isn't enough later-level value to be worth passing up the entry bonus of another Martial class. Barbarian 1 with the Pounce AFC, Totemist 2 for Totem Chakra, Fighter 2 for a pair of bonus feats, Paladin 2 for Charisma to saves, Rogue 1 for Trapfinding...

Because salting the earth of the casting-likes being so level-dependent is actually a hell of a lot less workload than any of the alternatives to some variant of LA. Literally rebuilding spellcasting, psionics, shadowcasting, truenaming, invocations, and binding from the ground up to operate like incarnum or martial initiating is a lot less workload than cobbling together a unique mechanical imitation package for the "defining" features of every monster in the game. Because you can do it by just rebuilding the base classes and core rules of the subsystems without a single touch to the enormous reams of spells, powers, mysteries, invocations, and vestiges, as opposed to going over the hundreds and hundreds of monsters in the game and putting together a friendly PC progression including every single ability in existence without exception.

Every solution that is a sane workload comes back to some variant of Level Adjustment. It might be WBL-adjustment, it might be hard HD loss, it might be some number of feats, but every single method that scales to the number of implementations required to cover all the theoretically playable monsters comes back to giving a specific number that takes away so many levels of some part of your character's progression. Every solution that requires per-monster design work is not viable design space, because it takes too much writing out to cover the enormous reams of monsters printed, and is not directly playing the monster.

That factor is called "there are four of them". The reason fights are supposed to be easy is not because PCs are supposed to be better than equal-level NPCs (they aren't, a level X PC is CR X). It's because four level X PCs are supposed to fight one CR X monster. The PCs in that fight represent an EL four higher than the thing they are fighting. A fight where the PCs are merely at EL parity with the opposition is described as "very challenging" by the DMG.

...No? Individual party members are supposed to be quite significant personages, it's part of the party role functionality that quite sizable parts of the design tried to keep working but bricked themselves on overly broad shapeshifting and summoning mechanics, alongside thoroughly screwing up the Cleric's balance point. Your Fighter is supposed to be specifically exceptional right at 1st level, just less so than they are at 5th level, that's what the Elite Array means by being Elite. It's also used for most varieties of class-advanced monster. And PCs do in fact have more WBL than NPCs, completely identical builds will diverge from that if absolutely nothing else. Unless it's a Mirror of Opposition or something that literally clones the PC gear and all.

You mean like how PrCs advance every part of a Sorcerer you care about while giving extra bonuses? Or maybe it's like how feats or magic items give you abilities that you get in addition to what your class gives you. The idea that "you get Sorcerer spellcasting and some additional stuff" is an insurmountably hard problem is just not borne out by the way the rest of the system works.
Except it's in the opposite direction: You get the racial advantages up front, while PRCs are qualified for later. PRCs are the primary form of the "level appropriate abilities" you've been obsessing about so much that don't actually exist for the vast majority of Martials. A single-class Barbarian gets nothing but slight number improvements past 5th level. Fighters have so vanishingly little tied to the class levels it's insulting, the class is used exclusively as a feat-bank in optimization. The overwhelming design trend is that the benefits the Aranea have are back-half advantages over base class, not first-quarter advantages.

Magic items are exponential in cost, so taking out WBL when the advantages include ability scores becomes punitive quickly because you can trivially get back dozens of thousands of GP by skipping out on upgrades that you don't actually need. Feats don't work because formally removing those in job lots is vastly more crippling than the blank ECL approach, because you get as much as LA +3 before you permanently lose even one feat that is an extremely limited and highly required resource to access "level appropriate" abilities, while ability scores and Natural Armor can quite readily make up for most of the raw number losses in many, many cases.

And the answer to that question -- which is the question we are talking about, no matter how much you would like to instead talk about a question that makes LA look better -- is "LA is a garbage design that tethers you to assumptions that do not work and means the best monster PCs can be is 'kind of okay if the class matches up well with the monster and the DM tunes things a bunch behind the scenes'". Even if we were talking exclusively about "what do you do in the 3.PF game you are running", the answer is not "use LA", it's "wing it based on the specific monster/class combos people want to play in your specific game".
d20 forum. Not general roleplaying. The thread's placed in the forum for 3.5, and you keep using 3.5-specific viability examples. The mechanical functions that are behind all the issues you list are 3.5 problems. "Thou Shalt Not Lose Caster Levels" is a very famously 3.5 problem. LA's perfectly fine because 3.5 isn't a finely-tuned system. All the problems with LA but the casting viability (burn Vancian to the ground and replace with something that isn't violently hostile to all but the most totally dedicated builds if monster-casters are your style) are either emergent of the wording being a total loss of all level-dependent properties (skill maximums and feats are the main issues), or the inherent skew of differing design goals. Which has dramatically worse presence in the base classes of the game than between Martial classes and beatstick monsters (other than Undead and Constructs, granted)

No, it's not. The most cost-effective option is "wing it", because it costs you zero, and as LA is implemented you need to do it anyway. From the perspective of individual games, LA does not get you anything.
Except that winging it means every DM working out all the math themselves as campaign prepwork leading to enormous variance and greatly enlarged leadup time, whereas honest handling of a blunt add-on like Level Adjustment allows coherent game design with a more usable drop-in state than the comparison point of many of the base classes. "Wing it" costs the designer nothing, but costs the customer a rather considerable amount of their time, especially if said customer has any eye at all for getting things balanced up front. Have you tried to "wing it"? Have you tried to actually crunch out MM1 as "playable" races? Have you taken literally a single moment to run the numbers yourself to determine the reality of the hard math?

Honest question: do you think the difference between "Water Orc Wizard" and "Grey Elf Wizard" is anywhere near as large as the difference between "Hill Giant Wizard" and "Water Orc Wizard"? Because I certainly don't, and unless you do this argument seems like a total red herring.
What's the difference between Water Orc Barbarian 14/Wizard 6 and a Stone Giant Wizard 6? By playing the monster, by using the actual printed statblock, you have an enormous amount of mechanical ability in front-line combat, locking in huge swaths of power budget into "not-Wizard". Stop trying to compare a fully-focused spellcaster to a beatstick monster. The game design required to make this work is a contradictory mess. The design workload to make it work is utter torture.

This premise. Cannot be answered sensibly. Because spellcasting mechanics in d20 are vastly too sensitive to class level losses to make anything with more than three RHD into a "playable" Wizard by your absurd standards if RHD are at all included in the ECL formula. And every single alternative to an ECL formula that's just a revision of LA itself is not directly playing the monster, therefor demanding additional mechanics being written for each and every single monster.

You seem to have literally no concept of workload. You seem to be arguing exclusively about what your ideal result should be, and literally zero realities of the surrounding system. The framework of the question cannot house an ideal result, because it is not an ideal system, it never was an ideal system, the workflow placed playability as a side function because it has tension with monster functionality and finding the optimal middle-ground is a tedious mess, and any "ideal result" would require adapting 6 years of rather high production rate content to your "solution", if it even actually solves the problem correctly instead of buggering it some new way because you aren't willing to engage with the intricacies of the math to prove that LA cannot work.

Duff

2021-06-22, 10:05 PM

Crake

2021-06-22, 10:58 PM

I don't think "this other thing is also bad" is a good defense of something being bad. That's just crab bucket mentality. Whatever the appropriate balance point is, things should hit that balance point. The fact that other things don't hit that balance point makes other things also problems, it doesn't make that thing not a problem.

Sounds to me like your issue isn't with level adjustment or racial HD, if you have an issue with barbarian and wizard multiclassing not being functional. Personally, I see asymmetry as a feature of 3.5, not a flaw, in allowing you to play a wide variety of classes and characters that aren't all necessarily homogenously balanced to they point they become practically indistinguishable from one another. In other words: Balance to the table/game.

That cuts both ways though. There are certainly advantages to something being a racial feature that can't be dispelled, doesn't cost actions, and is always on. But there are also advantages to something being a spell that can be used on other targets, used to produce other effects, or even be an entirely different spell tomorrow. It's not really obvious to me that either set of advantages is clearly better than the other.

Sure, except that in the use case, it was a wand in question, so it COULDN'T be a different spell tomorrow, and sure it can produce other effects, but it's also lacks duration, and also cannot fully duplicate the race's functionality. Polymorph for example, does not grant the target special qualities, like regeneration in the case of a troll.

Darg

2021-06-22, 11:29 PM

Worth 5 levels? Maybe. Worth 11 levels, nope. Because the 5 LA comes with 6 trash RHD. The thing is, large size is pretty easily available from level 2-3. I would expect a trip fighter 11 to have something like:
Combat Expertise
Improved Trip
Knock Down
One devoted spirit maneuver
Thicket of blades stance
One white Raven maneuver
White Raven Tactics
Mage Slayer
Pierce Magical protection
Pierce magical concealment

So yeah, I’d much rather have that than the troll. It’s way better at its battlefield control job. More hp (troll has 63, that’s likely significantly worse). And no, the troll probably isn’t doing more damage either (its natural attacks are pretty pathetic, so probably one swing with a manufactured weapon and a bite at -5 for 1d6+3, vs a fighters 3 attacks with a glaive). (Although really, that kind of thing is kind of paradoxical, because no one who knows/uses those feats is likely to write fighter 11 on a sheet when fighter/ranger/Barbarian/Hexblade/etc will be better at virtually everything.)

The troll’s bigger problem is that everything he gets that is worth anything is easily replicable with a single 4th level spell. I would expect an 11th level formerly human fighter to BE a troll or better any time it mattered. If he can’t come up with a better solution, he could buy a wand of polymorph with 50 charges and give the wizard or rogue a free action every fight to polymorph him into a troll until well after the point where he could be PAOed or give the wizard some level 4 pearls of power. I can’t think of any equivalent use of 1/2 WBL without things I think are really high op that let the troll gain 7 BAB and 7 feats. Once our group’s martials are level 12 they spend most of their combat rounds as WAR trolls. Which the troll can’t even emulate with WBL because they won’t have enough HD until like ECL 17. It’s not like the martial is being a drag on the party when he is literally giving the caster the spell slots to cast and the action to cast with.

The troll can skip Combat expertise, improved trip, and knockdown due to the number of attacks it already has, large size, and massive strength modifier. To put it mildly, you're calculation of initiator level for the fighter is off. The fighter can't learn 3rd level maneuvers until level 10 due to the fact non-martial adepts only gain half levels. You could get them at level 10 and 12 which is the ECL that troll is required to start at as PC monsters start with a single level in a class. So if that troll were a first level fighter then it's base HP would be 79 vs the 12th level fighter's 70.5. I'm glad your party found a way to make your martials not be a drag on the party by literally making them not martials through a source not their own, but rather relatively CR appropriate monsters instead. Funny how that works and isn't all that relative to the viability of the monster as a PC. ECL determines wealth too. So a Troll character ECL 12 will have the starting wealth of 12th level character. While that fighter is spending time transformed into a war troll without most of their equipment because they aren't resized with them, the troll is decked out with other cool items such as armor and rings and an amulet, properly sized weapon so you don't take the -2 weapon size penalty. The list can go on.

A troll is a CR 5 creature intended to give a challenge to a party of 4-6 level 5 characters. LA is designed to say what level that monster would fit into a PC party of 4-6. I can't say that it is far off. Especially when the baseline is a core only fighter.

As done, it's pretty bad. They've generally badly over-rated the usefulness of monster features and stat boosts so that even while still taking monster levels, the character with monster levels will be less powerful than a LA0 character of the same level. I think the reason this happened is that they both over-rated the combat value of the monster levels and under-delivered utility value with them and ignored the impact of lack of hitpoints for a lot of monsters which don't have abilities to protect them either.

But also, as noted, levels are exponential (especially for casters, but even for martial classes). And that means a monster who finishes their monster classes on par with LA0 will then start dropping behind as they are then getting lower character class levels.

So, Id say if you really want to do this, space monster levels out. If "Skulk" (the only monster I played) is a 5 level monster, it shouldn't be 5 levels of skulk then get on with your career.
It could be level 1 skulk, 2-4 class, 5 - skulk, 6-8 class, 9 Skulk, 10-13 class 14 skulk 15-18 class, 19 skulk and 20 class.
At the very least, each monster class level should deliver level appropriate results. Better to have them deliver slightly more than level appropriate for the higher levels since they can be making up for the fact that the character levels are still dropping behind.

Another option if you have the time, energy and license from your players would be to make some "Monster class" levels. Edit to add - I think this might be what's getting called "Savage Progression"
This would work the same as the race specific class levels that were created for elves and dwarves (and others I think...) though might be compulsory rather than optional and might go with limits on class choices. So for example, "skulk wizard" might be each odd numbered level.
So our level 1 skulk would take 1st level of "Skulk Wizard" Presumably setting them up to be a sneaky wizard with some limitations.
At level 2 they take a level in fighter. (I know, if you're going to dip fighter, it's usually best to do it at 1st level)
At 3rd level they go wizard again . This is a normal wizard level
4th level is another level of wizard. This will be a "skulk wizard" level. etc

That option will probably take a heap of fine tuning for each class/monster combo, but could give the most balanced and interesting results

Skulk is honestly undervalued. Sure, it wouldn't make the best wizard, but it would make for one hell of a deadly assassin or shadowdancer. With all the stealthy bonuses it has, there are so many ways to out play non-monster races in that regard it seems almost unfair. I can imagine playing a ranger skulk or rogue skulk to great effect.

Bohandas

2021-06-23, 12:18 AM

Psyren

2021-06-23, 02:58 AM

Man, how is it that every single person in this thread thinks "you could make this better" means "the only reasonable thing to do is completely solve this problem". I have repeatedly said that the thing you should do with your game is "wing it". My only objection is to the people insisting that systems that are demonstrably not consistent with the math the rest of the system is built on are good actually.

And *I* have repeatedly said that "good" and "good enough" are not synonyms.

I'm open to ways to make it better. I haven't seen any particularly appealing ones in this thread (or much of any at all really), but I'm still open.

Quertus

2021-06-23, 08:04 AM

Can we get some stat blocks on the Troll and not-Troll trip builds at 12th level?

Why do people keep insisting that you cannot play a monster until it has at least one class level? :smallconfused:

Talk of the value of extra attacks for the Stone Giant Strength seems odd, given that the Stone Giant will likely never have the BAB to get as many attacks.

For those who say that there have been no good solutions / nothing better than LA presented, what makes these not superior solutions for playing monsters?

* Levels count separately (racial HD 4 is 10k XP, Wizard 4 is 10k XP)

* 2e duel-classing restart XP (OK, that's fundamentally the same thing, I suppose)

And I can't help but give kudos to @Crake for the "balance to the table" reference (or for the rest of the surrounding post, which made me say, "there's someone who gets it").

Ettina

2021-06-23, 09:45 AM

As done, it's pretty bad. They've generally badly over-rated the usefulness of monster features and stat boosts so that even while still taking monster levels, the character with monster levels will be less powerful than a LA0 character of the same level. I think the reason this happened is that they both over-rated the combat value of the monster levels and under-delivered utility value with them and ignored the impact of lack of hitpoints for a lot of monsters which don't have abilities to protect them either.

But also, as noted, levels are exponential (especially for casters, but even for martial classes). And that means a monster who finishes their monster classes on par with LA0 will then start dropping behind as they are then getting lower character class levels.

So, Id say if you really want to do this, space monster levels out. If "Skulk" (the only monster I played) is a 5 level monster, it shouldn't be 5 levels of skulk then get on with your career.
It could be level 1 skulk, 2-4 class, 5 - skulk, 6-8 class, 9 Skulk, 10-13 class 14 skulk 15-18 class, 19 skulk and 20 class.
At the very least, each monster class level should deliver level appropriate results. Better to have them deliver slightly more than level appropriate for the higher levels since they can be making up for the fact that the character levels are still dropping behind.

Another option if you have the time, energy and license from your players would be to make some "Monster class" levels. Edit to add - I think this might be what's getting called "Savage Progression"
This would work the same as the race specific class levels that were created for elves and dwarves (and others I think...) though might be compulsory rather than optional and might go with limits on class choices. So for example, "skulk wizard" might be each odd numbered level.
So our level 1 skulk would take 1st level of "Skulk Wizard" Presumably setting them up to be a sneaky wizard with some limitations.
At level 2 they take a level in fighter. (I know, if you're going to dip fighter, it's usually best to do it at 1st level)
At 3rd level they go wizard again . This is a normal wizard level
4th level is another level of wizard. This will be a "skulk wizard" level. etc

That option will probably take a heap of fine tuning for each class/monster combo, but could give the most balanced and interesting results

My big problem with savage progression is that it often makes lower-levelled PC monsters feel like they're not actually that monster.

For example, if you make a level 5 mind flayer according to Savage Species progression, they literally can't eat. Mind flayers only eat brains, and Extract is a level 12 ability.

For a lot of monsters, you either have to only allow characters who start having already completed a certain number of monster class levels (in which case, why even have a level progression? if you're never going to play a mind flayer below level 12, it doesn't matter how a level 5 mind flayer differs from a level 7 mind flayer) or figure out lore justifications for a monster PC not having basic abilities like the ability to feed themselves the only kind of food their species eats, or changing from Medium to Large size when they hit a certain level (sure, maybe they're growing up, but to make their growth rate make sense in the timeline of the game, the DM has to change around the whole campaign around one PC - and what if you have two monstrous PCs whose growth rate in lore vs Savage Species progression don't match up?).

For all its flaws, LA strikes me as a much better solution than Savage Species for many monsters.

AmberVael

2021-06-23, 10:23 AM

My big problem with savage progression is that it often makes lower-levelled PC monsters feel like they're not actually that monster.
This can definitely be a problem with monster progressions, depending on both monster and exact progression. Mind flayer strikes me as a fairly easy one to explain though - there's a huge gap between eating brains and being able to yank out a brain as a combat-worthy ability.

For all its flaws, LA strikes me as a much better solution than Savage Species for many monsters.

That said, I think you're ascribing much more benefit to LA than it merits here. The fact that you may need to refluff, find an explanation or some contrivance is definitely a flaw of monster progressions, but the fact that the LA system makes monsters complete non-options in a lot of games is an even bigger flaw. This thread has been discussing a lot of quite powerful monsters. Taking the Mind Flayer again, by the LA rules you shouldn't even be asking to play one in a game below 15th level. A lot of games don't even get to that level, let alone start there.

A monster class needing an explanation is a lot more workable than not being able to do it at all.

Morphic tide

2021-06-23, 11:00 AM

Can we get some stat blocks on the Troll and not-Troll trip builds at 12th level?
Trolls get +4 to Trip attempts from Large size and another +6 from Strength, giving them an end result +3 to the check with their listed +5 LA. They have three feats plus one for Fighter 1 versus a 12th-level Fighter having twelve feats, which is a Big Ouch of missing eight feats, but the bigger problem is actually qualifying for the relevant feats through that -4 Int. HP-wise, they have Regeneration to shrug off normally-fatal encounters as long as there isn't Fire or Acid involved and free-heal between fights, and they get +6 HP/HD but -1 vs. Fighter for their RHD, owing to +12 Con, giving them +24 HP in their hit dice over a regular race Fighter 6.

Comparing to a 12 Con example (we're talking a high-Strength space that requires 13 Int and desperately wants a sizable Dexterity for AoOs that the Troll gets +4 to, ability scores are tight), the Fighter is getting +6.5 HP/HD, so the naked health break-even point would be Fighter 10 (+26, actually) versus the no-LA Troll. By these simple number checks, LA +5 isn't incomprehensible since the Troll actually does make up for the raw math surprisingly well with the Regeneration and ability bonuses, but the details of how LA functions ends up a big issue because you've lost a full feat and are two levels late to another and are basically completely doomed on skills.

...Let it be known I agree very well that LA has a terrible implementation. Getting ECL costs without general ECL benefits like feats and skill maximums breaks down beyond repair past LA +3.

Why do people keep insisting that you cannot play a monster until it has at least one class level? :smallconfused:
On my end, I actually look at it as 2-4 class levels to get the first big "spike" you tend to dip for out of the way, since the feature responsible for that is usually the breakpoint where it becomes almost solely bigger numbers rather than the qualitative changes.

Talk of the value of extra attacks for the Stone Giant Strength seems odd, given that the Stone Giant will likely never have the BAB to get as many attacks.
Totemist 2, and going full-BAB has you only the last least-likely-to-hit attack behind with the other two to three attacks being significantly improved by size and Strength. BAB -15 is very, very rarely important.

For those who say that there have been no good solutions / nothing better than LA presented, what makes these not superior solutions for playing monsters?

* Levels count separately (racial HD 4 is 10k XP, Wizard 4 is 10k XP)
Gone over this before with ThanatosZero, you end up getting rather sizable benefits for very limited cost. You can get 6 RHD instead of level 20 or 10 RHD instead of level 19+20. Starting off, 6 RHD gets 4th level features by ECL 7, and vanishes into costing a single level at ECL 16. It's an interesting multiclassing or gestalt variant and successfully lets anything be anything it has the ability scores and extremities for, but requires quite a bit more work to set it up to stay somewhat balanced after more than three levels.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-23, 11:13 AM

But the benefits of being a Mind Flayer aren't fixed.

Yes, they are. A bonus to INT is a bonus to INT. A +4 Headband doesn't cost more if you buy it at 10th than 5th.

Every solution that requires per-monster design work is not viable design space, because it takes too much writing out to cover the enormous reams of monsters printed, and is not directly playing the monster.

That is every solution! Setting aside your attempt to move the goalposts by defining "things that are not LA" as "actually LA" the solution space that fits the constraints you're trying to put on this problem is the empty set. There is no fix that does not require specific fiddling. That does not exist. There are some solutions that require more or less fiddling, or that fail for different combinations of monster and class and level range and balance point, but there is no general solution.

Except it's in the opposite direction: You get the racial advantages up front, while PRCs are qualified for later.

So put a level minimum on playing the monster. You know, exactly like LA already does, except you get to be level-appropriate.

PRCs are the primary form of the "level appropriate abilities" you've been obsessing about so much that don't actually exist for the vast majority of Martials.

Again, crab bucket. If martials are not level appropriate, you need to fix that not abolish the entire concept. We tried abolishing the entire concept, and it made the worst-received version of the game in its entire history.

d20 forum.

Yeah, because they asked a question about d20. You're not going to get useful answers about LA in the AD&D forum, because LA doesn't exist in AD&D. That doesn't mean we have to accept all the assumptions d20 makes as inviolate, because this is a game design question. If you would like to talk about "how should you run monster PCs in your games", you can make a thread where you talk about that. To the degree that I care, I will post in that thread, and in the context of that question I will accept the assumptions made by the rest of the d20 system as ground truths. But that is not the topic of this thread, and your desire to have the topic of this thread change to something that makes your argument better won't change that.

Except that winging it means every DM working out all the math themselves as campaign prepwork leading to enormous variance and greatly enlarged leadup time, whereas honest handling of a blunt add-on like Level Adjustment allows coherent game design with a more usable drop-in state than the comparison point of many of the base classes.

LA requires you to do that anyway. The LA math is not good enough to save DMs substantial amounts of time. What LA does is give you a false sense that these things have been evaluated properly so that you don't realize that Greg's Troll Druid is awful and needs direct attention until the game has already started and your options for fixing the issue are far more limited.

The game design required to make this work is a contradictory mess. The design workload to make it work is utter torture.

No, it's not. It's actually very simple. You just don't make monsters use completely separate math for no reason. That's it. That's the whole thing you have to do, and it makes your life easier. A Warblade and a Warmage are about as balanced as any two classes in 3e are, and the latter is a caster while the former is a beatstick. The reason this problem is hard is because of the contingent choices 3e has made, not because it is inherently difficult.

Sounds to me like your issue isn't with level adjustment or racial HD, if you have an issue with barbarian and wizard multiclassing not being functional.

That's a distinction without a difference. LA requires you to have a system that works like playing a Barbarian 18/Wizard 1. And Barbarian/Wizard multiclassing is functional, you just do it in a way that is mediated by a PrC like Eldritch Knight or Rage Mage, not by alternating levels of the base class.

Personally, I see asymmetry as a feature of 3.5, not a flaw, in allowing you to play a wide variety of classes and characters that aren't all necessarily homogenously balanced to they point they become practically indistinguishable from one another.

That's a false dichotomy. Making classes more balanced does not have to make them more similar. The Binder and Warmage are substantially more balanced than the Adept and Cleric, but they are also much more different from each other.

A troll is a CR 5 creature intended to give a challenge to a party of 4-6 level 5 characters.

A 5th level Barbarian is also CR 5. A CR X monster is not meant to be a challenge for a party. It's meant to be an easy encounter that requires a relatively small expenditure of resources. A Troll is supposed to burn like 1 top level spell slot from your casters and maybe some HP off your melee. That's the balance point. A challenge for a group of 5th level characters is a CR 9 Vrock, not a CR 5 Troll.

This suggests a solution to me. It clearly needs to be some kind of an XP adjustment rather than a level adjustment per se

Maybe? But if you look at the closest example of that which has been implemented (LA buyoff) you observe that it's power for nothing in a lot of cases. As a 7th level Sorcerer, being Draconic is free and gives you meaningful benefits. I'm also deeply skeptical of messing around with XP math in general, as that seems like an accounting nightmare that will almost inevitably produce breakpoints where there are meaningful mechanical benefits to guessing when the campaign will end.

My big problem with savage progression is that it often makes lower-levelled PC monsters feel like they're not actually that monster.

And with LA, lower-levelled PCs can't play monsters. I personally support just telling people they can't be a monster until they can afford to buy all the abilities that monster has, but if you want to let people play monsters before the level where having all the monster's abilities is balanced, the only ways to do that are A) have things be imbalanced and B) give people only some of the monster's abilities.

That said, I think you're ascribing much more benefit to LA than it merits here. The fact that you may need to refluff, find an explanation or some contrivance is definitely a flaw of monster progressions, but the fact that the LA system makes monsters complete non-options in a lot of games is an even bigger flaw.

Also, it's not like those are the only options. Maybe both solutions are bad. Maybe monster classes are worse than LA. That doesn't make LA good, it just means it isn't literally the worst possible solution. I can imagine a class that's less powerful than the Commoner, that doesn't make Commoner a good class by any reasonable standard.

AmberVael

2021-06-23, 11:56 AM

Also, it's not like those are the only options. Maybe both solutions are bad. Maybe monster classes are worse than LA. That doesn't make LA good, it just means it isn't literally the worst possible solution. I can imagine a class that's less powerful than the Commoner, that doesn't make Commoner a good class by any reasonable standard.

I'm hard pressed to see any solution that doesn't run into that problem though, at least in the context of this system. Outside of the system I keep thinking that Mutants and Masterminds laughs at this whole problem, as it can handle monster PCs without effort.

Morphic tide

2021-06-23, 12:16 PM

Yes, they are. A bonus to INT is a bonus to INT. A +4 Headband doesn't cost more if you buy it at 10th than 5th
What I mean is that +8 Intelligence becomes more useful, because it unlocks higher-level bonus slots you don't actually have access to the spell level for initially.

That is every solution! Setting aside your attempt to move the goalposts by defining "things that are not LA" as "actually LA" the solution space that fits the constraints you're trying to put on this problem is the empty set. There is no fix that does not require specific fiddling. That does not exist. There are some solutions that require more or less fiddling, or that fail for different combinations of monster and class and level range and balance point, but there is no general solution.

How is flat shifts of level characteristics like WBL or feats not a variant of Level Adjustment? Any cost phrased in the easily-digested form of directly taking away levels worth of some mechanical value is in fact a form of level adjustment, just not proper WotC LA. Which has its rather major problems, but the underlying idea of adjusting ECL for the monster is simply the best-scaling because it places no design constraints on the monster, allowing the full freedom to make it as relentlessly simplified for DM use as desired.

Again, crab bucket. If martials are not level appropriate, you need to fix that not abolish the entire concept. We tried abolishing the entire concept, and it made the worst-received version of the game in its entire history.
Or alternatively purge the outlier that breaks large chunks of the rest of the system and is violently hostile to playable monsters in multiple ways. It isn't just not being able to tolerate all but the most miniscule losses of class progression. Spellcasting also literally flat-out steals monster statblocks, both summoning them and turning party members into them, to have painfully exact solutions from ridiculously few options taken. The basic concept of opportunity costs doesn't work properly for spellcasters, there's too many do-many-things spells in the game. A Cleric of Mystra gets the utterly insane game-breaker that is Anyspell. For one extra spell level, you prepare literally every spell in the game.

LA requires you to do that anyway. The LA math is not good enough to save DMs substantial amounts of time. What LA does is give you a false sense that these things have been evaluated properly so that you don't realize that Greg's Troll Druid is awful and needs direct attention until the game has already started and your options for fixing the issue are far more limited.
"Troll Druid". You mean a class that is simultaneously a full spellcaster and has its major selling point feature come online at 5th level with both that feature and its 1st-level feature scaling with specifically Druid levels? On a Big Dumb Beatstick monster? Stop trying to make the comparison of spellcaster monsters, pure spellcaster builds almost always cannot survive the power cost of having monster abilities. They don't work with vast, vast reams of extremely basic game design, because the progression is quadratic. CL*slots*spell level*feats*items, whereas Martials are generally BAB+feats+items. Very few items and feats multiply Martial output, while very few spellcaster feats and items are simple additions, and spellcasters have more variables to scale with on top of that.

Martials are perfectly fine being cobbled masses of dips because they have features that scale numerically, not qualitatively, and this numeric scaling usually stacks. Numeric scaling is perfectly fine because there's honestly not much need for gaining large differences in kind with higher levels in game design terms. Literally nothing about spellcasting stacks. You don't stack CL, spell slots, or spells known, plenty of the feats aren't fully transparent, PRCs demand rather specific builds including the Arcane/Divine divide, spells appear on different lists at different levels when they're shared at all.

The layers of spellcasting's non-stacking are so intense that WotC actively trying in 5e still has mixing casting classes beyond one two-level dip for highly valuable features be seen as completely mad because the sheer extremity of qualitative shifts with spell level is too much to allow any meaningful amount of mixing to keep the "level appropriate" features (seriously, like 80% of that is just bigger numbers, it's why Martials are fine stacking so many dips, you don't need to go from Alter Self to Shapechange). Spellcasting is violently hostile to anything resembling multiclassing, which includes playable monsters. The inseparable difference between spell levels is just too dramatic.

Ignore the spellcasters. There is exceedingly little room for any kind of monster PC in their space, because they have far too sensitive a return on investment for their costs. Taking out one level early is minor, that level staying gone at the end is rather often seen as completely intolerable unless it is a dramatic benefit to the casting, as with Aranea's ability score bonus and gestalting of gish prerequisites.

No, it's not. It's actually very simple. You just don't make monsters use completely separate math for no reason. That's it. That's the whole thing you have to do, and it makes your life easier.
It isn't for no reason. PC math is extremely complicated, and has always been in Dungeons and Dragons, right back to the original Chainmail derivative at Gygax's kitchen table. Monsters need to be reasonable to handle a dozen at a time and are generally disposed of after one fight. If they directly mirrored PC math, the design process for every individual monster would look like making a new character from scratch, down to the class used, and bonuses would have to be calculated to properly mirror the way PCs gain them.

The difference of PC-math and monster-math is bluntness. Monsters are built very simply, with their bonuses being virtually entirely racial. Monsters reach similar final numbers, by following very different design processes. PCs are built in an extremely complicated fashion, with bonuses split between feats, items, class levels, race, and often times buff spells, compiling these bonuses and avoiding their overlap to reach extremely dramatic advantages over an ordinary individual.

And then the PCs fight the monsters that just are enormously more capable than a typical town guard, with basically no need for training or equipment to be so; the narrative standards are heavy on monsters being significant to defeat for what they are, a matter of overcoming impressive innate abilities with your own guile and boons of your achievements as an exceptional person. So the PC-math would generate terrible ludonarrative dissonance when the freaking bears are using the gear and training based PC-math. Your bog-standard wild animals.

Gnaeus

2021-06-23, 12:40 PM

The troll can skip Combat expertise, improved trip, and knockdown due to the number of attacks it already has, large size, and massive strength modifier

So it’s going to essentially give up on being an area controller. The point of a trip build is it’s knocking people down with every hit. Controlling space and jacking up nearby caster types. If I just wanted to play a damage game, look up charge builds. Personally I like control fighters better than damage ones, but fighter 12>troll in damage too. Honestly

To put it mildly, you're calculation of initiator level for the fighter is off. The fighter can't learn 3rd level maneuvers until level 10 due to the fact non-martial adepts only gain half levels. You could get them at level 10 and 12 which is the ECL that troll is required to start at as PC monsters start with a single level in a class .

So the problem is that he just got them? I pointed out this rule up thread as to why the troll can’t learn them at all. And I still can, so ???? That wasn’t a build, it was 10 (now 12 I guess) feats that seemed good on a trip fighter. Your issue is they aren’t in order?

So 12 not 11. My bad. That just increases the fighter’s comparative advantage by one feat and a stat point.

So if that troll were a first level fighter then it's base HP would be 79 vs the 12th level fighter's 70.5.

If the fighter has 10 con. And he gets 12 per con boost instead of 7. Also remember that you will need to spend more of your ability points dealing with -10 mental stats, and the fighter 12 also has 2 more ability bumps.

I'm glad your party found a way to make your martials not be a drag on the party by literally making them not martials through a source not their own, but rather relatively CR appropriate monsters instead. Funny how that works and isn't all that relative to the viability of the monster as a PC

Oh we “found a way”. Like we read a core book and used a widely known spell in the obvious manner. Whether your monster is as good as a pc in a party isn’t just relative, it’s the sole determining factor of the viability of a monster as a PC. The fact that the troll can’t do it is a huge hit. That would need significant mojo to compensate, which the troll lacks.

ECL determines wealth too. So a Troll character ECL 12 will have the starting wealth of 12th level character. While that fighter is spending time transformed into a war troll without most of their equipment because they aren't resized with them, the troll is decked out with other cool items such as armor and rings and an amulet, properly sized weapon so you don't take the -2 weapon size penalty. The list can go on..

Oh noes, a -2 attack bonus, compared with my 7 point bab advantage, 6+ point Str advantage. Man, I’m only going to have about a +8 comparative advantage to hit. + 4 more once I knock the target down. Oh, I might get another -1 for being huge sometimes. So 7+3+4-3, the fighter can power attack enough to outdamage troll on every hit and still walk away with a hit advantage. Or I could just get a sizing weapon. That’s only a +1.

Wait, WBL isn’t a “Source not your own?” So I can use my WBL to buy, a wand say? Or pearls of power? Cool. Cool.

Oh, and gear that your new form can wear resizes. So rings amulets etc are all good.

Oh, and you don’t have as much of an advantage on WBL as you think. You will need a flying item, something to let you walk into most towns, something to let you walk through not giant sized spaces. You still have to fix the common melee issues as well as the fact that you are a troll.

Assuming that the fighter isn’t being built organically, because, you know, it’s being compared with a creature that you keep pointing out isn’t playable 1-11, the fighter can actually build with the expectation of replacing his physical stats most of the time. So Str/dex just high enough to qualify for feats, max con, decent mental stats…

Crake

2021-06-23, 01:01 PM

That's a distinction without a difference. LA requires you to have a system that works like playing a Barbarian 18/Wizard 1. And Barbarian/Wizard multiclassing is functional, you just do it in a way that is mediated by a PrC like Eldritch Knight or Rage Mage, not by alternating levels of the base class.

Firstly, if you include eldritch knight or rage mage, you're no longer just a barbarian/wizard multiclass. Secondly, my point was directed at the fact that your example of LA being nonfunctional is specifically one you picked to be a woefully unsynergistic combination. You would do better off comparing hillgiant/fighter with straight fighter, as hill giant levels are far more equivalent to martial levels than caster levels. If you wanted to make a caster comparison, you should pick a caster race to compare with. Trying to compare the difference between hill giant/wizard with water orc/wizard is just entirely disingenuous and an argument made in bad faith.

That's a false dichotomy. Making classes more balanced does not have to make them more similar. The Binder and Warmage are substantially more balanced than the Adept and Cleric, but they are also much more different from each other.

That depends on your view of balance. A lot of 5e classes are vastly different to each other at first glance, but when you actually rip off the chassis and look at the engine, they are all designed to hit the same benchmarks, and upon seeing that, you realise that, while they may have different means of achieving a goal, they are basically all the same on many levels. When you start expecting all classes to hit all benchmarks, that's where you get issues with homogenization, as opposed to understanding "this class should be good at this thing, but bad at this thing" which inherently creates imbalance and asymmetry, but creates a more interesting and diverse game. Sure, some classes will have strengths that some will value less than others, and that's what makes them inherently "imbalanced", because a class that's good at a low value task will be less important and less sought after, but that's just how things are in life as well.

This is actually something you can see in a lot of modern game designs, if you say, compared classic world of warcraft, to the more modern game, the more modern game is significantly more "balanced", and while the classes in the modern game each play very differently, the end result is still what feels like a homogenization of the classes, because every class can meet all the same benchmarks, each class has a way to self heal, each class has an interrupt, each class has a gap closer, etc.

Darg

2021-06-23, 01:42 PM

Why do people keep insisting that you cannot play a monster until it has at least one class level? :smallconfused:

It's not a matter of if you can't, it's a matter of you generally won't. A PC gets to pick a class when they start the game. The monsters as races rules give you permission not to if you want. So the assumption is that you would have the first level of your class compared to not having it. It's better to compare the standard than the exception. Don't forget that the first class level gets maximum on the HD roll which you can see in the troll ranger stat block on the SRD.

Firstly, if you include eldritch knight or rage mage, you're no longer just a barbarian/wizard multiclass. Secondly, my point was directed at the fact that your example of LA being nonfunctional is specifically one you picked to be a woefully unsynergistic combination. You would do better off comparing hillgiant/fighter with straight fighter, as hill giant levels are far more equivalent to martial levels than caster levels. If you wanted to make a caster comparison, you should pick a caster race to compare with. Trying to compare the difference between hill giant/wizard with water orc/wizard is just entirely disingenuous and an argument made in bad faith.

The best way to balance to the table for monster PCs is to simply create specialized PRCs which is what the DMG recommends doing for your campaign anyway. The given PRCs are simply templates, i.e. not meant to be used in every campaign or as is. I think this is the best solution for 3e as you get into the higher LA/RHD creatures.

Crake

2021-06-23, 02:12 PM

The best way to balance to the table for monster PCs is to simply create specialized PRCs which is what the DMG recommends doing for your campaign anyway. The given PRCs are simply templates, i.e. not meant to be used in every campaign or as is. I think this is the best solution for 3e as you get into the higher LA/RHD creatures.

I mean, that's also definitely true, and I can say as a DM, some of my favourite time has been spent homebrewing prestige classes for players, and with the precedent set by classes like beholder mage, there's nothing stopping you from making a "catch up" prestige class like that, which lets your monster PCs get up to standard quickly with the more regular PCs

Edit: But alternatively, it may not even be an issue if your table is low or even mid op, and you have entirely single classed characters, without any fancy acfs or anything like that, because despite what people say about level adjustment scaling linearly while the game scales exponentially, that's just flat out not true. The system and a lot of it's base assumptions scale at a fairly linear rate, it's just that the POTENTIAL of some classes scale exponentially. That doesn't make LA and RHD any worse than the fighter class or the rogue class, which scale linearly, it just means that LA and RHD don't meet the balance of the table, just the same as fighter and rogue don't.

Beni-Kujaku

2021-06-23, 02:23 PM

Level adjustment is a simple way to account for monster power and allow to play them. Any other way either makes the calculations necessary much more daunting (like the separate XP pools discussed here) or change the monsters characteristics so that you don't really play the monster itself (what is done in 5e). Just reducing the number of class levels is straightforward and works relatively well in most cases. Really, the system in itself works. It discourages spellcaster levels since these are so dependant on not losing spell levels but that's really not a problem in and of itself. There are an incredible number of classes in the game and most of them will synergize good enough with the benefits of a monster to be useable, if you don't actively pick combinations like Hill giant wizard or stirge barbarian.

However, where LA really fails is in its implementation. The problems are two-fold. First, the fact that LA doesn't stack with levels. As said here, a 3rd level doesn't give the same benefits as a 15th one. The second one is the fact that WotC overestimates the LA of most monsters because they absolutely didn't want to playtest them and to be sure that they wouldn't break the game. So they put these monsters at ECL where they are absolutely sure they won't be too strong or too versatile. This is not a problem with the system, just how it is implemented.

And these 2 problems have both been tentatively solved time and time again by both WotC and the community. The non-scaling LA calls for LA-buyoff (yes, it means you have advantages for "free" at high level. What that means is that you have advantages at high levels at the cost of having disadvantages at lower levels and often a less harmonized build). The kind of LA-buyoff doesn't really matter, the rest is just an affair of fine-tuning.

And the overestimated LA have been reevaluated on this very forum. More specifically this thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?632372-The-LA-Assignment-Thread-XI-Better-LA-d-Than-Never) currently and this archive (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?624825) before, plus the one in my signature for really weak monsters.

I don't believe Level Adjustment is a bad system. I don't think it is a perfect system, but it is as good as it could be without having to increase calculations and playing difficulty exponentially.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-23, 03:12 PM

I'm hard pressed to see any solution that doesn't run into that problem though, at least in the context of this system. Outside of the system I keep thinking that Mutants and Masterminds laughs at this whole problem, as it can handle monster PCs without effort.

Well, that's what I've been saying. 3e makes design decisions that make any other solution than "wing it for the specific combinations your game has" unworkable. That doesn't make LA good, it just makes all the solutions bad. There are plenty of ways the system could work that would be fine, but none of those look anything like LA.

How is flat shifts of level characteristics like WBL or feats not a variant of Level Adjustment?

Because those costs are constant. The cost of not having a feat is one feat at 1st level, one feat at 8th level, and one feat at 20th level. The cost of not having a class level is different at every single level for the overwhelming majority of classes (even Incarnates and Warblades).

it places no design constraints on the monster, allowing the full freedom to make it as relentlessly simplified for DM use as desired.

"No design constraints" is not inherently a good thing. You want your designs to be constrained, because that lets you make assumptions about how they fit into the rest of the system. The fact that a CR 8 monster can have 4 or 8 or 10 or 16 hit dice is not a good thing. It doesn't make anyone's life easier, it just means you can't key things off of HD because they will cause wildly different results in a fight with Outsiders than a fight with Undead. The benefit of having monsters that work like PCs (or more importantly NPCs) is that it makes it vastly easier to scale monsters, or to vary monsters. If "Hill Giant" was a race that could be applied to any class like "Orc" or "High Elf" that would make it vastly easier to write an adventure where the PCs fight a bunch of Hill Giants because it would allow you to have Hill Giant Shamans and Hill Giant Beastmasters and Hill Giant Stalkers and Hill Giant Stormcallers without having to A) homebrew those things from scratch or B) awkwardly stitch mechanics onto a blob of stats that isn't designed for that at all.

Spellcasting also literally flat-out steals monster statblocks, both summoning them and turning party members into them, to have painfully exact solutions from ridiculously few options taken.

No, spells do that. There's nothing about the Sorcerer or the Bard or the Dread Necromancer that inherently steals monster statblocks, and nothing about the Incarnate or the Warlock or the Swordsage that inherently doesn't. In fact, there's even a Binder vestige that gives you summon monster. People seem to think that because there are broken effects written for spellcasting, spellcasting is broken. But nothing could be further from the truth. planar binding isn't a problem because you cast it out of spell slots, it's a problem because that effect is completely goddamn absurd and would be whether it came out of a Soulmeld, a Vestige, a Maneuver, or an Invocation.

Stop trying to make the comparison of spellcaster monsters,

No. If your system can't support a Death Giant Necromancer or a Ogre Warlock or a Pixie Enchanter, your system is bad. Those are perfectly reasonable concepts, and telling people they can't play them is a system failure.

There is exceedingly little room for any kind of monster PC in their space, because they have far too sensitive a return on investment for their costs.

No, there is exceedingly little room for the LA/RHD model in their space. But that's because it's a bad model.

Firstly, if you include eldritch knight or rage mage, you're no longer just a barbarian/wizard multiclass.

Why? Are you not a Ranger/Scout multi-class if you take Swift Hunter or not a Bard/Warblade multi-class if you take Song of the White Raven? You have Wizard levels, you have Barbarian levels, you fight by doing a combination of Wizard and Barbarian things. That makes you a Wizard/Barbarian multi-class. Especially if you're a Rage Mage. I acknowledge that it works better than just alternating base class levels, but that's because it's a better design, not because it's a different thing.

Secondly, my point was directed at the fact that your example of LA being nonfunctional is specifically one you picked to be a woefully unsynergistic combination.

Water Orc Wizard is a woefully unsynergistic combination. It is vastly more playable than Hill Giant Wizard. You should not have to pick the correct race for your class to get a playable character. It's not a bad faith argument to say "I would like to be able to play characters that exist in the source material and are easy to mechanically support".

"this class should be good at this thing, but bad at this thing" which inherently creates imbalance and asymmetry,

Asymmetry, yes. Imbalance, no. Rock beats scissors and ties to rock. Paper loses to scissors and beats rock. That doesn't mean that they are "imbalanced", and while you won't get balance as perfect as Rock-Paper-Scissors in a game as complicated as D&D, that doesn't mean that trying to fix imbalance makes the game less interesting.

The system and a lot of it's base assumptions scale at a fairly linear rate

The core assumption of the system (how you build combat encounters) has explicitly exponential scaling. One CR X monster is EL X, but two are EL X + 2, not 2X. That's exponential scaling right there.

I don't believe Level Adjustment is a bad system. I don't think it is a perfect system, but it is as good as it could be without having to increase calculations and playing difficulty exponentially.

I like how a system that has spawned nine different threads trying to fix it is a totally reasonable amount of work, but a system where monster PCs just worked the same way as regular PCs would obviously be impossible. That seems like a very reasonable assessment of the problem space.

Crake

2021-06-23, 03:37 PM

The core assumption of the system (how you build combat encounters) has explicitly exponential scaling. One CR X monster is EL X, but two are EL X + 2, not 2X. That's exponential scaling right there.

The mechanics of the system scale linearly. Bab increases by 1 every level, good saves go up by 1 every 2 levels, DCs go up at the same rate etc. The reason why lower CR monsters need higher numbers is entirely because of the linear scaling, which can in fact scale from 5% hit chance to 95% hit chance, so to match the challenge of a creature that hits 50% of the time, with monsters that only hit 5% of the time, you'd need 12-13 monsters attacking every round, just to match the 50% hit rate, not even mentioning the likely less damage those monsters would do on a hit compared to the single bigger hitter.

If we instead used your logic, I could just as easily claim that the system scales logarithmically, because the first step from 95% hit rate to 90% hit rate is actually a doubling of the hit chance, then the next step is only +50%, then the next step is only +33% etc, so each +1 beyond the first actually has less and less value, thus the scaling is logarithmic, but we both know that's not the case. The numbers of the system scale in a linear fashion, and the reason why people say wizards are quadratic, or exponential, isn't because of the number scaling, it's becuase of the scope of what their spells allow, but if you play a caster the way 3.5 EXPECTS you to play a caster, they likewise scale linearly.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-23, 04:03 PM

If we instead used your logic, I could just as easily claim that the system scales logarithmically, because the first step from 95% hit rate to 90% hit rate is actually a doubling of the hit chance, then the next step is only +50%, then the next step is only +33% etc, so each +1 beyond the first actually has less and less value, thus the scaling is logarithmic, but we both know that's not the case.

Yes, the value of those things does scale logarithmically, and astute mathematicians will remember the special relationship between logs and exponents. The bonuses are linear, but their effect is not. A +1 bonus to AC is not worth the same thing if your opponents hit you on a 10+ as it is if they hit you on a 19+.

AmberVael

2021-06-23, 04:07 PM

Beni-Kujaku

2021-06-23, 04:08 PM

No. If your system can't support a Death Giant Necromancer or a Ogre Warlock or a Pixie Enchanter, your system is bad. Those are perfectly reasonable concepts, and telling people they can't play them is a system failure.

Water Orc Wizard is a woefully unsynergistic combination. It is vastly more playable than Hill Giant Wizard. You should not have to pick the correct race for your class to get a playable character. It's not a bad faith argument to say "I would like to be able to play characters that exist in the source material and are easy to mechanically support".

I like how a system that has spawned nine different threads trying to fix it is a totally reasonable amount of work, but a system where monster PCs just worked the same way as regular PCs would obviously be impossible. That seems like a very reasonable assessment of the problem space.

Well, there you have it. Death Giant Necromancer, Ogre Warlock, etc... are all "woefully unsynergistic combinations". They are playable, of course. I could make these characters and play them, they would be a bit weaker, but if the party is not that optimized, they are definitely playable. The Death Giant might use their undead soldiers to flank the enemy, the Ogre might use Eldritch Glaive to attack and the Pixie might use her size and flying to be able to enchant people more easily, but it just won't be on a level of something that actually works with the character, like Death Giant Warblade, Ogre Barbarian, or Pixie Warlock. Monster PCs do work exactly the same way as regular PCs do. It's just that they have more HD, and take more of the build, so when you take class levels that are inappropriate, the result is even more out of place than in a regular PC. You can consider the monster HD and LA as a class for which you can't get out for a number of levels. If you took 12 levels of fighter, nobody would tell you to take 1 level of wizard afterwards. It's the same with 12 RHD of Hill Giant, which are comparable to martial levels.

And the system isn't just for what you'd consider monster PCs. Level Adjustment also functions the same way with Asimaar, who are definitely a regular playable race.

Also, could you please explain what you mean by "a system where monster PCs work the same way as regular PCs"? How do you intend to do that. Psyren already asked you this, but just saying "the system is bad" when the system works in most cases and when you have no interest in trying to find an alternative or a fix is kinda hypocrite.

Crake

2021-06-23, 04:23 PM

Yes, the value of those things does scale logarithmically, and astute mathematicians will remember the special relationship between logs and exponents. The bonuses are linear, but their effect is not. A +1 bonus to AC is not worth the same thing if your opponents hit you on a 10+ as it is if they hit you on a 19+.

So you agree then, the system scales linearly, and those linear bonuses have a variable effect based on your target. The system is in fact a linearly scaling system.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-23, 04:53 PM

But I was saying I don't see a way for any particular solution in 3e to avoid the flaw of just not having enough resources to represent certain monsters, at least at low levels. It's just a flaw that comes with the 3e system, since it wants to do zero to hero, and there are some monsters that just won't fit nicely into zero no matter how you cut or rework.

Honestly, I don't even think that's a flaw. Some concepts don't make sense at a low level. I don't hold it against the class system that I can't play an Archmage as a 1st level character, so I don't think it's fair to hold it against whatever system you have for monsters-as-PCs if you can't play a Mind Flayer as a 1st level character. Whether it's better to not be able to play such a character at all, or to be able to play an unsatisfying imitation of such a character is a subjective question I don't have a strong opinion on.

Well, there you have it. Death Giant Necromancer, Ogre Warlock, etc... are all "woefully unsynergistic combinations". They are playable, of course.

This argument is as facile as it was the last time someone made it. Yes, you can play those characters. You can play a Commoner or a guy with 3s in all his stats. Equating "playable" with "mechanically possible to play" is just unhelpful goalpost-moving. The question is why Warcraft's Cho'Gall or a Gigantes from A Practical Guide to Evil should be mechanically awful in D&D. These are not some idiosyncratic quirk of 3e's system that happens to be mechanically subpar, these are things that are quite common in the fantasy genre as a whole. What is so good about LA as an approach to solving this problem that justifies making them so ineffective?

If you took 12 levels of fighter, nobody would tell you to take 1 level of wizard afterwards. It's the same with 12 RHD of Hill Giant, which are comparable to martial levels.

If the only way to play a Gish was Fighter 12/Wizard 1, that would be a bad design choice too. But it isn't. You could play a Duskblade or a Stalwart Sorcerer (or a Battle Sorcerer or a Stalwart Battle Sorcerer) or an Eldritch Knight or an Abjurant Champion or any of the double-digit list of ways you can build a Gish. Once again, "it's okay if this is bad because other things are bad" is the mentality of crabs in a bucket and it has no place in a serious discussion of the merits of a game design proposal.

And the system isn't just for what you'd consider monster PCs. Level Adjustment also functions the same way with Asimaar, who are definitely a regular playable race.

Once again, your definition of "playable" is meaningless. I could play a 12th level Commoner in a 20th level game. I'd probably even have fun, because TTRPGs are very forgiving and hanging out with your friends is a fun thing to do. But if that means "playable" the term is so broad as to be mechanically useless. I'm not saying a Hill Giant Wizard has to be perfectly balanced with a Grey Elf Wizard (in fact, I have quite repeatedly said I'm not asking for that). I'm saying that as a Hill Giant Wizard, I should not get more magic from my Cohort's Cohort's Cohort's summoned monster than I do from my personal ability.

Also, could you please explain what you mean by "a system where monster PCs work the same way as regular PCs"?

I outlined my proposal earlier in this thread. I'm happy to answer specific questions you might have about how I would envision it working.

just saying "the system is bad" when the system works in most cases and when you have no interest in trying to find an alternative or a fix is kinda hypocrite.

It's not my job to fix the problems that the multi-million dollar company's product has, and the idea that I have to do that to call them problems is goddamn absurd. If you sell me a chair that screws up my lower back, I don't need a degree in ergonomic furniture design to know that there's a problem, and I certainly don't need to bring a new chair to market before I'm allowed to complain about it.

Crake

2021-06-23, 04:57 PM

It's not my job to fix the problems that the multi-million dollar company's product has, and the idea that I have to do that to call them problems is goddamn absurd. If you sell me a chair that screws up my lower back, I don't need a degree in ergonomic furniture design to know that there's a problem, and I certainly don't need to bring a new chair to market before I'm allowed to complain about it.

They did fix the problem: They revised the edition and created 4th and subsequently 5th edition, creating a homogenous set of "balanced" classes, just the way you wanted them.

Psyren

2021-06-23, 06:08 PM

It's not my job to fix the problems that the multi-million dollar company's product has, and the idea that I have to do that to call them problems is goddamn absurd. If you sell me a chair that screws up my lower back, I don't need a degree in ergonomic furniture design to know that there's a problem, and I certainly don't need to bring a new chair to market before I'm allowed to complain about it.

I mean, you're "allowed" to complain about whatever you want... just like we're allowed to point out that yelling "SYSTEM BAD" isn't remotely helpful or conducive to constructive discussion :smalltongue:

Morphic tide

2021-06-23, 06:24 PM

Well, that's what I've been saying. 3e makes design decisions that make any other solution than "wing it for the specific combinations your game has" unworkable. That doesn't make LA good, it just makes all the solutions bad. There are plenty of ways the system could work that would be fine, but none of those look anything like LA.
Then kindly leave the thread alone because you seem to be literally unable to offer an example that is not rather extremely particular to 3.5. The outright nonviability of monster-casters is heavily on the extremely non-typical nature of spellcasting with respect to the rest of the system. To keep your basic Martial numbers up, you need only more BAB, which has plenty of sources and active substitutes. For spellcasting? Class levels or bust. Period, no meaningfully scaling alternative exists to hard class levels. More Intelligence does not give you higher level spells or caster level like more Strength directly substitutes for accuracy of BAB and damage of iteratives, even if somewhat poorly for the latter. Dedicated Spellcaster only covers +4 CL, nothing about spell levels or slots. The items in the space are utterly obscene prices for very limited applicability.

Because those costs are constant. The cost of not having a feat is one feat at 1st level, one feat at 8th level, and one feat at 20th level. The cost of not having a class level is different at every single level for the overwhelming majority of classes (even Incarnates and Warblades).

So's the cost of a feat, because feat chains are nearly omnipresent and PRC prerequisites quite the straightjacket. So's a loss of WBL, if we're measuring by taking levels worth of it off the top as would be required to actually maintain parity with the factual matter of exponential item costs. The incompatibility of your approaches suggested is extremely comprehensive, such that every single one of them demands a very nearly total system overhaul. Monsters being playable is a tertiary design goal at best for the initial d20 system, it is not a point of focus at all.

With all the things I've mentioned about the game, Level Adjustment of some kind ends up the only sensible matter, because it is a straightforward declaration of equivalence in a system where such is extremely loose to begin with. The room for optimization within the same build stub of race+classes is massive in every case on the back of how many ways the chains of feats build up to dramatically change the results of characters and in-class options like spells alter the way the character interacts with the surrounding world.

If "Hill Giant" was a race that could be applied to any class like "Orc" or "High Elf" that would make it vastly easier to write an adventure where the PCs fight a bunch of Hill Giants because it would allow you to have Hill Giant Shamans and Hill Giant Beastmasters and Hill Giant Stalkers and Hill Giant Stormcallers without having to A) homebrew those things from scratch or B) awkwardly stitch mechanics onto a blob of stats that isn't designed for that at all.
But then designing Hill Giant encounters would require building out NPCs with specialized character mechanics rather than having sufficient statblocks you can just drop down and call good, and monster encounters don't need to care about XP totals to level up like a PC does so the DM can just declare the Hill Giants have sufficiently-leveled Druids, Rangers, and Bards for their encounter's purposes. And what about monsters completely orthogonal to classes? How do you model the playability of an Awakened Bear?

Are you seriously suggesting that perfectly mundane animals have class levels for the freaking spell effect to make them theoretically playable? That the space of NPC class be extended to cover literally just being a bear? If you do go absolutely insane with standardization like that, then Wild Shape's value just went up in a puff of smoke, along with every imaginable variant of shapeshifting based on directly taking existing statblocks scaling over time. It'll let you scale intelligent monsters better and make playing them smoother. But those two things are the goddamn only benefits, and are very thoroughly tertiary concerns.

Monster design is to make enemies. 3.5 is not a finely-honed system. It is therefor not an unremarkable solution in the slightest to declare a given monster a level different from its hit dice. Many monsters are very high level implementations of a specific niche, causing them to exit the domain where they'd have the remaining levels to operate effectively in other niches, but this is no different from ending up spending too many levels on a base class to fit sufficient PRCs to get viability in another niche. Being the monster locks you into paying for the power budget of the monster somehow, and the only vaguely appropriate fit of design space for this magnitude is class levels. Items and feats do not remotely approach the scale of advantage we're talking here, and skills are nearly totally irrelevant.

No. If your system can't support a Death Giant Necromancer or a Ogre Warlock or a Pixie Enchanter, your system is bad. Those are perfectly reasonable concepts, and telling people they can't play them is a system failure.
It can't support them at exactly the same level of casting as a PC at exactly the same character level, because being a Death Giant or Ogre or Pixie is multiple levels of power budget. Their advantages over a normal race are vastly outside the magnitude of anything but very rare class features, without overhauling literally everything about character design to shift the values so you can actually meaningfully attach non-level costs to what they give. I have run the numbers, the class feature and feat and WBL equivalence of very common monster functionality very much calls for adjusted ECL.

You want to play monster-casters, but you cannot meaningfully be the monster without spending so much power budget you need to sacrifice class levels, particularly given the nearly one-to-one match of functionality intent with most Big Dumb Bruisers to the Barbarian. Every suggestion you make seems to require radical redesigns of a considerable chunk of the system in pursuit of this nonsensical idea of playing a mid-level melee beater with spellcasting directly comparable to dedicated full spellcasting builds. A Death Giant Necromancer's comparison point is primarily in the space of the Duskblade or the 4/2 Fighter/Wizard Abjurant Champion, not the actual Necromancer Wizard, because the Necromancer Wizard is a squishy full caster and the Death Giant is not squishy in the slightest.

Your suggested paper-over of enormously exaggerated minimum levels is a worse solution than LA because you cannot meaningfully model playing the Mind Flayer or Stone Giant itself at the point they're sensible encounters, entirely eliminating the space of a PC starting off only slightly atypical for their kind in pursuit of this bizarre insistence that every imaginable monster/class combination must work well, whereas LA +1 or +2 still has the regular monster be a meaningful challenge. When even the standard races by the proper rules aren't actually suitable to many builds. There are a lot of 4/2 splits intended to qualify for PRCs in the game, and unless you have one of those as a Favored Class, you're eating the 30% multiclassing penalty to be permanently stuck a level or two behind.

And note the implication of that, the game is supposed to have permanent tradeoffs for the versatility of merging two divergent sets of mechanics, and PRCs flatten these tradeoffs rather than remove them. Level Adjustment is not alone. Monsters tend to have a fairly well-built-up niche. Their mechanics are directly substituting for having classes, and many monsters have no business having class levels, such as the humble bears you can Awaken. Therefor, monsters exist very thoroughly in the space of losing a meaningful chunk of class progression, by even the PRC standards, because the vast majority of monster-casters are going to be Martial-heavy Gish builds inherently if you actually have the monster statblock and Gishes in general are supposed to lose their 9th-level spells because you're not supposed to be stacking three relevant PRCs by using them to qualify for eachother!

No, there is exceedingly little room for the LA/RHD model in their space. But that's because it's a bad model.
There's exceedingly little room because of the inherently quadratic scaling. Spell Slots*Spell Level*Caster Level. The fundamental premise of the subsystem's scaling is where the hostility to level tradeoffs emerge, because it multiplies three factors that each increase with level. WBL and feats and race and skill points combined are not enough space to provide the benefits of a Troll over a standard race. The only mechanical unit with the precedent for such mechanics and scope of capability enormous swaths of monsters have over base races is the class level. WBL and feats were not remotely designed for such functions, they do not have the power budget necessary to fulfil the role.

The basic way monsters work, for the sake of low complexity in design and DM operation so that the game is not a torturous slog to play, is very large, very blunt numbers. A DM can be regularly expected to run a half-dozen monsters in one encounter, PCs place all their attention on their one character. The execution complexity budget of monsters is dramatically lower than PCs, the design complexibility budget is dramatically lower than PCs, because you need vastly more monsters than you need PCs. Party of four, each run by a separate player, is the expectation of PCs. A DM goes through a number of monsters every session, never to be seen again.

Again, Incarnum and Martial Initiating and core Martials and Ardent and Psychic Warrior are all quite capable of tolerating quite a few lost levels to pay for RHD and LA, because they aren't losing enormous vital chunks of basic function with every single level, because they aren't based entirely around a system with multiple exponential functions. The Ardent can lose four ML before permanently losing a Power level thanks to a quirk of wording alongside Powers bundling some important related effects into single lower-level Powers augmented into higher-level effects, and the Psychic Warrior's Powers are so insanely front loaded that losing six levels is perfectly able to still give you a solid final result in the exact same niche with literally no vital qualitative losses until you talk about Form of Doom. Incarnum classes have their subsystem capacity based on character level rather than subsystem level, the subsystem's how much you get to run simultaneously and some usually-secondary effects that you can unlock with spells or feats if needed.

Wizards can barely meet some of their basic functionality benchmarks after two lost levels, three levels is only ever worth it right at the end of the game, and four is right out no matter what in the proper Wizard niches. Level Adjustment is perfectly fine for the exceedingly vast majority of the game, give or take tweaks like restoring feats and skill rank maximums and giving a few minutes to compare benchmarks to correct the LA given (I personally rarely spend more than half an hour on each monster in the reassignment threads as a very extreme outlier of effort, the time it's taken is entirely in giving multiple days to discuss each monster. So blame it taking years on it being design-by-committee).

Darg

2021-06-23, 07:04 PM

This argument is as facile as it was the last time someone made it. Yes, you can play those characters. You can play a Commoner or a guy with 3s in all his stats. Equating "playable" with "mechanically possible to play" is just unhelpful goalpost-moving. The question is why Warcraft's Cho'Gall or a Gigantes from A Practical Guide to Evil should be mechanically awful in D&D. These are not some idiosyncratic quirk of 3e's system that happens to be mechanically subpar, these are things that are quite common in the fantasy genre as a whole. What is so good about LA as an approach to solving this problem that justifies making them so ineffective?

The point is to play them differently than a normal race. Ogre warlock would probably want to use Hideous Blow, a greatsword, medium armor. Even at ECL 7 that's 4d6 + str×1.5 vs 4d6. You get more HP than straight warlock and +5 natural armor which is extremely valuable for melee combat. Along with reach and +10 speed is nice. I'd probably get power attack and cleave to take advantage of the reach and heavy damage.

If the only way to play a Gish was Fighter 12/Wizard 1, that would be a bad design choice too. But it isn't. You could play a Duskblade or a Stalwart Sorcerer (or a Battle Sorcerer or a Stalwart Battle Sorcerer) or an Eldritch Knight or an Abjurant Champion or any of the double-digit list of ways you can build a Gish. Once again, "it's okay if this is bad because other things are bad" is the mentality of crabs in a bucket and it has no place in a serious discussion of the merits of a game design proposal.

Once again, your definition of "playable" is meaningless. I could play a 12th level Commoner in a 20th level game. I'd probably even have fun, because TTRPGs are very forgiving and hanging out with your friends is a fun thing to do. But if that means "playable" the term is so broad as to be mechanically useless. I'm not saying a Hill Giant Wizard has to be perfectly balanced with a Grey Elf Wizard (in fact, I have quite repeatedly said I'm not asking for that). I'm saying that as a Hill Giant Wizard, I should not get more magic from my Cohort's Cohort's Cohort's summoned monster than I do from my personal ability.

I outlined my proposal earlier in this thread. I'm happy to answer specific questions you might have about how I would envision it working.

It's not my job to fix the problems that the multi-million dollar company's product has, and the idea that I have to do that to call them problems is goddamn absurd. If you sell me a chair that screws up my lower back, I don't need a degree in ergonomic furniture design to know that there's a problem, and I certainly don't need to bring a new chair to market before I'm allowed to complain about it.

You are complaining about power disparity that is built in to the game to make casters much better than the jock counterparts once you get to high caster levels. Your use of the word "playable" is fairly questionable itself when you aren't staying consistent as to what power level is playable.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-23, 09:39 PM

They did fix the problem: They revised the edition and created 4th and subsequently 5th edition, creating a homogenous set of "balanced" classes, just the way you wanted them.

Wow, it's the worst argument in the entire world. In counter, I will suggest that in 4e and 5e they actually did what you and Morphic tide wanted and removed all the nasty "level appropriate abilities" in favor of nice simple numbers, making a game where no one does anything interesting and we can have monsters that work with PC math in peace. Or maybe your strawman of my position is, as I have repeatedly told you, not my position and "balanced" does not mean "mechanically identical".

I mean, you're "allowed" to complain about whatever you want... just like we're allowed to point out that yelling "SYSTEM BAD" isn't remotely helpful or conducive to constructive discussion :smalltongue:

It's at least as helpful as people shouting "system as good as it can be" in a thread where that is not remotely the point. I explained what the problems with the system are in my first post in the thread (literally the first post after the OP). I explained what an alternative model that would be good looks like. It's not my fault people keep shouting at me how if you reject every other solution the bad system is better than any available solution like it's something that matters. I would love to have the discussion be "what would the system need to look like for there to be a good solution to this problem". It's hardly my fault that the conversations other people want to have are "balance bad because 4e bad" and telling me that my system requires too much work per monster when there have been literally 11 threads making their system work and, as far as I can tell, they're not done yet. But, sure, my concisely outlining the reasons the system can't work and proposing a scalable alternative is preventing constructive discussion.

Then kindly leave the thread alone because you seem to be literally unable to offer an example that is not rather extremely particular to 3.5.

"Your argument is invalid because the only examples you use when discussing a mechanic are from a system that uses that mechanic" is certainly an argument. You are correct that I do not have an example from 4e of why LA is bad. That is because 4e does not use LA! I also don't have an example from 3e D&D of why SR5 Limits cause problems because, guess what, 3e D&D does not use that mechanic! If you think some other system implements LA in a way that resolves my complaints, the burden of proof is on you to bring it up.

The incompatibility of your approaches suggested is extremely comprehensive, such that every single one of them demands a very nearly total system overhaul.

How do you still think this is a meaningful argument? The question we are discussing has literally never been "how do I fix this mechanic in 3e". Again, you want to discuss that, you go make a thread about that. Actually, go make 11 threads about that. The question is "is this a good mechanic". If your only argument is "well there are a bunch of sunk costs and I spent however many years of my life posting in the 11 threads worth of spot-fixes we've decided to do for this system", you have no argument.

But then designing Hill Giant encounters would require building out NPCs with specialized character mechanics rather than having sufficient statblocks you can just drop down and call good,

I genuinely don't understand what you think you're saying here. Changing how the MM entry for "Hill Giant" is derived never requires the DM to do any additional work because the Hill Giant's stats are a fiat accompli regardless of how they got there. The Hill Giant could be a pile of Giant HD with arbitrary stats and special abilities (as it is in 3e). The Hill Giant could be a completely arbitrary pile of stats and abilities (as it is in 4e). The Hill Giant could be a 7th level Warrior with the Hill Giant race (as I think it should be). Every single one of those is exactly the same from the DM's perspective. They get a stat block, it is (hopefully) appropriate for whatever level the game tells them to use it at, roll combat music.

The place where you see differences is when you try to write new Hill Giants. And I genuinely do not understand how you could think that "writing a new Hill Giant NPC should be a completely different system from writing a new Orc NPC" is supposed to be simpler. How? How does that make sense to you? How is saying "alright DMs, you need to manually compute the appropriate diff for a Hill Giant to become a Bard and a Druid and a Ranger and every other class you want to use in your Hill Giant adventure" simpler than saying "alright DMs, here is a pre-computed diff for making NPCs into Hill Giants, roll it into your usage of the rules for making Bards, Druids, or Rangers"? At what point do we acknowledge that O(m+n) does, in fact, scale better than O(m*n)?

How do you model the playability of an Awakened Bear?

Well I would probably figure out what it costs to have one use per day of Wild Shape as an ACF, then I would charge people that. If you're going to let people turn into Bears (and I submit that your system probably should let people do that), it doesn't seem terribly complicated to let people play Bears.

It can't support them at exactly the same level of casting as a PC at exactly the same character level, because being a Death Giant or Ogre or Pixie is multiple levels of power budget.

Why not? It supports "Sorcerer 20" and "Sorcerer 10/Divine Oracle 10" with the same level of casting at the same character level, and the latter has a bunch of abilities the former doesn't. As I have said, despite it's total lack of acknowledgement by anyone, I am not asking for perfect balance. I'm just asking that "Giant Sorcerer" be a weakness on par with "I didn't realize PrCs gave you a bunch of power for free" instead of one on par with "I alternated between two unrelated base classes for 20 levels".

Let's consider the Pixie specifically for a moment. What does it get? It gets some stat bonuses that are way bigger than a PC race could be allowed to have, but that's only because Pixies arbitrarily don't use the same stats PCs do. If you assume that a Pixie's modifiers are sitting on top of 32 point buy instead of "10s and 11s", those modifiers are pretty reasonable. It gets flight that is exactly as good as the fly spell, but permanent. It gets some minor SLAs, the best of which is an illusion that is either a better version of a 2nd level spell or a worse version of a 6th level spell because the way Illusions work in 3e is totally unprincipled. Oh, and some of them get an absurdly powerful death spell once per day, but frankly that's problematic even as a monster. Finally, they get permanent greater invisibility. That's a lot of stuff. But is it really stuff you could only possibly give a PC by taking away levels? I don't think so. Consider a simple build: Binder 1/Wizard 3/Anima Mage 7. They get a suite of minor abilities that are much better than the Pixie's 1/day SLAs from their Vestiges, and they can have two free Persistent buffs to replicate the flight and invisibility. So it seems to me that, if you tax them their feats and tell them they can't take a PrC, it should be fine to let someone play a Pixie Wizard with no LA and no muss by 11th level at the latest. And that's barely doing anything at all to the underlying system.

Your suggested paper-over of enormously exaggerated minimum levels is a worse solution than LA because you cannot meaningfully model playing the Mind Flayer or Stone Giant itself at the point they're sensible encounters

The LA rules literally say that the level at which it is appropriate to play a 1st level Stone Giant Barbarian is higher than the level at which it is a meaningful threat to a PC. Yes, I know <angry noises about WBL and scaling> but come on. I could literally double my proposed minimum level and it would see you playing the character sooner than LA does.

The point is to play them differently than a normal race.

The point is to play a cool race because it's your character concept. The Gigantes don't run around with hammers because they're stuck with a bunch of Giant hit dice that stop them from doing anything else. They craft gigantic magical workings because they are mages that are giants. Why shouldn't the system produce that result? I understand that it doesn't, and that if I just declare my preferences to follow the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, I could become happy with that, but why is that better?

You are complaining about power disparity that is built in to the game to make casters much better than the jock counterparts once you get to high caster levels. Your use of the word "playable" is fairly questionable itself when you aren't staying consistent as to what power level is playable.

Well that's the point. I'm not taking a strong stance about what's playable. I don't need to, because monster PCs are so incredibly bad that I could set my standards at "single classed Fighter" and most of them would still fall below them. As a monster, a Hill Giant Barbarian 1 is CR 8. Bumping up to PC WBL gets you CR 9. And yet the game expects that character to be appropriate in a 17th level party. A party which, by the way, is not supposed to be meaningfully challenged by a CR 9 opponent.

Darg

2021-06-23, 11:10 PM

The point is to play a cool race because it's your character concept. The Gigantes don't run around with hammers because they're stuck with a bunch of Giant hit dice that stop them from doing anything else. They craft gigantic magical workings because they are mages that are giants. Why shouldn't the system produce that result? I understand that it doesn't, and that if I just declare my preferences to follow the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, I could become happy with that, but why is that better?

Why should the system prevent that? Because giants have benefits that out weigh anything a human has. A 20th level hill giant fighter would greatly surpass any 0 RHD/+0 LA race at the same level.

Well that's the point. I'm not taking a strong stance about what's playable. I don't need to, because monster PCs are so incredibly bad that I could set my standards at "single classed Fighter" and most of them would still fall below them. As a monster, a Hill Giant Barbarian 1 is CR 8. Bumping up to PC WBL gets you CR 9. And yet the game expects that character to be appropriate in a 17th level party. A party which, by the way, is not supposed to be meaningfully challenged by a CR 9 opponent.

I don't think you can disagree that taking the LA and/or the RHD away while leaving all the racial features would create an overwhelmingly stronger creature than a basic race. Even just taking the LA away would make the creature vastly stronger than a basic race. You say that a 1st level hill giant barbarian isn't equal to be a party member and yet you aren't trying to prove it.

Size/Type: Large Giant
Hit Dice: 12d8 + 1d12 + 52 (118 hp)
Initiative: -1
Speed: 40 ft. in hide armor (6 squares); base speed 50 ft.
Armor Class: 17 (-1 size, -1 Dex, +9 natural), touch 8, flat-footed 17
Base Attack/Grapple: +10/+22
Attack: Greatsword +18 melee (3d6+12) or rock +10 ranged (2d6+8)
Full Attack: Greatsword +18/+13 melee (3d6+12) or rock +10 ranged (2d6+8)
Space/Reach: 10 ft./10 ft.
Special Attacks: Rock throwing
Special Qualities: Low-light vision, rock catching, rage 1/day
Saves: Fort +12, Ref +3, Will +4
Abilities: Str 27, Dex 8, Con 18, Int 6, Wis 10, Cha 6
Feats: 5
Level Adjustment: +4
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Size/Type: Medium Human
Hit Dice: 17d12 (116 hp)
Initiative: +0
Speed: 30 ft. in hide armor (6 squares); base speed 40 ft.
Armor Class: 10, touch 10, flat-footed 10
Base Attack/Grapple: +17/+19
Attack: Greatsword +19 melee (2d6+3)
Full Attack: Greatsword +19/+14/+9 melee (2d6+3)
Space/Reach: 5 ft./5 ft.
Special Attacks:
Special Qualities: DR 4/-, Greater Rage 5/day, Imp uncanny dodge, Trap Sense +5
Saves: Fort +10, Ref +5, Will +5
Abilities: Str 14, Dex 10, Con 10, Int 10, Wis 10, Cha 10
Feats: 7
Level Adjustment: +0

I don't see how that hill giant couldn't contribute to a 17th level party if the barbarian can.

Yogibear41

2021-06-24, 01:24 AM

If you use LA buy-off and stick with a non-rhd template that is +1 or +2 la its fine. Even +3 is manageable. +4 la and higher is basically unplayable( in most cases)

Allowing monsters with RHD to count their RHD toward LA buy-off purposes would help alot too.

Also obviously many things are horrendously over LA'd, but there are also many good things you can get for +1, +2, or +3 LA that can be worth it, depending on the kind of game you play in.

My first ever 3.5 character was a simple barbarian werewolf-lord (I used the template class to gain) its amazing how far just having DR 10/silver got me against 90% of the encounters I was involved in, well worth the LA, not to mention the insane Strength and Con boosts.

In most cases its actually my preference to play something with a reasonable amount of LA because its usually worth it in the long run(in our games), and Most of our games start at level 1 and work their way up.

If you view LA adjusted races/templates in a similar light to say Fighter/Wizards in that you pay a cost to be weaker up front but you end up being stronger in the long run it can be kind of worth. (I know loads of people on these boards disagree with this, but being relatively weaker now to be relatively stronger later is definitely a thing IMO)

Crake

2021-06-24, 09:19 AM

Wow, it's the worst argument in the entire world. In counter, I will suggest that in 4e and 5e they actually did what you and Morphic tide wanted and removed all the nasty "level appropriate abilities" in favor of nice simple numbers, making a game where no one does anything interesting and we can have monsters that work with PC math in peace. Or maybe your strawman of my position is, as I have repeatedly told you, not my position and "balanced" does not mean "mechanically identical".

The 5e classes aren't identical in mechanics, they're identical in outcome. Going about things a different way, but arriving at the same destination for all. 5e also has tonnes of level appropriate abilities, it is in fact dedicatedly married to the idea of such things. At X level, everyone should have access to Y abilities so they're all on par.

Psyren

2021-06-24, 11:55 AM

It's at least as helpful as people shouting "system as good as it can be" in a thread where that is not remotely the point. I explained what the problems with the system are in my first post in the thread (literally the first post after the OP).

Yes, you described the main problem with LA (i.e. the effects of LA on power are linear while the effects of levels themselves are not.) I don't think anyone was disagreeing with that, certainly I wasn't. Rather, I pointed out that some form of buyoff is already the answer to that problem. In other words, at higher class levels when the costs of LA start to outweigh their benefits due to this scaling, the LA can be reasonably/partially backed out of the system, and the monster race + class will no longer be so far behind a base race + class.

I explained what an alternative model that would be good looks like.

Mind pointing to that post?

RandomPeasant

2021-06-24, 06:22 PM

Why should the system prevent that? Because giants have benefits that out weigh anything a human has. A 20th level hill giant fighter would greatly surpass any 0 RHD/+0 LA race at the same level.

If you gave them those things for free, yes it would. But you can just not do that. There are all kinds of build resources people have that aren't "class levels". People get feats and PrCs and WBL and class features and spell slots and essentia and maneuvers known. Why not trade away those things, where the cost doesn't change every time they gain a level?

If you view LA adjusted races/templates in a similar light to say Fighter/Wizards in that you pay a cost to be weaker up front but you end up being stronger in the long run it can be kind of worth. (I know loads of people on these boards disagree with this, but being relatively weaker now to be relatively stronger later is definitely a thing IMO)

That sort of approach is structurally unbalanced. Not all campaigns last the same number of levels, or start at the same level, so power now for power later is going to leave some people getting benefits they never pay for or paying costs they never benefit from. If you're going to rest balance that narrowly on the specifics of the campaign, you're better off explicitly telling DMs to improvise.

Yes, you described the main problem with LA (i.e. the effects of LA on power are linear while the effects of levels themselves are not.) I don't think anyone was disagreeing with that, certainly I wasn't. Rather, I pointed out that some form of buyoff is already the answer to that problem. In other words, at higher class levels when the costs of LA start to outweigh their benefits due to this scaling, the LA can be reasonably/partially backed out of the system, and the monster race + class will no longer be so far behind a base race + class.

Sure. And I acknowledge that doing that is better. But it's still not good, because it doesn't solve the problem of high LA, doesn't solve the problem of RHD at all, and causes a new problem where certain characters are simply strictly better than others. I'm not going to claim that you couldn't make a version of LA that is less bad than "exactly RAW 3.5 LA", but that doesn't mean that LA is a good mechanic.

Mind pointing to that post?

This (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25093651&postcount=44) is a worked example I gave in response to someone's working of their proposed LA fix. It's not "release-ready mechanics", but the idea some people seem to have that I need to provide those to be able to call LA bad is weird. You should be able to get a pretty clear idea of what I mean from that, and if not I'm happy to answer questions that you have.

Psyren

2021-06-24, 06:31 PM

Sure. And I acknowledge that doing that is better. But it's still not good, because it doesn't solve the problem of high LA, doesn't solve the problem of RHD at all, and causes a new problem where certain characters are simply strictly better than others. I'm not going to claim that you couldn't make a version of LA that is less bad than "exactly RAW 3.5 LA", but that doesn't mean that LA is a good mechanic.

And yet again I point to the difference between "good" and "good enough."

This (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25093651&postcount=44) is a worked example I gave in response to someone's working of their proposed LA fix. It's not "release-ready mechanics", but the idea some people seem to have that I need to provide those to be able to call LA bad is weird. You should be able to get a pretty clear idea of what I mean from that, and if not I'm happy to answer questions that you have.

Uh...am I reading that right? At 6th level (the minimum) that character would have all the stone giant stuff + 6 levels of wizard casting, all in exchange for three feats?

Darg

2021-06-24, 06:58 PM

If you gave them those things for free, yes it would. But you can just not do that. There are all kinds of build resources people have that aren't "class levels". People get feats and PrCs and WBL and class features and spell slots and essentia and maneuvers known. Why not trade away those things, where the cost doesn't change every time they gain a level?

ECL is used to determine WBL; so no loss there. PRCs given in any source book are templates as stated by the DMG. It even encourages you to create your own PRC to fit your game. No loss there unless your DM isn't actually wanting you to play as a monster. As for feats and class features, imagine the world of core only where the LA system was introduced. The only thing that doesn't scale linearly is spellcasting. We have already voiced how incompatible it is with everything else that doesn't progress spellcasting. Just like how ToB makes fighter outdated by creating stronger martials, supplements make some monsters outdated too because of the power creep.

Zanos

2021-06-24, 07:27 PM

Uh...am I reading that right? At 6th level (the minimum) that character would have all the stone giant stuff + 6 levels of wizard casting, all in exchange for three feats?
As far as I can tell, RandomPeasant doesn't seem to believe that you should face substantial tradeoffs for features that are boosting things other than your characters main shtick, because there are characters in other fantasy settings that aren't D&D related who are giants that are also good at magic. Personally, I don't think that +16 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +8 Constitution, and +2 Wisdom should be buyable for two feats, and I don't feel that D&D needs to model every other fantasy settings characters as being reasonable build choices at ECL < 20.

Darg

2021-06-24, 08:32 PM

As far as I can tell, RandomPeasant doesn't seem to believe that you should face substantial tradeoffs for features that are boosting things other than your characters main shtick, because there are characters in other fantasy settings that aren't D&D related who are giants that are also good at magic. Personally, I don't think that +16 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +8 Constitution, and +2 Wisdom should be buyable for two feats, and I don't feel that D&D needs to model every other fantasy settings characters as being reasonable build choices at ECL < 20.

Personally this is what I think PRCs are for. You are given a free class level to play at 1st level and RHD can fulfill requirements. Want to play that hill giant wizard with higher progression? Give class features that trade away the racial features. It can even function like the blackguard direct level trading to adjust how much you stray from being a normal specimen of your race.

Crake

2021-06-24, 08:41 PM

Psyren

2021-06-24, 09:38 PM

As far as I can tell, RandomPeasant doesn't seem to believe that you should face substantial tradeoffs for features that are boosting things other than your characters main shtick, because there are characters in other fantasy settings that aren't D&D related who are giants that are also good at magic. Personally, I don't think that +16 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +8 Constitution, and +2 Wisdom should be buyable for two feats, and I don't feel that D&D needs to model every other fantasy settings characters as being reasonable build choices at ECL < 20.

If that's really the proposal, that's ludicrous. It's even more unbalanced than LA could ever hope to be.

Morphic tide

2021-06-24, 09:59 PM

"Your argument is invalid because the only examples you use when discussing a mechanic are from a system that uses that mechanic" is certainly an argument. You are correct that I do not have an example from 4e of why LA is bad. That is because 4e does not use LA! I also don't have an example from 3e D&D of why SR5 Limits cause problems because, guess what, 3e D&D does not use that mechanic! If you think some other system implements LA in a way that resolves my complaints, the burden of proof is on you to bring it up.
Provide solutions that are actually coherent with your example cases. Currently, you are not, because your examples are very specifically focused on 3.5 while your suggestions do not operate in 3.5. This is a major mismatch of how you are attempting to discuss it.

I genuinely don't understand what you think you're saying here. Changing how the MM entry for "Hill Giant" is derived never requires the DM to do any additional work because the Hill Giant's stats are a fiat accompli regardless of how they got there.
Except it is because it is not a true Fiat Accompli, owing to the "Hill Giants As Characters" entry. If you use class levels, anything not offered by the class used must be a racial property. Unless you print reams of War Hulk variations to fulfil the exact same roll of easy-bake enemy bonuses and absolute mountains of AFCs and racial feats to cover all the monster abilities that are incompatible with the racial power budget, returning us to the workload problems.

Well I would probably figure out what it costs to have one use per day of Wild Shape as an ACF, then I would charge people that. If you're going to let people turn into Bears (and I submit that your system probably should let people do that), it doesn't seem terribly complicated to let people play Bears.
But that's an additional special case you're bringing up a different answer for a situation your initial model is incoherent for. It is very important in game design to have generally-applicable systems, to keep the workload under control. Designing a monster should focus nearly solely on its value as an encounter or part thereof, because that is the purpose of the mechanical block that is a monster. A system where every monster requires a pile of PC options to reverse-engineer its progression as a PC in every niche of the game, including those at the furthest extreme possible for orthogonal operation to the monster, is going to have a very shallow content pool and a hideous DM workload.

Look at some of the mess surrounding Exalted 3e's Evocations. The designers decided to specify a concept, that every Artifact has a unique associated set of Charms, and provided a barely sufficient to use example. This decision makes the workload for the Storyteller making Artifacts, which are to my understanding any variety of significant magical equipment in the game, inflate dramatically. The players are informed they should expect this bundle of ancillary mechanics, forcing the person running everything that isn't the players to go through vastly more work to properly introduce something they want for a small subset of the mandated work.

Your suggestions have this problem very nearly universally. Because they seem to all center on making bespoke mechanics to play each given monster. Not every DM is going to have the patience and skillset to crunch out a sensible playability schedule for a monster that'll be remotely balanced or compatible with every class concept. Using a generalized system will inevitably generate sub-optimal edge-cases, but allow for content production to occur reasonably. A DM under Level Adjustment needs no thought but comparison to simple niche benchmarks for PC playability when designing their own monsters, whereas in your scenario they have to weigh up parts of builds and write out what the monster does in a bunch of small pieces while finding a decently fit class to represent it.

Why not? It supports "Sorcerer 20" and "Sorcerer 10/Divine Oracle 10" with the same level of casting at the same character level, and the latter has a bunch of abilities the former doesn't. As I have said, despite it's total lack of acknowledgement by anyone, I am not asking for perfect balance. I'm just asking that "Giant Sorcerer" be a weakness on par with "I didn't realize PrCs gave you a bunch of power for free" instead of one on par with "I alternated between two unrelated base classes for 20 levels".
The system does not, however, support Barbarian 11 with 9th level spells directly from Sorcerer. You may find an edge-case with accelerated progressions like Ur Priest or fish up a PRC that stacks Rage scaling, but straight base-class Barbarian 11 isn't getting 9ths normally. Many monsters have benefits in excess of Barbarian 11. Many of them have benefits in excess of the raw martial ability of most Abjurant Champion builds. Fundamentally, taking the statblocks of monsters around CR 10 and playing a class unrelated to the monster's abilities should operate similarly to alternating unrelated base classes. Because that CR 10 statblock is meant to be broadly comparable to a 10th level character, with everything accounted for.

Let's consider the Pixie specifically for a moment. What does it get? It gets some stat bonuses that are way bigger than a PC race could be allowed to have, but that's only because Pixies arbitrarily don't use the same stats PCs do.
Pixie stats are not arbitrary. It arises from the difference between PC and NPC building, as 1st-level PCs need to be better than 1st-level NPCs, which requires them to have some mixture of better classes, better equipment, and/or better ability scores. 3.5 says "yes" to all three. The system you are giving examples for. Has many layers of its premises contradictory to the solutions you're trying to suggest. The Elite/Standard Array difference is part of how PCs are intended to be better than normal people, reinforced by the fact that most varieties of class-advanced monster share the Elite array advantage over their race's norm.

Get it through your head: 3.5 is not a system built with the assumption that literally everything should be directly in the hands of PCs and work in every capacity. This is a system with Arcane Spell Failure on armor, trying to be a Wizard in Full Plate is extremely bad without vast efforts. Consequently, there are numerous parts of the design process that cause friction with playability in various ways.

The LA rules literally say that the level at which it is appropriate to play a 1st level Stone Giant Barbarian is higher than the level at which it is a meaningful threat to a PC. Yes, I know <angry noises about WBL and scaling> but come on. I could literally double my proposed minimum level and it would see you playing the character sooner than LA does.
That's a problem of the exact values assigned, not an intrinsic of the concept of Level Adjustment. And has more to do with hit dice bloat than level adjustment, because of how many monsters have RHD in excess of CR to meet their accuracy, damage, and durability benchmarks. This is an example of "poorly implemented", not "bad idea", because it's not at all about Level Adjustment intrinsically.

The issue with playing a monstrous spellcaster rests on the uniquely poor tolerance of multiclassing of 3.5 spellcasting combined with monster simplicity pressing for the unscaling SLAs. It is not because of Level Adjustment, it is because literal casting monsters are very rare and spellcasting classes withstand very little distraction. Again, the vast majority of Martials work perfectly well with a huge chunk of the monster manuals, unless you're speaking of a truly lunatic example of Level Adjustment values. Which is "Poorly Implemented", not "Bad Idea".

You keep complaining about exact use cases that have enormous swaths of the system ill-equipped to handle with any sensibility. Not getting into what seems to be literally anything about Level Adjustment's inherent properties. You've not mentioned a single word of the complications with maximum skill ranks and feats, it's all "What About Giant Wizards!?", when Giants are a mid-high level bruiser archetype and Wizards are a very extreme outlier for level sensitivity.

Crake

2021-06-25, 12:09 AM

Personally this is what I think PRCs are for. You are given a free class level to play at 1st level and RHD can fulfill requirements. Want to play that hill giant wizard with higher progression? Give class features that trade away the racial features. It can even function like the blackguard direct level trading to adjust how much you stray from being a normal specimen of your race.

Or just allow multiclassing with savage progressions before the savage progression is completed

Duff

2021-06-25, 04:17 AM

This can definitely be a problem with monster progressions, depending on both monster and exact progression. Mind flayer strikes me as a fairly easy one to explain though - there's a huge gap between eating brains and being able to yank out a brain as a combat-worthy ability.
.
This. To mis-quote the band "They Might be Giants A 'flayer walked up to me and said, I'd like to open your mind. By hitting it with a rock he said Though I am not unkind"

For some monsters, there needs to be fluff around how/why they are as weak as they are. And for some there could be improvements in which powers are offered when.
There might even be some where it really isn't possible to do a good progression or that can't really start at level 1 as well, but I think most can in the right campaign. A giant for example might be sarting as a child and might only work in a game where there's a long time between adventures

Clementx

2021-06-25, 01:21 PM

Monster HD are not created equal. The CR 9 Vrock has 10 HD, the CR 7 Hill Giant has 12. Unless you're normalizing to HD = CR (in which case you're already doing enough work that preserving LA doesn't win you anything), you can't really rely on any HD-based metric.
Sorry, should have clarified I meant a not the HD of the race, but the PC. A Pixie with one rogue level isn't going to work in a party with lvl7 elves and dwarves, because 2HD isn't enough numbers to deal with CR7-9 encounters. A Drow lvl6 rogue would survive stubbing his toe on that parry's adventures.

And this also assumes sensible LA revision, where poor racial HD stats are factored in.

Darg

2021-06-25, 01:54 PM

Sorry, should have clarified I meant a not the HD of the race, but the PC. A Pixie with one rogue level isn't going to work in a party with lvl7 elves and dwarves, because 2HD isn't enough numbers to deal with CR7-9 encounters. A Drow lvl6 rogue would survive stubbing his toe on that parry's adventures.

And this also assumes sensible LA revision, where poor racial HD stats are factored in.

You don't have to pick up irresistible dance for +4 instead of +6. And having permanent greater invisibility and a base fly speed of 60 isn't powerful at ECL 7? Damage reduction 10, +6-7 AC, and spell resistance 16 isn't enough to keep you alive and contributing?

Psyren

2021-06-25, 02:11 PM

I agree, I think some of a pixie's natural defenses make up for the lack of defenses from Fey HD and would need to be taken into account.

Quertus

2021-06-26, 07:22 AM

I agree, I think some of a pixie's natural defenses make up for the lack of defenses from Fey HD and would need to be taken into account.

Well, yes. I've had several pixie PCs at my tables, and those defenses are pretty formidable.

However, a single Fireball or other AoE - even a weak one, like a Hellhound breath attack, that world only be a nuisance to the rest of the party, can be *fatal* to such a character with only a single HD - sometimes even on a *successful* save.

It means you cannot play railroaded CaS "and this is where the monsters ambush you, no rolls, take some trivial AoE damage to soften you up and add tension to the otherwise easy encounter". Instead, the GM must pull their punches, kill the pixie, or run CaW (at which point, the party still needs to successfully mitigate all such issues, else the pixie is still dead).

Darg

2021-06-26, 08:19 AM

Psyren

2021-06-26, 11:29 AM

Well, yes. I've had several pixie PCs at my tables, and those defenses are pretty formidable.

However, a single Fireball or other AoE - even a weak one, like a Hellhound breath attack, that world only be a nuisance to the rest of the party, can be *fatal* to such a character with only a single HD - sometimes even on a *successful* save.

It means you cannot play railroaded CaS "and this is where the monsters ambush you, no rolls, take some trivial AoE damage to soften you up and add tension to the otherwise easy encounter". Instead, the GM must pull their punches, kill the pixie, or run CaW (at which point, the party still needs to successfully mitigate all such issues, else the pixie is still dead).

Wait, I'm confused, don't Pixies have 4HD? Why would a pixie rogue only have one? Yes, a fireball would be instantly lethal to *anyone* with a single HD, but that's true of regular and monster races alike.

Morphic tide

2021-06-26, 11:36 AM

Wait, I'm confused, don't Pixies have 4HD? Why would a pixie rogue only have one? Yes, a fireball would be instantly lethal to *anyone* with a single HD, but that's true of regular and monster races alike.

Pixies are Challenge Rating four, they do indeed only have one hit die.

Psyren

2021-06-26, 12:22 PM

Pixies are Challenge Rating four, they do indeed only have one hit die.

4d6+4 (18 hp) (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/pixie/)

And again, ANY creature with 1 HD will get one-shot by a fireball, PC race or not.

Remuko

2021-06-26, 12:43 PM

4d6+4 (18 hp) (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/pixie/)

And again, ANY creature with 1 HD will get one-shot by a fireball, PC race or not.

in pathfinder, sure. but were talking about LA which last I heard PF doesnt have, so were talking about the 3.5 Pixie seen here: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/sprite.htm third entry after the Grig and the Nixie. 1d6 (no con bonus, just 1d6 HP).

Psyren

2021-06-26, 12:45 PM

Gotcha - I agree the 3.5 one is way too fragile without some kind of immediate buyoff then.

Crake

2021-06-26, 01:30 PM

Well, yes. I've had several pixie PCs at my tables, and those defenses are pretty formidable.

However, a single Fireball or other AoE - even a weak one, like a Hellhound breath attack, that world only be a nuisance to the rest of the party, can be *fatal* to such a character with only a single HD - sometimes even on a *successful* save.

It means you cannot play railroaded CaS "and this is where the monsters ambush you, no rolls, take some trivial AoE damage to soften you up and add tension to the otherwise easy encounter". Instead, the GM must pull their punches, kill the pixie, or run CaW (at which point, the party still needs to successfully mitigate all such issues, else the pixie is still dead).

I keep bringing this up, but this is solved by just allowing people to multiclass their savage progression freely rather than being locked into it from the get-go.

Quertus

2021-06-26, 03:24 PM

The party wizard has a good chance of being KO'ed from a 5th level fireball too. The pixie is not the only character in trouble and I would say the pixie has better odds of not being in the area in the first place thanks to flight and invisibility. Throwing a fireball at an unsuspecting party bunched up is a good way to simply end the party. Although, I think we have it down to always have a move action readied to move away if we see a projectile while exploring enclosed spaces and have yet to encounter combat.

A 5th level Wizard - even with a 12 Con - can expect to have 19 HP. A 1st level pixie (+4 con mod?) rogue is looking at 9 HP with that "12" Con. A Fireball that KO's the wizard (the otherwise weakest member of the team in that regard) would *kill* the pixie. Getting caught in the Wizard's own fireball could easily ko the pixie, even on a successful save.

"Not being in the area" is in the realm of… well, it's *not* in the realm of the forced railroad, where that's not an option. Yes, player skill, playing CaW and minimizing your weaknesses that way, etc, makes the pixie much more survivable. That was kinda my point. :smallamused:

Crake

2021-06-26, 04:11 PM

Although, I think we have it down to always have a move action readied to move away if we see a projectile while exploring enclosed spaces and have yet to encounter combat.

Readied actions are special initiative actions, you can't use a ready action if you aren't in initiative, that's specifically what the initiative roll is for.

vasilidor

2021-06-26, 05:02 PM

possible solutions:
trade racial hit die for class levels as you progress (i.e. an ogre trading a racial hit die for a level of barbarian on level up every once in a while or a fey trading in for sorcerer etc.)
every 5 levels reduce the level adjustment by 1.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-26, 09:26 PM

Uh...am I reading that right? At 6th level (the minimum) that character would have all the stone giant stuff + 6 levels of wizard casting, all in exchange for three feats?

Consider what "all the Stone Giant stuff" means before acting all outraged. What do you get for being a Stone Giant?

In terms of actual abilities, it's pretty slim pickings. You get Rock Throwing and Rock Catching. Neither of those seems particularly overpowered as a racial ability.

You get to be Large, which seems like a reasonable feat (IIRC, there is a feat that makes you Large, but I assume it has some stupid downside because why would we ever give melee anything good).

Then you get the various Stone Giant racial stats, like +16 STR or +8 CON. And, yes, those numbers are really big. But they're big because the Stone Giant is written to output appropriate numbers in a way that is arbitrarily non-transparent with how PC stats are derived (and we derive the stat mods from an array PCs don't use for no reason). Part of the proposal is that the way Stone Giants work would be more like PCs, so that instead of having arbitrarily inferior Giant HD, they would simply be Warriors or Barbarians and require much smaller compensatory bonuses. Like how the Orc works now.

And I'm not married to the idea that it should be specifically a sixth level minimum, or that it shouldn't also cost you some WBL or something. But if your objection is just "the costs seem too low", that strikes me as a really trivial objection that doesn't engage with the thrust of the proposal at all.

The only thing that doesn't scale linearly is spellcasting. We have already voiced how incompatible it is with everything else that doesn't progress spellcasting.

You mean the thing that has an entire chapter dedicated to it and that literally more than half of classes do? Maybe instead of ripping out a core part of the game that works fine so that we can make LA work, we can just discard the system that doesn't work and write an alternative that does.

As far as I can tell, RandomPeasant doesn't seem to believe that you should face substantial tradeoffs for features that are boosting things other than your characters main shtick,

Well, that's not actually what I'm saying, Psyren just tunnel-visioned on "you've set the costs too low" rather than engaging with the question of "is this a better model for the costs". However monster races work, they need to be balanced for synergistic combinations, the goal is simply to make them less awful for non-synergistic combinations.

That said, I want you to think about what you're proposing. Should it really cost the same to buy up a secondary shtick as it does to buy up a primary one? Let's imagine that we're talking about a 19th level character (which, if you'll recall, is the level the game says you're supposed to start playing a Stone Giant). Is it really a good design for that character to pay through the nose for starting out their melee combat ability at "8th level character" instead of "1st level character" if they're going to be a Bow Rogue or Hordificier? You should face lower tradeoffs when buying secondary shticks, because that encourages character diversity, which makes the game more interesting.

because there are characters in other fantasy settings that aren't D&D related

D&D is a Kitchen Sink Fantasy Game. It grows by adding things from elsewhere in the genre. The Githyanki are something Charles Stross stole from a George RR Martin short story (I am not making that up at all), and they are an iconic part of D&D now. Telling people "you can't play that, it's not D&D" is, itself, not D&D.

Personally this is what I think PRCs are for. You are given a free class level to play at 1st level and RHD can fulfill requirements. Want to play that hill giant wizard with higher progression? Give class features that trade away the racial features. It can even function like the blackguard direct level trading to adjust how much you stray from being a normal specimen of your race.

Sure. That is a workable model if Sally wants to play a Drider Paladin of Slaughter in your game. You eyeball the level at which "drider" is okay, call some arbitrary part of that "LA", and then write a "Spider Knight" PrC that scales her character into higher levels. The problem is that it doesn't scale. At all. It's like how there's no Incarnum/Maneuvers or Binding/Infusions Theurge, only orders of magnitude worse. You could print a book worth of PrCs at the density of the first Completes every month for a decade and you still wouldn't have covered the playspace to any meaningful degree. The solution for your game or my game can require specific tweaking and tuning that is specialized to the characters in those games. The solution for the game can't.

Provide solutions that are actually coherent with your example cases. Currently, you are not, because your examples are very specifically focused on 3.5 while your suggestions do not operate in 3.5. This is a major mismatch of how you are attempting to discuss it.

"You need to provide something that works in a system where you think there is not a workable solution as part of your argument that there's not a workable solution" is, again, a take, but not one I feel needs to be engaged with particularly seriously.

But that's an additional special case you're bringing up a different answer for a situation your initial model is incoherent for. It is very important in game design to have generally-applicable systems, to keep the workload under control. Designing a monster should focus nearly solely on its value as an encounter or part thereof, because that is the purpose of the mechanical block that is a monster.

And this doesn't apply to NPCs because? It seems to me that "Charles the 6th level Rogue who ambushes you on the orders of the cult of Orcus" and "Charles the Babau who ambushes you on the orders of the cult of Orcus" fill the same role at any level of detail you care to mention. If you want to argue that the rules for generating Charles the Rogue are too complicated, that's an argument I would agree with, but it means that you need simpler rules for making NPCs, not that you should paper over the issues with making NPCs by adding a second system for generating enemies.

Your suggestions have this problem very nearly universally. Because they seem to all center on making bespoke mechanics to play each given monster.

I know, right? It might take me 500 pages of discussion to make my concept work. That would really show it was an unreasonable proposal that couldn't possibly scale efficiently and that I had made fundamental mistakes in proposing it as an alternative. LA would definitely be able to avoid taking that much effort to make function by giving up on supporting certain edge case character concepts like "any monster that becomes a spellcaster".

You keep complaining about exact use cases that have enormous swaths of the system ill-equipped to handle with any sensibility.

Yes, I keep making the arguments you have not refuted because you have not refuted those arguments and if you don't it makes you wrong. And it's not really true that there are large chunks of the system that don't work with Wizards. You can make a Wizard/Rogue or a Wizard/Warblade or a Wizard/Bard, and those characters work reasonably well. The Arcane Trickster, Jade Phoenix Mage, and Ultimate Magus put lie to your claim that it's intolerable to blend Wizard with other classes. What's intolerable is the "Barbarian 18/Wizard 1" paradigm, but that's the exact paradigm LA locks you into (or I guess you could say RHD locks you into that, if you want to be pedantic).

when Giants are a mid-high level bruiser archetype and Wizards are a very extreme outlier for level sensitivity.

Yes, such an extreme outlier that there are multiple sourcebooks where every single new class has the exact same problems the Wizard does where it gets abilities that matter at high levels.

You don't have to pick up irresistible dance for +4 instead of +6. And having permanent greater invisibility and a base fly speed of 60 isn't powerful at ECL 7? Damage reduction 10, +6-7 AC, and spell resistance 16 isn't enough to keep you alive and contributing?

The pixie is a great example of how LA doesn't work. At 6th level, a Pixie Warlock 1 can solo many encounters with absolutely no risk to herself. greater invisibility + fly is a combo that most monsters are simply not equipped to handle. But at high levels, the value of those abilities declines dramatically. If you want to let people play Pixies, it would be far, far easier to have a system where you couldn't play a Pixie until "permanent invisibility and flight" were things you could buy with your normal character resources and playing a Pixie simply meant that you were required to buy those things instead of being allowed to make specific selections you might like more. If only someone had proposed a system like that.

Zanos

2021-06-26, 09:56 PM

Well, that's not actually what I'm saying, Psyren just tunnel-visioned on "you've set the costs too low" rather than engaging with the question of "is this a better model for the costs". However monster races work, they need to be balanced for synergistic combinations, the goal is simply to make them less awful for non-synergistic combinations.
Fair enough. I think that other build resources than levels could be used as a balancing mechanic, but considering most feats are strictly worse than +2 to an ability score, getting a sum of +30 ability mods would cost more feats than a non-epic character would ever have. Now if you want to tune those numbers down to be in line with other LA+0 choices that could obviously work, but then you're probably looking at playing a reskinned goliath, which isn't going to give enough bonuses on its own to allow you to hold your own in melee with just 6 wizard levels. There's not a lot of give when the balancing point of LA 0 is 1 bonus feat and 1 skill point per level.

That said, I want you to think about what you're proposing. Should it really cost the same to buy up a secondary shtick as it does to buy up a primary one? Let's imagine that we're talking about a 19th level character (which, if you'll recall, is the level the game says you're supposed to start playing a Stone Giant). Is it really a good design for that character to pay through the nose for starting out their melee combat ability at "8th level character" instead of "1st level character" if they're going to be a Bow Rogue or Hordificier? You should face lower tradeoffs when buying secondary shticks, because that encourages character diversity, which makes the game more interesting.
Making it cheaper to have a character that has a variety of abilities actually increases homogeneity. Four specialists is more diverse than four guys that are pretty okay at everything. And considering the party is a group, and you generally only need one person to be capable of any given task, four (different) specialists is generally preferable. Not that you were suggesting much of a generalist, since your example was a character that was just as good of a spellcaster as a regular wizard, but is also a giant.

Now the system does support characters that cover multiple niches, casty fighters, casty rogues, fightery rogues, etc. via prestige classes. But usually some tradeoff is involved, a level or two of progression in casting or BAB, a feat or two, and the obvious opportunity cost of not selecting a prestige class that does something other than makes you a hybrid.

D&D is a Kitchen Sink Fantasy Game. It grows by adding things from elsewhere in the genre. The Githyanki are something Charles Stross stole from a George RR Martin short story (I am not making that up at all), and they are an iconic part of D&D now. Telling people "you can't play that, it's not D&D" is, itself, not D&D.
There's a difference between supporting a lot of different themes and supporting specific other media. D&D is well within your rights to tell that, no, a character that is equally capable in spellcasting as the wizard, equally capable at fighting as the fighter, and equally capable at dying to traps as the rogue is a valid character concept. I will stand by that failure to model any particular character from other media is not a failure of D&D; it's a failure of your own expectations. D&D in fact fails to model characters from almost every other medium correctly; generally only making sense if you ignore abilities available to the character or take snapshots at specific levels. Which we can still do it here; play an abjurant champion eldritch knight wizard with permanent enlarge person. There ya go, giant wizard.

And sure, there's tons of inspiration from other fantasy settings here. But it's just that, inspiration. D&D cosmology is pretty unlike other settings. The demons here aren't quite like other demons, the devils here aren't quite like other devils, and the game isn't balanced for people to play the Balrog of Morgoth.

Darg

2021-06-26, 10:39 PM

Readied actions are special initiative actions, you can't use a ready action if you aren't in initiative, that's specifically what the initiative roll is for.

I could say the same thing about other actions. You can't use combat actions out of combat because the book only says the action is done in combat. That's wrong. If the fireball comes without rolling for initiative, it's all fair game. If the party is ambushed and they get a fireball to the face before they get the chance to act, good luck playing easy mode on the party after that. Even at CL 5 vs a level 7 party, you are looking at damage that can easily KO a party member or two if the dice feel like it.

A 5th level Wizard - even with a 12 Con - can expect to have 19 HP. A 1st level pixie (+4 con mod?) rogue is looking at 9 HP with that "12" Con. A Fireball that KO's the wizard (the otherwise weakest member of the team in that regard) would *kill* the pixie. Getting caught in the Wizard's own fireball could easily ko the pixie, even on a successful save.

"Not being in the area" is in the realm of… well, it's *not* in the realm of the forced railroad, where that's not an option. Yes, player skill, playing CaW and minimizing your weaknesses that way, etc, makes the pixie much more survivable. That was kinda my point. :smallamused:

That's the problem isn't it. When you set them up to fail (die) they will. A low level pixie adventurer that wants to live when going to dangerous places would probably think to not be around the moving targets. If there is no way to get away on the x or y axis, then use the z axis. Scout ahead or keep an eye on the rear. The pixie is invisible and it flies. Stupid decisions mean death, no matter how much health a character has. A wizard that wants to live isn't going to wade in front of the party in a dungeon. This is simply a version of that.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-26, 11:08 PM

Fair enough. I think that other build resources than levels could be used as a balancing mechanic, but considering most feats are strictly worse than +2 to an ability score, getting a sum of +30 ability mods would cost more feats than a non-epic character would ever have.

"Most feats" don't ever get taken. It's true that, compared to Weapon Focus or Alertness, getting any meaningful stat boost for your feats is broken, but people don't take Weapon Focus or Alertness. If feats are going to be as rare as they are in 3.5, they need to be closer in value to DMM or Shock Trooper. If they are going to be more common, then the Stone Giant will have correspondingly more feats to buy its stat bonuses with.

Making it cheaper to have a character that has a variety of abilities actually increases homogeneity. Four specialists is more diverse than four guys that are pretty okay at everything.

That's not true. Or rather, it's not automatically true. It depends on how widely varied a single character's abilities are compared to the range of abilities available in the system. For a simplified model, look at MTG. It's true that there are five combinations of a single color and only one combination of five colors, but there are ten combinations of two colors.

And considering the party is a group, and you generally only need one person to be capable of any given task, four (different) specialists is generally preferable.

That's an argument that sub-par secondary shticks should be less expensive, not more. If the party's Rogue can handle their sneaking and lock-picking needs, the Fighter picking up some lock-picking because it fits his backstory can be close to free.

play an abjurant champion eldritch knight wizard with permanent enlarge person. There ya go, giant wizard.

Could you explain exactly how you see this as different from the system I proposed? Because to my mind "spend non-level resources to buy abilities that are like a Giant's abilities" seems almost exactly like "spend non-level resources to buy a Giant's abilities", except that it means that PC Giants are different from NPC Giants in arbitrary and unpredictable ways.

D&D cosmology is pretty unlike other settings.

Yeah, including other D&D settings. The cosmology presented in 3.5's core books is different from the one presented in the Eberron Campaign Setting, and both are different from the cosmology presented in 4e's core books. D&D literally has multiple ways of building "humanoid elephant". The idea that it's some super-specialized game that can't adapt to concepts from other media is just utterly unsupported.

This is simply a version of that.

Differences of degree matter. AoE effects that are simply not dangerous to 6th level characters will kill a Pixie. The absence of HP makes them not level appropriate in a real and important sense.

sreservoir

2021-06-26, 11:19 PM

Darg

2021-06-26, 11:37 PM

You mean the thing that has an entire chapter dedicated to it and that literally more than half of classes do? Maybe instead of ripping out a core part of the game that works fine so that we can make LA work, we can just discard the system that doesn't work and write an alternative that does.

So we should tack on spellcasting to noncasters now? This line of reasoning requires an entire system overhaul. Arguing for this is a waste of everyone's time and you would be better off finding a different game to play.

Sure. That is a workable model if Sally wants to play a Drider Paladin of Slaughter in your game. You eyeball the level at which "drider" is okay, call some arbitrary part of that "LA", and then write a "Spider Knight" PrC that scales her character into higher levels. The problem is that it doesn't scale. At all. It's like how there's no Incarnum/Maneuvers or Binding/Infusions Theurge, only orders of magnitude worse. You could print a book worth of PrCs at the density of the first Completes every month for a decade and you still wouldn't have covered the playspace to any meaningful degree. The solution for your game or my game can require specific tweaking and tuning that is specialized to the characters in those games. The solution for the game can't.

You do realize that the whole point of races is that they don't scale right? It's a one and done thing. Humans don't give a scaling racial benefit. The only ones that do usually give SLAs for caster level or spell resistance. My solution is not a solution. In fact, I've never had the need to use such a thing to "make up the difference." My groups have been fine playing different races without any "fixes." It hasn't been anymore challenging with a pixie than it was with a sickly 6 con elven wizard. If anything the wizard struggled infinitely more than the pixie.

If you really, reeaally want to play that stone giant wizard from level one then give it the stats of an Orc or human. It's the only way to make it fair to be in the PC party. Is that what you want? A stone giant that isn't even a stone giant?

The pixie is a great example of how LA doesn't work. At 6th level, a Pixie Warlock 1 can solo many encounters with absolutely no risk to herself. greater invisibility + fly is a combo that most monsters are simply not equipped to handle. But at high levels, the value of those abilities declines dramatically. If you want to let people play Pixies, it would be far, far easier to have a system where you couldn't play a Pixie until "permanent invisibility and flight" were things you could buy with your normal character resources and playing a Pixie simply meant that you were required to buy those things instead of being allowed to make specific selections you might like more. If only someone had proposed a system like that.

At ECL 6 the pixie would be warlock 2. The LA is +4/6 not +5.

It's why I don't like savage progressions, you aren't even a member of your race until you have lived a life of adventure. You start as this formless blob that gradually gets what makes them not a formless blob. You basically start the adventure as a baby of your race. It's like a cat that doesn't grow claws or get their night vision or have fur until they reach the age of 1, 2, and 3. It doesn't make sense. Every race starts as a grown adult when they go on adventures. Why should it be any less for monster races?

Differences of degree matter. AoE effects that are simply not dangerous to 6th level characters will kill a Pixie. The absence of HP makes them not level appropriate in a real and important sense.

Look at it in reverse. Things that are simply not deadly to a pixie could be extremely deadly to another party member. The absence of HP is only a problem if tactical defense cannot be managed, but at that point the pixie would likely bow out because they want to live. Rather than a difference in degree it is more a difference in perspective. Players tend to play as a base race would and end up dying as a result. It's like playing a druid and not realizing you can use spells. The groups I play in tend to be fairly unforgiving and we regularly lose characters which forces us to really think about the advantages our characters have and we try to avoid avoid getting into situations where our weaknesses can be taken advantage of.

Crake

2021-06-27, 12:05 AM

I could say the same thing about other actions. You can't use combat actions out of combat because the book only says the action is done in combat. That's wrong. If the fireball comes without rolling for initiative, it's all fair game. If the party is ambushed and they get a fireball to the face before they get the chance to act, good luck playing easy mode on the party after that. Even at CL 5 vs a level 7 party, you are looking at damage that can easily KO a party member or two if the dice feel like it.

Considering both ready and delay actions are specifically actions that interact with initiative, and are defined as "Special Initiative Actions", seems fairly clear to me that if you are not actively in initiative, you can't use a special initiative action that interacts with initiative order. Who gets to act first in a situation is literally the purpose of the initiative roll.

Consider what "all the Stone Giant stuff" means before acting all outraged. What do you get for being a Stone Giant?

In terms of actual abilities, it's pretty slim pickings. You get Rock Throwing and Rock Catching. Neither of those seems particularly overpowered as a racial ability.

You get to be Large, which seems like a reasonable feat (IIRC, there is a feat that makes you Large, but I assume it has some stupid downside because why would we ever give melee anything good).

Then you get the various Stone Giant racial stats, like +16 STR or +8 CON. And, yes, those numbers are really big. But they're big because the Stone Giant is written to output appropriate numbers in a way that is arbitrarily non-transparent with how PC stats are derived (and we derive the stat mods from an array PCs don't use for no reason). Part of the proposal is that the way Stone Giants work would be more like PCs, so that instead of having arbitrarily inferior Giant HD, they would simply be Warriors or Barbarians and require much smaller compensatory bonuses. Like how the Orc works now.

And I'm not married to the idea that it should be specifically a sixth level minimum, or that it shouldn't also cost you some WBL or something. But if your objection is just "the costs seem too low", that strikes me as a really trivial objection that doesn't engage with the thrust of the proposal at all.

Sounds an awful lot like racial feats from pf2e.

The whole purpose of having "inferior giant hd" is to represent a stone giant being harder, chunkier and just all around tougher than a weaker race, while still representing the average member of it's species. Your idea seems to imply that every giant must have X levels in something, but levels imply experience, and training, and learning of some kind. What if I want the stone giant equivalent of a level 1 commoner?

A better solution would be instead, say you're a stone giant of ECL X, but as you start "leveling up" you can gestalt your RHD/LA with class levels at a reduced cost, say, 50% of the cost of real levels, and determine your ECL based on your total xp of actual levels + gestalted levels.

For bonus points, combine that with a savage progression, and you have a character that's playable across all level ranges as a monster PC, almost entirely regardless of what the race is.

Quertus

2021-06-27, 04:17 AM

I'm disappointed. There was a suggestion to trade actual class features for racial abilities - like trading the ability to go Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil or Incantrix for being a pixie Wizard - that none of its detractors have seemed to understand well enough to address.

Is a human Incantrix X balanced against a Pixie Wizard X, or a Giant Wizard X who also bans 2 schools, gets no bonus feats, and cannot craft?

Is a (to give muggles actual class features) human Fighter X with pounce, whirling frenzy, X/2 bonus feats, (X/2)d6 SA, maneuvers, SU-disabling strikes, and CPR resurrection balanced against a Troll Fighter X, or a Beholder Fighter X with 3/4 BAB?

Anyone care to address - for or against - this particular idea?

(EDIT: yes, this is for the "remove racial HD" idea, which… I'm not exactly a fan of, but this *component* of the concept has been studiously ignored.)

Zanos

2021-06-27, 10:53 AM

"Most feats" don't ever get taken. It's true that, compared to Weapon Focus or Alertness, getting any meaningful stat boost for your feats is broken, but people don't take Weapon Focus or Alertness. If feats are going to be as rare as they are in 3.5, they need to be closer in value to DMM or Shock Trooper. If they are going to be more common, then the Stone Giant will have correspondingly more feats to buy its stat bonuses with.
Okay, I'll put it this way. I am pretty sure if +2 intelligence was a feat, most wizards would have +2 intelligence 7 times and no other feats. And the reason I know this is because there were feats that increased your casting stat by 2 for only the purposes of spells in 3.0 and literally every caster had that feat and it got nerfed into oblivion in 3.5. The vast majority of caster builds will consider getting a sum of +2 to ability scores over the human bonus feat to be good enough picks to select over humans in almost every case if the bonus feat isn't required to qualify for something at specific levels. Intelligence boosting elves, despite their con penalties, are widely suggested for wizard builds on these forums. So based on both what the designers of the system have done with similar feats, and how people actually behave when building characters, I am pretty confident in my statement that +2 to an important stat is > one feat. Hell, I've seen people say complacent humans are one of the best races in the game, whose only feature is +2 to one score of your choice.

That's not true. Or rather, it's not automatically true. It depends on how widely varied a single character's abilities are compared to the range of abilities available in the system. For a simplified model, look at MTG. It's true that there are five combinations of a single color and only one combination of five colors, but there are ten combinations of two colors.
It's not automatically true, but we were discussing trends. The cheaper it is to by up non-primary niches, the more optimal it is to build characters that are all doing everything.

That's an argument that sub-par secondary shticks should be less expensive, not more. If the party's Rogue can handle their sneaking and lock-picking needs, the Fighter picking up some lock-picking because it fits his backstory can be close to free.
I happen to think niche protection is important because it feels pretty bad to play characters with +10 in their specialization that suck at everything else next to characters that are +9 at killing things and +9 in some other characters specialization.

Could you explain exactly how you see this as different from the system I proposed? Because to my mind "spend non-level resources to buy abilities that are like a Giant's abilities" seems almost exactly like "spend non-level resources to buy a Giant's abilities", except that it means that PC Giants are different from NPC Giants in arbitrary and unpredictable ways.
I already said I supported the idea of using non-level resources to 'pay' for giant abilities, we were haggling over cost. My point here was that you can make something that looks kind of sort of like this character you're describing with the system, but it's janky, only actually represents it if you take a specific snapshot, and ignore what mechanics the character is actually using.

Yeah, including other D&D settings. The cosmology presented in 3.5's core books is different from the one presented in the Eberron Campaign Setting, and both are different from the cosmology presented in 4e's core books. D&D literally has multiple ways of building "humanoid elephant". The idea that it's some super-specialized game that can't adapt to concepts from other media is just utterly unsupported.
You're ignoring like 95% of my point. D&D supports themes not specific characters. You can make a character that uses fire magic. You can't really make a character that models, say, a fire bender.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-27, 12:55 PM

So we should tack on spellcasting to noncasters now?

Why is that a less reasonable proposal than "we should remove spellcasting from the game entirely"? If you think spellcasting and LA are incompatible, you need to show that LA is a better game mechanic than spellcasting if you want to argue we should keep it instead. Good luck with that.

If you really, reeaally want to play that stone giant wizard from level one then give it the stats of an Orc or human.

How is that people keep thinking I want things I have never remotely asked for, then demanding that I defend those things instead of the solutions I have proposed.

At ECL 6 the pixie would be warlock 2. The LA is +4/6 not +5.

You do see how, while you are correct (I forgot that the system does the sane thing with 1 RHD for some reason), that really doesn't help your argument, right? At ECL 5, the invisible flying Warlock is even more ludicrously overpowered than it is at ECL 6, because there are even fewer monsters that have the tools to engage it at all.

The whole purpose of having "inferior giant hd" is to represent a stone giant being harder, chunkier and just all around tougher than a weaker race, while still representing the average member of it's species. Your idea seems to imply that every giant must have X levels in something, but levels imply experience, and training, and learning of some kind. What if I want the stone giant equivalent of a level 1 commoner?

So if you get a bunch of HP and attack bonus from "Giant HD" that's fine and totally compatible with being the equivalent of a 1st level Commoner, but if you get those same HP and attack bonus from "Warrior HD" that's totally absurd? Sorry, I don't buy it. If it really makes you feel happy, we can have a separate "Giant" class that is mechanically identical to the "Warrior" class but says "these numbers come from your genes" in bold type at the top.

A better solution would be instead, say you're a stone giant of ECL X, but as you start "leveling up" you can gestalt your RHD/LA with class levels at a reduced cost, say, 50% of the cost of real levels, and determine your ECL based on your total xp of actual levels + gestalted levels.

So AD&D-style dual-classing? There's a reason they abandoned that model for 3e.

I'm disappointed. There was a suggestion to trade actual class features for racial abilities - like trading the ability to go Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil or Incantrix for being a pixie Wizard - that none of its detractors have seemed to understand well enough to address.

Imagine how I feel.

Okay, I'll put it this way. I am pretty sure if +2 intelligence was a feat, most wizards would have +2 intelligence 7 times and no other feats.

Go take a look at stock optimized Wizard builds like Shadowcraft Mages or Incantatrixes. Which feats are you replacing with "+2 INT"? Maybe it's some of them, but it's definitely not all of them. "Boost your casting stat" is a good feat, but it's a long way from the only thing you'd do with a feat slot.

It's not automatically true, but we were discussing trends. The cheaper it is to by up non-primary niches, the more optimal it is to build characters that are all doing everything.

And the more possible it is to have a character that has a thematically important secondary niche without crippling your ability to solve the problems the party needs you to solve. I never claimed there wasn't a tradeoff there, but you seem to what to completely ignore the benefits of allow characters to not be one-dimensional "I fight people with a sword" or "I cast spells that blow people up" or "I sneak around and gank people" caricatures. Your fluffy backstory abilities need to be cheap, because they are fluffy backstory abilities that do not come up very often and making them expensive makes people not take them. In Leverage, Elliot (whose primary shtick is "fights good") is also really good at cooking. This does not result in him being meaningfully less good at fighting, because this is an ability that impacts the plot twice that I can think of in five seasons. And, yes, TV is different from a TTRPG, but the principle remains the same: the cost of an ability needs to be related to how useful that ability is, not how nice it sounds in the abstract.

You're ignoring like 95% of my point. D&D supports themes not specific characters. You can make a character that uses fire magic. You can't really make a character that models, say, a fire bender.

But if the game did not support Fire Mage as a functional concept, saying "Zuko is a part of the fantasy genre" would be a reasonable argument for why that's a problem. I'm not asking that the game specifically include Ligurian sorcery, I'm pointing out that "large dude who does magic" is a thing that exists elsewhere in the fantasy genre without problems. If you want, I can dig up other examples of it if that will help clarify for you that I'm not literally asking for a 1-to-1 translation from a specific other story.

Zanos

2021-06-27, 02:53 PM

Go take a look at stock optimized Wizard builds like Shadowcraft Mages or Incantatrixes. Which feats are you replacing with "+2 INT"? Maybe it's some of them, but it's definitely not all of them. "Boost your casting stat" is a good feat, but it's a long way from the only thing you'd do with a feat slot.
Probably everything that doesn't enable divine miracles or persistent spell is getting replaced with +2 int, and we probably shouldn't be balancing race choices around 'as good as being an incantatrix with persistent spell.' :smallconfused:

And the more possible it is to have a character that has a thematically important secondary niche without crippling your ability to solve the problems the party needs you to solve. I never claimed there wasn't a tradeoff there, but you seem to what to completely ignore the benefits of allow characters to not be one-dimensional "I fight people with a sword" or "I cast spells that blow people up" or "I sneak around and gank people" caricatures. Your fluffy backstory abilities need to be cheap, because they are fluffy backstory abilities that do not come up very often and making them expensive makes people not take them. In Leverage, Elliot (whose primary shtick is "fights good") is also really good at cooking. This does not result in him being meaningfully less good at fighting, because this is an ability that impacts the plot twice that I can think of in five seasons. And, yes, TV is different from a TTRPG, but the principle remains the same: the cost of an ability needs to be related to how useful that ability is, not how nice it sounds in the abstract.
Cooking doesn't really impact your ability to contribute to an adventure, so this analogy is pretty ridiculous. You're talking about an objective increase in a characters combat power. You want a character with the melee combat ability of a fully grown giant and the casting ability of a full wizard, not a full wizard that can whip up a decent roast.

But if the game did not support Fire Mage as a functional concept, saying "Zuko is a part of the fantasy genre" would be a reasonable argument for why that's a problem. I'm not asking that the game specifically include Ligurian sorcery, I'm pointing out that "large dude who does magic" is a thing that exists elsewhere in the fantasy genre without problems. If you want, I can dig up other examples of it if that will help clarify for you that I'm not literally asking for a 1-to-1 translation from a specific other story.
Are we talking about a character that is giant-y enough to hold their own in melee combat against equal CR threats, or just a big guy that can cast spells and maybe beat up some CR 3 orc warriors in melee? Because those are different things. Being Large and having enough melee ability to beat up some low CR guys is pretty trivial at low levels; there's no need to build a system of custom racial progressions that trades a small number of feats for massive stat increases to do so.

I'm disappointed. There was a suggestion to trade actual class features for racial abilities - like trading the ability to go Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil or Incantrix for being a pixie Wizard - that none of its detractors have seemed to understand well enough to address.
I understand and agree with the proposal to use things other than LA or RHD to pay for racial abilities. I have yet to see a proposal that is anywhere close to reasonable to actually do so, however.

Darg

2021-06-27, 03:02 PM

Why is that a less reasonable proposal than "we should remove spellcasting from the game entirely"? If you think spellcasting and LA are incompatible, you need to show that LA is a better game mechanic than spellcasting if you want to argue we should keep it instead. Good luck with that.

I have never said that spellcasting is incompatible with LA. You are. Saying you can't be a stone giant wizard of ECL 20 that can't fling level 9 spells and be a worthy part of a party is pretty opinionated. False, but a valid opinion.

How is that people keep thinking I want things I have never remotely asked for, then demanding that I defend those things instead of the solutions I have proposed.

Because your solution is unbalanced. The flaws definitely don't balance with the benefits.

You do see how, while you are correct (I forgot that the system does the sane thing with 1 RHD for some reason), that really doesn't help your argument, right? At ECL 5, the invisible flying Warlock is even more ludicrously overpowered than it is at ECL 6, because there are even fewer monsters that have the tools to engage it at all.

That's the point now isn't it, trading power for fragility. Different races have different power levels just like how a fighter falls behind the tier 1 classes. You give something up to be more powerful in a niche. Because you specialize in a niche, you are vulnerable in other areas.

I'm disappointed. There was a suggestion to trade actual class features for racial abilities - like trading the ability to go Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil or Incantrix for being a pixie Wizard - that none of its detractors have seemed to understand well enough to address.

Is a human Incantrix X balanced against a Pixie Wizard X, or a Giant Wizard X who also bans 2 schools, gets no bonus feats, and cannot craft?

Is a (to give muggles actual class features) human Fighter X with pounce, whirling frenzy, X/2 bonus feats, (X/2)d6 SA, maneuvers, SU-disabling strikes, and CPR resurrection balanced against a Troll Fighter X, or a Beholder Fighter X with 3/4 BAB?

Anyone care to address - for or against - this particular idea?

(EDIT: yes, this is for the "remove racial HD" idea, which… I'm not exactly a fan of, but this *component* of the concept has been studiously ignored.)

Are you talking about my idea of creating a specialized PRC that trades monster HD for levels in the class like a blackguard with 11+paladin levels? I'm not a fan of it myself, but an idea I came out with on the spur of the moment to expand on using custom PRCs as a concept. I'm not a fan of savage progressions and didn't like the idea to allow multiclassing with savage progressions. I much prefer the concept of degenerating due to atrophy as you studiously apply yourself to your class.

Both of the ideas for a custom PRC aren't systematized and put the onus on the player and the DM to create the class. Honestly though, there isn't a way for monsters to simply match high level casters and there shouldn't be. The only gripe that is ever consistent is the loss of HP due to the loss in HD. This is extremely easy to fix by allowing the characters to roll "ghost" HD that do nothing other than give you HP per LA (RHD if you have RHD, class HD otherwise). It also leads to the characters to being above the baseline power level however and extra tanky. I've also floated around just giving monster HD in place of LA, but it leaves an even larger power gap.

As for the examples you presented, if we are removing racial features for class features then that troll fighter would also have pounce, bonus feats, etc. at the cost of regen per round, strength, constitution, etc. Remember though that LA was balanced around core features. So getting pounce, maneuvers, incarnum are all things that make class levels and feats more valuable than they used to be compared to simple class features.

Ramza00

2021-06-27, 03:38 PM

LA of more than 2 should not exist for the game was not designed for it and it is a very "brittle experience." Either it is balanced, or it is very over balanced, or under balanced. Explaining why gets into the game mechanics of stuff like many things are based off the formula of

A) 10+1/2HD+Ability Modifier for good saves (with a free virtual feat of +2), and 10+1/3HD+Ability Modifier for bad saves.
B) Likewise expected abilities of things like Flight and so on are programmed to come on line at specific HDs like HD 05, HD 09, and so on. The specific numbers do not matter but the 3.5 DMG thought Encounter Levels of 1 to 4 higher than the party level are very difficult, and if you can't have the toolbox response via class ability, feat, spells, or magic item it screws up the encounter and thus your party really should have some form of flight at HD10 or so even though the first expected availability of this ability is around HD05 (aka 5 levels earlier)

So yeah LA of 0, 1, and 2 do not break the game (often), but LA of 3, 4, 5, 6 are often either underpowered, or overpowered and rarely just right. Sure you can make a LA of 1 or 2 that breaks the game but often that is not assigning the correct LA in the first place.

------

Also if you wanted to make the LA system not a bad idea you should have a threshold where after you past that specific level the exact template or race say you can now convert that LA into just an XP penalty where you are 5k XP behind the party (whatever number does not matter), or you can convert it into a GP penalty. For the reasons I mentioned in point B earlier.

Likewise if your template or race provide new abilities that scale with each level that specific race or template should not provide an "exit penalty" of XP or GP that I mentioned earlier.

------

In sum LA is a bad idea as implemented right now, but it could be made into a good idea if implemented not as an afterthought but was built into the system in the first place and understanding the actual mechanics of how the d20 system works.

Crake

2021-06-27, 04:37 PM

So if you get a bunch of HP and attack bonus from "Giant HD" that's fine and totally compatible with being the equivalent of a 1st level Commoner, but if you get those same HP and attack bonus from "Warrior HD" that's totally absurd? Sorry, I don't buy it. If it really makes you feel happy, we can have a separate "Giant" class that is mechanically identical to the "Warrior" class but says "these numbers come from your genes" in bold type at the top.

The difference is you can be a regular giant with 0 xp, but you can't be a warrior X without xp to gain those levels and that makes a difference when you consider what that means and represents from an in-universe perspective. For example, a giant can, by its very nature, survive taking a negative level, wheras a human cannot, without training, experience and learning. You can't simply replace the racial HD with class levels, because class levels cost experience to gain, whereas racial HD do not, so they aren't directly interchangable.

So AD&D-style dual-classing? There's a reason they abandoned that model for 3e.

Care to elucidate your thoughts on why that's the case? You can only speculate of course, but for what reason do you think they made that change? Personally I think it was to make it a more streamlined experience, but at this point, 3.5 is already the more complicated of systems, adding slightly more complexity doesn't strike me as too much of an issue. I've actually personally used the gestalt system I've described to fairly great effect in my games when I DM.

Cooking doesn't really impact your ability to contribute to an adventure, so this analogy is pretty ridiculous. You're talking about an objective increase in a characters combat power. You want a character with the melee combat ability of a fully grown giant and the casting ability of a full wizard, not a full wizard that can whip up a decent roast.

Also, I mean, if you want stuff like that in your games, just use the background skills system from pathfinder and give your players more to work with, rather than forcing them to take away from existing character resources to fulfill some fluff desire.

Psyren

2021-06-27, 06:40 PM

Consider what "all the Stone Giant stuff" means before acting all outraged. What do you get for being a Stone Giant?

In terms of actual abilities, it's pretty slim pickings. You get Rock Throwing and Rock Catching. Neither of those seems particularly overpowered as a racial ability.

You get to be Large, which seems like a reasonable feat (IIRC, there is a feat that makes you Large, but I assume it has some stupid downside because why would we ever give melee anything good).

Then you get the various Stone Giant racial stats, like +16 STR or +8 CON. And, yes, those numbers are really big. But they're big because the Stone Giant is written to output appropriate numbers in a way that is arbitrarily non-transparent with how PC stats are derived (and we derive the stat mods from an array PCs don't use for no reason). Part of the proposal is that the way Stone Giants work would be more like PCs, so that instead of having arbitrarily inferior Giant HD, they would simply be Warriors or Barbarians and require much smaller compensatory bonuses. Like how the Orc works now.

And I'm not married to the idea that it should be specifically a sixth level minimum, or that it shouldn't also cost you some WBL or something. But if your objection is just "the costs seem too low", that strikes me as a really trivial objection that doesn't engage with the thrust of the proposal at all.
...
Well, that's not actually what I'm saying, Psyren just tunnel-visioned on "you've set the costs too low" rather than engaging with the question of "is this a better model for the costs". However monster races work, they need to be balanced for synergistic combinations, the goal is simply to make them less awful for non-synergistic combinations.

Uh, I'm not "outraged" at all, just baffled that you think this proposal is in any way superior to LA+buyoff (either the 3.5 or the PF versions of such). Be dismissive about costing all you like, but tradeoffs are still one of the most important components of game design and yours haven't been thought through well (or at all?) And no, I don't think rock-throwing/catching are amazing features either, but even if you dropped those two entirely this would still be really unbalanced. Large size / +16 Str / +8 Con and 6th-level casting all at ECL 6 is ludicrous. And how would your throwaway WBL penalty suggestion for one character in the party even work?

Removing the minimum actually makes this even worse, as now you'll be large with a bunch of stat boosts at level 3 instead - not as many, but the effect of the ones you get are even more pronounced that early on.

vasilidor

2021-06-27, 06:54 PM

I think 2nd edition dual classing was entirely superior to the more modern multi classing.

RandomPeasant

2021-06-27, 09:18 PM

Probably everything that doesn't enable divine miracles or persistent spell is getting replaced with +2 int, and we probably shouldn't be balancing race choices around 'as good as being an incantatrix with persistent spell.' :smallconfused:

By making the argument "people will do X because X is mechanically optimal", you are implicitly comparing to whatever is mechanically optimal in the status quo.

Cooking doesn't really impact your ability to contribute to an adventure, so this analogy is pretty ridiculous. You're talking about an objective increase in a characters combat power.

That's a distinction without a difference. Cooking does in fact impact Elliot's contribution to adventures, it just doesn't do so very often. There are problems he solves using that skillset, and if he didn't have it, those problems would go unsolved. That is, by any meaningful definition of the term, an "objective increase" in his utility to the team. It's just that he provides other utility to the team that is A) larger and B) useful much more frequently. That's exactly the situation (modulo concerns about tuning that aren't really interesting) that you have with "is a Stone Giant". If your contribution to the party is to cast meteor swarm or time stop or dominate monster (or using high level Shadowcaster or Druid or Binder or Warlock abilities), it doesn't really matter if your melee combat abilities are those of a CR 1/2 Human or a CR 8 Stone Giant, because the situations where those capabilities are going to be relevant are as rare as the ones where it matters that Elliot is a master chef.

Being Large and having enough melee ability to beat up some low CR guys is pretty trivial at low levels; there's no need to build a system of custom racial progressions that trades a small number of feats for massive stat increases to do so.

"You can build a character that is like a monster" is a deeply unsatisfying solution to the problem of monster PCs. For your Stone Giant Wizard or Medusa Rogue or Pixie Paladin to feel like a Stone Giant or Medusa or Pixie, they need to be getting the same racial abilities as those monsters do. And, as those examples should demonstrate, there are much more interesting versions of this problem than "I'd like to play a bruiser monster race but not a bruiser PC". I picked the Giants because they're so simple that, in my view, they put the system's failure into stark relief. Figuring out how to let someone play a Mind Flayer is something that is challenging enough that I could forgive punting on it.

I have never said that spellcasting is incompatible with LA. You are.

The only thing that doesn't scale linearly is spellcasting. We have already voiced how incompatible it is with everything else that doesn't progress spellcasting.

Because your solution is unbalanced. The flaws definitely don't balance with the benefits.

A system where the costs don't balance with the benefits certainly seems superior to me to a system where the costs can't balance with the benefits.

The difference is you can be a regular giant with 0 xp, but you can't be a warrior X without xp to gain those levels and that makes a difference when you consider what that means and represents from an in-universe perspective. For example, a giant can, by its very nature, survive taking a negative level, wheras a human cannot, without training, experience and learning. You can't simply replace the racial HD with class levels, because class levels cost experience to gain, whereas racial HD do not, so they aren't directly interchangable.

So because of contingent decisions about what mechanics represent, we can't make different contingent decisions about mechanics? I find this argument less compelling than you seem to.

Care to elucidate your thoughts on why that's the case?

Same reason they did away with different XP tables for different classes: it's a nightmare to track, and it means intentionally sacrificing certain system invariants (for example: holy word is now slightly dumber than it already was).

I've actually personally used the gestalt system I've described to fairly great effect in my games when I DM.

There's a wide, wide gap between solutions that work for a game and solutions that work for the game. If you're only concerned about balancing a specific set of monster PCs with a specific set of non-monster PCs, you can get away with a system that is much less robust than would be necessary if you wanted to get a useful level of quality out of a new system. I've already said that the only solution that makes sense to use in a 3e-based game is "wing it", and "semi-gestalt advancement with custom Savage Progressions" is as good a framework for winging it as any other.

Be dismissive about costing all you like, but tradeoffs are still one of the most important components of game design and yours haven't been thought through well (or at all?)

Again, I think the notion that I have to present a viable product to argue that the existing product is bad is completely absurd. If you want to argue that it would be harder to balance a system like the one I'm proposing than LA + Buyoff, that's fine, but saying "you have to present a functioning alternative to call something bad" is simply not a standard of evidence I consider at all reasonable. To paraphrase Bill Burr, I don't need a helicopter license to see one in a tree and know the pilot screwed up.

And how would your throwaway WBL penalty suggestion for one character in the party even work?

How does Vow of Poverty work? I'll give you that "not well" is a reasonable answer, but the game certainly seems to believe you can take away WBL from some, but not all, members of the party. Though, really, the solution is that WBL is also terrible, and you should use a less-terrible system that would allow individual party members to have benefits in lieu of magic items without needing epicycles like Incarnum added to the system.

Crake

2021-06-27, 09:48 PM

So because of contingent decisions about what mechanics represent, we can't make different contingent decisions about mechanics? I find this argument less compelling than you seem to.

It seems to be becoming quite evident that you want the system as a game, vs others who prefer the system as a simulation. The implications behind changes you make and what it means for the simulationist perspective matters to many people, and is why you seem to be getting push that that you wholly cannot reconcile with.

Same reason they did away with different XP tables for different classes: it's a nightmare to track, and it means intentionally sacrificing certain system invariants (for example: holy word is now slightly dumber than it already was).

A point i already covered. As a system, 3.5 is already near the top end in terms of complexity of what is available on the market, adding a relatively small amount of extra complexity (it's really not that much more complex once you actually use it), doesn't make a whole heap of difference in the end.

There's a wide, wide gap between solutions that work for a game and solutions that work for the game. If you're only concerned about balancing a specific set of monster PCs with a specific set of non-monster PCs, you can get away with a system that is much less robust than would be necessary if you wanted to get a useful level of quality out of a new system. I've already said that the only solution that makes sense to use in a 3e-based game is "wing it", and "semi-gestalt advancement with custom Savage Progressions" is as good a framework for winging it as any other.

There are almost exactly 0 solutions that will work across the board, simply because the range of value you can get out of any single character resource is so broad, you can't reasonably quantify how to apply it to the abilities that a monster has. Every feat, every level, hell, even the skill points you spend, can be quantified in such vastly different ways, so if your goal is balanced, you're just gonna have a bad time of it.

In the end you need to accept that not all things are going to be created equal, unless you want to vastly narrow the power range between different options, but I think, if you start doing that, you may as well move to a different system where such things are already baked into the game. I've said this before, and I'll say it again, power disparity between choices, and the ability to play characters ranging from the bottom of the barrel, to the cream of the crop is part of the appeal of 3.5, the option and ability to play at what power level you like, with the optimization you want is a benefit of the system, and as soon as you try to narrow that power range by making everything "balanced", you take that choice away from players.

Darg

2021-06-28, 12:27 AM

I think 2nd edition dual classing was entirely superior to the more modern multi classing.

I can agree to that.

Psyren

2021-06-28, 12:36 AM

Again, I think the notion that I have to present a viable product to argue that the existing product is bad is completely absurd. If you want to argue that it would be harder to balance a system like the one I'm proposing than LA + Buyoff, that's fine, but saying "you have to present a functioning alternative to call something bad" is simply not a standard of evidence I consider at all reasonable. To paraphrase Bill Burr, I don't need a helicopter license to see one in a tree and know the pilot screwed up.

Once again, (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?632617-Racial-Level-Adjustment-Bad-Idea-or-Poorly-Implemented&p=25097355&viewfull=1#post25097355) I never said you aren't allowed to criticize LA+buyoff. I merely said your proposal is worse. Those are wholly independent sentiments; you are the one drawing a line between them, not me.

How does Vow of Poverty work? I'll give you that "not well" is a reasonable answer, but the game certainly seems to believe you can take away WBL from some, but not all, members of the party.

Bad analogy. Putting aside that you answered your own question, VoP functions by removing ALL of that character's wealth, and replacing it with the same kinds of level-appropriate bonuses that wealth would have provided. (As you mentioned, it doesn't do that very well, but that's the basic intent.) Not only is disabling wealth for one character entirely much easier for a GM to calculate and track than a granular half-measure, it's also replacing a like system with a like one (passive scaling bonuses from items, replaced by passive scaling bonuses applied directly to the character.) That wouldn't work for monster-as-race system unless every single race and monster in the game got all the same benefits over their career.

Quertus

2021-06-28, 04:22 PM

I think 2nd edition dual classing was entirely superior to the more modern multi classing.

I can agree to that.

I love 2nd edition. It's my favorite RPG. But I'm not sure *why* either of you feel this way in this particular issue.

2e duel classing was human only. You abandoned your current class (and couldn't go back, like… 3e Monk?), to start over again at 1st level.

You kept your HP, but everything else - your attack bonus, saving throws, proficiencies (weapon & armor proficiencies & skills), and class features (like spells) were "greyed out" until your level in your new class exceeded your level in your old class.

Except, they weren't *actually* greyed out. Just, if you used any of them, you got 0 XP for the adventure.

Then, once your level in your new class exceeded your level in your old class, you gained HP in your new class, and you regained free access to your old abilities. For abilities that overlapped (attack bonus, saving throws) you took whichever was better.

The old way was nice in that, as a Fighter 20 / Wizard 1, you leveled up at the pace of a 1st level Wizard.

Is that what y'all found superior? If so, I agree. If not, what made it better?

vasilidor

2021-06-28, 05:36 PM

I think the 2nd edition thing should go to another thread. sorry for derailing.

Crake

2021-06-28, 07:47 PM

I love 2nd edition. It's my favorite RPG. But I'm not sure *why* either of you feel this way in this particular issue.

2e duel classing was human only. You abandoned your current class (and couldn't go back, like… 3e Monk?), to start over again at 1st level.

You kept your HP, but everything else - your attack bonus, saving throws, proficiencies (weapon & armor proficiencies & skills), and class features (like spells) were "greyed out" until your level in your new class exceeded your level in your old class.

Except, they weren't *actually* greyed out. Just, if you used any of them, you got 0 XP for the adventure.

Then, once your level in your new class exceeded your level in your old class, you gained HP in your new class, and you regained free access to your old abilities. For abilities that overlapped (attack bonus, saving throws) you took whichever was better.

The old way was nice in that, as a Fighter 20 / Wizard 1, you leveled up at the pace of a 1st level Wizard.

Is that what y'all found superior? If so, I agree. If not, what made it better?

Look, nobody's saying 2e multiclassing was perfect, but the idea of some kind of pseudo gestalt of the two classes you want to multiclass together i think resonates much better with people than the janky feeling "I'm this class at this level, and that class at that level, and I need this dual progression prestige class to really make it work". Feels a lot more like the hybrid classes that pathfinder 1e brought out that combined the flavour of two different classes and combined it into one, but if you just gestalt the classes, you don't have to put in the work of creating a whole new class for each hybrid you want to make.

Psyren

2021-06-29, 12:28 AM

Darg

2021-06-29, 11:56 AM

Well for a modern "pseudo-gestalt" I personally like the idea of PF1's Variant Multiclassing. The implementation for many of the classes was jank, but I could see repurposing that basic framework to make something solid.

The reason it probably works for pathfinder is that feats are more common and it refrains from giving spellcasting as a feature. It's a cool concept and works if you want just a dabbling. Something like 2e multiclassing is what people want in a 3rd edition chassis. Gestault is too strong while normal multiclassing works but is fragmented. For 2e style multiclassing to work, it has to fit within the established 3e framework. Now that I think about it, my idea for multiclassing might work with monster HD.

I've been meaning to try a multiclass variant where you gestault while taking the standard xp penalties. You take a level adjustment for each class and give it a score. HD d12 would be 5 and a d4 would be a 1. Add them together, divide by the number of classes, and round up. The final number for the multiclass above would be a 4 which translates to a d10 HD on level up. The lowest is always a 1. So a poor BAB is a 1 and a good BAB is a 3. Calculating it comes out as a 3 and so the fighter/barbarian/cleric comes out as having good BAB. The same happens with saves and skill points with good/poor/good and +4 points per level. Your class skills are combined from all classes. Your ECL (LA + class level + RHD) determines the number of HD you possess. Racial LA HD are the same size as RHD. RHD + class level determines max skill rank. RHD are treated as a single class progression. So a level 1 half dragon centaur fighter/barbarian/cleric would have 10d10 HD thanks to the half dragon template, +3 fort/+4 ref/+5 will, +5 BAB, max class skill rank of 8, and 2 CL feats. Max level in the triple multiclass would be 7/7/7. A dual class max level would be 9/9. Quadruple would be 5/5/5/5.

Personally, I think it adds a little extra oomph that multiclassing needs, but it doesn't have the power level of a true gestault. The end result has a closer power level to single class characters and tries to retain the advantages of individual classes, but it also leaves single class characters with the powerful advantages of leveling sooner. But, that is speculation as I haven't tried it.

Combining it with savage progression might work extremely well. Skipped monster HD can be treated as a 0 in the adjustment calculations.The exp penalty for multiclassing keeps the power level from getting out of hand, but because each multiclass level is treated as a single level it's easy to build the character. One thing I didn't think about earlier was that the character should track their unpenalized exp gain as a way to track their ECL and WBL. I'm also thinking a stacking 5% exp penalty per +1 LA of the monster race would help balance the races further. A pixie wizard would be just getting to level 5 and finishing getting their abilities while the rest of the party would already have been 6th for a while and will be 57% of the way to 8th when the pixie gets to level 6.

A rule that would have to be implemented is that you can't multiclass into the standard/variant of the single class version that you have already multiclassed with. So that pixie wizard would be able to multiclass a level of rogue, but not wizard. As normal, the multiclass penalties apply.

Any thoughts on it? I haven't done any calculations as to the relative power level compared to single classing and I wouldn't know how to implement favored classes just yet (first thought is a 5% bonus to exp which increases their CL threshold: pixie sorcerer would be level 16 at 190,000 exp vs a level 15 wizard.)

Silly Name

2021-06-29, 12:22 PM

Something like 2e multiclassing is what people want in a 3rd edition chassis. Gestault is too strong while normal multiclassing works but is fragmented. For 2e style multiclassing to work, it has to fit within the established 3e framework.

I am very much happy with how 3rd edition does multiclassing, and I don't want some pseudo-AD&D method of handling a straightforward and intuitive concept. Fragmented as it may be, 3.X style multiclassing works fine in the system and is easy to grasp, and the fact you "need" to take certain feats and/or Prestige Classes to make some peculiar mixes work isn't a bug to be fixed. The one bump on the road are the experience penalty rules, which are often houseruled away in any case.

The fact RHD and LA are broken don't really say anything about the general multiclass rules. The designers of the game clearly did not want certain monsters to be available as player characters - and indeed, wrote the game on the assumption PCs are humanoid creatures of Medium or Small size -, and they achieved this through inflated RHD and LA values instead of just saying "no, this is not a good pick for a player character".

Darg

2021-06-29, 12:54 PM

I am very much happy with how 3rd edition does multiclassing, and I don't want some pseudo-AD&D method of handling a straightforward and intuitive concept. Fragmented as it may be, 3.X style multiclassing works fine in the system and is easy to grasp, and the fact you "need" to take certain feats and/or Prestige Classes to make some peculiar mixes work isn't a bug to be fixed. The one bump on the road are the experience penalty rules, which are often houseruled away in any case.

You are right, 3e multiclassing is not a bug. It is dissatisfying for a lot of players though; hence the popularity of gestault. It's extra dissatisfying when you want to multiclass spontaneous casters. Having a variant that fits within the framework of 3e would allow people to scratch that itch without overpowering normal encounters.

The fact RHD and LA are broken don't really say anything about the general multiclass rules. The designers of the game clearly did not want certain monsters to be available as player characters - and indeed, wrote the game on the assumption PCs are humanoid creatures of Medium or Small size -, and they achieved this through inflated RHD and LA values instead of just saying "no, this is not a good pick for a player character".

I personally disagree that RHD and LA are broken. In fact, it fits quite nicely within the core rules. A fighter isn't going to fight like a wizard and a wizard isn't going to fight like a fighter. A pixie isn't going to fight like a minotaur and likewise isn't going to fight like a straight up fighter even if they take fighter levels. The only reason RHD and LA seem broken to many is the perspective they look at it from and the power creep from additional content over the years.

Silly Name

2021-06-29, 01:20 PM

You are right, 3e multiclassing is not a bug. It is dissatisfying for a lot of players though; hence the popularity of gestault. It's extra dissatisfying when you want to multiclass spontaneous casters. Having a variant that fits within the framework of 3e would allow people to scratch that itch without overpowering normal encounters.

As I see it, gestalt's main selling point is that it's noticeably more powerful than base multiclassing rules and obviates the need for specific "dual progression" PrCs (whether the dual progression is in two types of casting, casting and martial ability, or other stuff).

I also think it's perfectly ok for certain concepts to be harder to pull off, or simply not work. No game is obligated to provide infinite viable combinations, things sometimes just don't work in the given framework.

I personally disagree that RHD and LA are broken. In fact, it fits quite nicely within the core rules. A fighter isn't going to fight like a wizard and a wizard isn't going to fight like a fighter. A pixie isn't going to fight like a minotaur and likewise isn't going to fight like a straight up fighter even if they take fighter levels. The only reason RHD and LA seem broken to many is the perspective they look at it from and the power creep from additional content over the years.

The reason I think RHD and LA seem broken is that, bar a few notable exceptions, most creatures have such a large sum of RHD and LA that they are effectively disqualified from ever seeing play, or they offer far too little to be worth the price, right in Core.

How many campaigns start at level 12? 14? 18? How many character concepts are there based around "I'm pretty much a completely average representative of my kind, with little to no space for customisation of skillset and abilities"? I don't disagree that minotaurs and pixies should play differently, but there's no need for minotaurs to start at ECL 8 if you want them to be an acceptable player option.

Creatures that have too high a starting ECL are basically "soft-banned" from ever getting played: because they get out of the range at which campaigns start, because they stifle the possibility of actually making a character, or because they offer too little for too big a price, turning players away.

If you want something to be an actual PC option... Make it one. If a designer thinks that a certain ability is too much for a PC to have, then they need not make it available for players. If a monster is too powerful but you really want players to be able to play as one, offer them a version that's in line with the balance points you're aiming for.