Savage Species + Gestalt?

[47948201]

Savage Species' monster classes have lots of cool features, but the fact that they come with a bunch of levels that don't advance HDs means they're pretty much all woefully underpowered compared to regular classes. I can imagine an all-monster campaign being pretty fun, but the numbers might still get pretty wonky, and maybe not everyone at the table wants to be a monster.

But wait! What if you used UA's gestalt rules, taking a monster class on one side and a regular class on the other? For example, at 12th level you could have a succubus swordsage, who now has 12d8 HDs from the swordsage side so they're not made of paper and aren't missing out on feats, but they still get all those really flavorful succubus abilities (and a little boost to their Fort saves and skill points from the succubus side, to boot). In the end, you basically have a regular gestalt character that can play with the Barbarian/Wizard and Paladin/Sorcerer gestalt players, with usable stats but a wider variety of features to play with.

Maybe a monster class is stretching things a bit when gestalt rules say "choose two standard classes", but maybe it seems reasonable to say that just means "you can't just ignore prereqs and start in a prestige class or whatever"

I dunno, just an idea I had. Has anyone tried anything like this before? How did it go?

[Rebel7284]

There are no major problems with this approach that I can think of. Some monster classes will still be weak, of course, but overall this does address many of the common problems with LA and should be a reasonably even playing field with regular gestalt.

[Crake]

This is actually the approach I use to make monster classes playable, using my optional gestalt system in my signature. Long story short, each gestalt level costs half the xp of that regular level (so level 1 costs 500x, level 2 costs 1000 xp, level 3 cost 1500xp etc), and your ECL is calculated by adding your xp total and comparing it to the regular class leveling table. You still end up a little bit behind, a fully gestalted level 12 succubus for example would be ECL 15, but you have the added benefit of being able to do it incrementally from level 1, and after you finish your savage progression, the xp total from your gestalt side slowly dwindles in comparison to your actual levels, so the ECL adjustment actually slowly goes down. For example, a level 8 vampire would have an ECL adjustment of +2, but that drops immediately to +1 at level 9, and eventually goes away completely by level 19.

[Eldonauran]

I dunno, just an idea I had. Has anyone tried anything like this before? How did it go?
Absolutely. I've run this kind of game several times ... wow, starting nearly a decade ago. I mixed it with the Libris Mortis undead progressions as well. So long as you don't have people in your group that hyperfocus on peer to peer power, and instead focus on overall party ability, you should be fine. I had a game fall apart not too long ago because people nitpicked over level to level balance or stat bonuses and thought they should all be equal overall.

[Lord Foul]

Oscelemo monster races work well for this too, I've made a Drider/Ageis and an assasin devil/warlock that both worked quite well, though the bigger difficulty with meshing the standard human bard/Paladin with your succubus sword sage is thematically, what stories would they share