Sanity Check: LA or Feat in exchange for flaws

[Jervis]

I hope this is ok for here, it didn’t seem fit for the homebrew board. I’m working on planning a potential game for the near future and I was thinking about a possible answer to PCs that want to play as something exotic without either of us dealing with the annoyance of La, especially at low levels. I never liked LA buy off because it creates a trap where players pile up the LA under the assumption of buying it off later and end up weaker for a lot of the game and making them and me deal with the leveling annoyance. I was going to give a LA allowance but that creates a opportunity cost that leads to everyone picking up LA to not leave things laying on the table.
Then I thought about how flaws do the same thing which lead me to this idea.

Players have a maximum amount of 2 flaws drawn from the usual list. A flaw can either knock off a point of LA or give a feat. In this case LA +2 would be the unadjusted maximum and the assumption is that you can’t choose to grab a feat with a flaw while you have LA.

Is this a good idea or just plane stupid?

[Beni-Kujaku]

Players have a maximum amount of 2 flaws drawn from the usual list. A flaw can either knock off a point of LA or give a feat.

One LA is much more valuable than a feat‚ which is already a good bit more valuable than a flaw.

If you do that‚ consider weighing one LA against two flaws instead (and choosing the flaws at random instead of letting players pick them.

Alternatively‚ use the E6 system. No LA‚ but for which LA you should have had‚ reduce your point-buy by 8 points (so a Goliath player has 24 points if your other players have 32).

[Rebel7284]

Flaws are a pretty bad balancing tool to begin with. Most flaws fall into two categories: Debilitating or will almost never apply. Using them to buy off LA in addition to buying feats doesn't change that.

In addition, the LA buyoff, while an imperfect system, doesn't necessarily lead to weaker characters up-front as usually LA races and templates have the highest impact up-front and become less useful over time.

So it feels to me like you'd be trading a mediocre system for a slightly worse system.