LA for the Epic stuff?

[Particle_Man]

Is there anything, official or not, that gives LA for the tougher monsters, even if that pushes them into epic level territory? Like what would the LA of a Solar or an Ancient Gold Dragon be?

[redking]

Is there anything, official or not, that gives LA for the tougher monsters, even if that pushes them into epic level territory? Like what would the LA of a Solar or an Ancient Gold Dragon be?

I don't know. LA equal to their HD or CR?

Dragons and Outsiders have the gold standard racial HD. Good BAB, lot of skill points, all good saves. A Solar with many class levels is a juggernaut.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Is there anything, official or not, that gives LA for the tougher monsters, even if that pushes them into epic level territory? Like what would the LA of a Solar or an Ancient Gold Dragon be?

I mean‚ there's the LA assignment thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?624825) on this very forum and Negative LA Assignment thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?629100-Negative-LA-Assignment-Resurrection-but-no-diamond-here)in my sig (page 6 for Epic true dragons). They are dedicated to this very task.

For official sources‚ the ELH gives positive and negative LA to some of their monsters (in fact‚ it gives ECL to play them), but I think that's all.


Pathfinder says that‚ should you want to play a monster‚ you can estimate its ECL as roughly equal to its CR‚ but we all know what problems that can entail.

[Inevitability]

ELH, page 156. Straightforward table of all the monsters in the book and their ECL where applicable. Notably includes monsters that are not exactly traditional PCs (the ECL 25 Ruin Swarm has no intelligence score and is also a swarm) and monsters with negative LA (the same ECL 25 ruin swarm has 50 RHD).

edit: That said, the text contradicts itself right away with the only monster (Mercanes) to actually get a level adjustment in the text. According to the table, mercanes have an ECL of 7, but according to the mercane statblock they have 7 RHD and a level adjustment of 7. Depending on your interpretation, the table of ECLs might just be a table of LAs.

[Beni-Kujaku]

ELH, page 156. Straightforward table of all the monsters in the book and their ECL where applicable. Notably includes monsters that are not exactly traditional PCs (the ECL 25 Ruin Swarm has no intelligence score and is also a swarm) and monsters with negative LA (the same ECL 25 ruin swarm has 50 RHD).

edit: That said, the text contradicts itself right away with the only monster (Mercanes) to actually get a level adjustment in the text. According to the table, mercanes have an ECL of 7, but according to the mercane statblock they have 7 RHD and a level adjustment of 7. Depending on your interpretation, the table of ECLs might just be a table of LAs.

It's not the first time we had theoretically unplayable creatures be assigned an LA. Notably, Savage Species gave an LA to MM1 golems. Now, in the end of the book, the golems are considered to be either awakened or Incarnate Constructs, but there is a monster class for the Flesh Golem where you don't roll for stats as with awakened. It considers the flesh golem starts with Int 4 (-6) then gains intelligence as it gains levels to reach Int 8. This sets an.... Interesting precedent at least. Sadly, this is the only monster in this case, so we can't infer a general rule.


For the mercane, I choose to believe that the rest of the table is actually ECL, and that this is an example of negative LA. They were just heavily confused at the time considering there were not really any monster who were playable (remember, this is almost a year before Savage Species, only two years after PHB 3.0. Having PC monsters was still very new and probably not a fully formed idea). Which gives us some pearls like "In this special circumstance, the character level is now referred to as effective character level (ECL). For instance, a winterwight with a level adjustment of +25 who is also a 1st-level sorcerer has an ECL of 26.". Not only that's not how LA works in 3.5, the winterwight is listed as having ECL 32, not ECL 25 in the table (and has 32 HD, if anybody was wondering).
But above all, that's not the only example of that. Before Savage Species, "Level Adjustment" was the adjustment to the class levels, not to the full number of RHD. The Dungeon Master's Guide 3.0 explicitates it, and the Manual of the Planes even has a table showing that a creature with "level adjustment" 5, for example, gains XP as a character five levels lower, giving for example the Uridezu. The Uridezu is listed as having an adjustment of 5 and being playable at ECL 5 despite having 7 RHD, a clear example of negative LA before its time.
All of this was much more streamlined later, but I find it interesting that they changed the system so completely as to remove negative LA everywhere except for Incarnate Construct. I guess the existence of prestige classes requiring 8 ranks in some skills played heavily in that decision, so that they really couldn't be taken before ECL5. Maybe they should have went with tying the skill rank limit to ECL instead, but it would create more problems than it would solve.

However, when 3.5 came around, they seemingly didn't want players playing monsters anymore and arbitrarily increased the LA for a lot of these. ECL+5 satyr (equivalent LA+0)? Now its LA+2. The Troll goes from LA+2 to +5, werebear goes from ECL+4 to ECL+8 (tbf, it gains a few abilities too), Uridezus somehow went from LA-2 to LA+6, and gnolls go from the already underpowered LA+0 to the frankly ridiculous LA+1. I just don't understand any of that. It confuses and angers me to see that they had a somewhat right estimation in the beginning and changed it for the current mess.

[AvatarVecna]

ELH, page 156. Straightforward table of all the monsters in the book and their ECL where applicable. Notably includes monsters that are not exactly traditional PCs (the ECL 25 Ruin Swarm has no intelligence score and is also a swarm) and monsters with negative LA (the same ECL 25 ruin swarm has 50 RHD).

edit: That said, the text contradicts itself right away with the only monster (Mercanes) to actually get a level adjustment in the text. According to the table, mercanes have an ECL of 7, but according to the mercane statblock they have 7 RHD and a level adjustment of 7. Depending on your interpretation, the table of ECLs might just be a table of LAs.

I've made a thread about this before, but there's two monsters who have their LA mentioned outside of the table. One is the mercane, who has LA 7 in their statblock, but ECL 7 in the table. The other is the winterwight, which is the example monster they have in the text for demonstrating how LA works. Once again, the explicit LA mentioned in the text happens to be equal to the number in the winterwight's "ECL" column in the table. By pure RAW, the table is accurate and takes precedent for every monster except these two (who are "text trumps table" in action). Buuuuuut with two examples that both put forth an easy alternate hypothesis, it's not difficult to say that the designers just mislabeled the table, and that column is supposed to be LA.

The LA reassignment threads are much better for this kind of thing generally; most monsters just aren't cool enough to deserve more than LA +0, and a great many of them deserve even less than that.