Creating Monster Characters

[Cowboy_ninja]

my group is starting an evil dungeon. anything goes really.

I need help understanding Level Adjustments making my character.

so im a half vampire (libiris mortis) with a +2 LA. so if im a Level 2 fighter drow half vampire my LA is +4.

so i geat feats as a level 6 character or a level 2 character?
is the maximum rank i can have in a skill that of a lvl 2 or lvl 6 character?

[UserClone]

Close. your level would be 2 for all purposes except to determine how much experience you get/how much you need to level up. for those purposes you are 4th level.

[The Glyphstone]

Like he said - as a Half-Vampire Drow Fighter 2, you have the HP/Skills/Feats/stats of a Fighter 2, with the bonuses of the Drow race and the Half-Vampire template. When counting XP totals, you don't gain a level until you've gotten what it would take for a 6th level character to level up, at which point you are now a Half-Vampire Drow Fighter 3 (or Fighter 2/Barbarian 1, or whatever you chose for your new level). Now you're considered to be level 7 for XP purposes, etc.

[Cowboy_ninja]

one more question:

can someone link me to a monster search engine? is there a search engine out there with all th D&D books in it? also preferably i'd like to search by LA.

[Eloel]

www.dandwiki.com has all open-source PC races I know of.

[Darrin]

one more question:

can someone link me to a monster search engine? is there a search engine out there with all th D&D books in it? also preferably i'd like to search by LA.

IMarvinTPA's D&D page has some pretty good search features:

http://www.imarvintpa.com/dndlive/index.php

As far as looking things up by LA... check Crystalkeep:

http://www.crystalkeep.com/d20/index.php

In general, you want to keep LA as low as possible, and buy it off quickly (if the DM is allowing LA buyoff) so that you start leveling up at the same rate as the other players. Otherwise you can get stuck with fewer HPs, BAB, and skill points than the other PCs. The best monsters/templates will have low LAs with a good selection of special abilities. Some of the best templates: mineral warrior, feral, divine minion, lolth-touched, half-fey, and half-minotaur.

Half-vampire looks pretty decent, but putting Drow (LA +2) on top of it is too much. You can get rid of the Drow LA by playing a Lesser Drow (Players Guide to Faerun, p. 191) or using racial class levels from the Wizards website (just ignore the two racial levels and never take them, or take them whenever it is more convenient to miss the BAB/skill points/etc):

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/sp/20040213a

If you're playing a spellcaster, you want to avoid LA as much as possible, since any LA you take will cut into gaining more caster levels. If rival spellcasters are leveling up faster than you can, then they're going to pwn you, no matter what kind of monster type/template you have.