monster characters

[Crafty Cultist]

Hey there fellow playgrounders.

a monster's ECL is generally too high to be played effectively

Does anyone know any good homebrew rules for monster PC's?

[StoryKeeper]

Home brewed stuff will vary in effectiveness and what it allows you to play, but you could probably search teh homebrew section for some stuff.

You could try to find the racial class progression stuff in various books so that you could level up as the monsters. What are you wanting to play out of curiosity? A lot of the main undead can be played as a class in Libris Mortis. Savage Species (while I think it might be 3.0) seems to be pretty good as well, though I don't actually have it.

P.S. Whatever you wind up using, be careful not to let the PC's have any built-in powers that are too game-breaking. I accidentally let my vampire (not vampire spawn; full-fledged vampire) player have unlimited dominating gaze. We eventually had to change that.

[Apropos]

Someone just did this, lemme see if I can't find it...

EDIT: Here it is

[ericgrau]

Then reduce the LA? Or generally all it takes is good optimization to make the LA worth it. The LA assumes you fully exploit a monster's large size, unusual special abilities, etc. If no matter how hard you try you can't figure it out then fine, reduce the LA. If you play in a high power group with a lot of books where a class level is worth more, then reduce LA on all monsters.

Some good monster races to use "right out of the box" that are easy to optimize include: orcs (any melee), grimlocks (rogue with a source of concealment or any melee), pixies (esp. rogues and I hear warlocks), and maybe lizardfolk.

[Geiger Counter]

what specifically do your PCs want to play>
Elans give a close approximation of the abilities of typical outsiders.
shifters are a good substitute for lycanthropes.
changelings are a good substitute for dopplegangers.
And warforged (though totally overpowered) is a good substitute for constructs.

[Apropos]

Reposting this just to make sure you got it.

[Crafty Cultist]

Reposting this just to make sure you got it.

Thanks. this seems like just what I was looking for

[Apropos]

Happy to help