Why Level Adjustment sucks

[icyshadowlord]

So, anyone want to give the fine details of why Level Adjustment doesn't work? I fail at explaining it to a friend.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The benefits that are supposed to replace actual levels do a really bad job of replacing actual levels. You wind up behind on hit dice, saves, BAB, sneak attack, spellcasting, etc. in a way that the usual sorts of things that LA comes with simply cannot compensate for.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

The Savage Species review delved pretty well into the suck, I feel http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54069

That careless mistake gets the reader's asshole nice and lubed up for the true cornholing: Level Adjustments. And let me tell you, they had something custom-made by Bad Dragon for you in this chapter. Here is a list of things that grant level adjustment:

1. Unbalanced hit die. The tome version of half orcs? Unbalances, level adjustment! Not having a constitution? Unbalanced, level adjustment! (because it's a good thing to not have bonus hit points per level. Oh wait...).

2. Being big! Because being surrounded by more things and being an obvious first target is awesome! Reach is handy, but that gets put in the player's hands by level 1...

3. Having natural armor! Having even one point gives you a level adjustment! Because that +1 to AC really breaks the game right in half!

4. Movement: Get this, the ability to swim doesn't grant a level adjustment, except if you use it in a game. I am serious as a motherfucking heart attack, this is what the fucking book says. climb also grants a +1 level adjustment because there isn't a first level spell that lets you climb for free.

[Note: I'm noticing a trend here, if the character can do something that a wizard can do at level 1 just because, it kicks you in the nuts. Also, extra strength and constitution are weighted for level adjustment purposes, but not mental stats. This book should have been titled "Fighters Can't Have Nice Things"].

5. Natural Attacks. So yeah, if the natural attacks can deal more damage than a fighter can do, LEVEL ADJUSTMENT! Never mind that natural weapons can't be enhanced easily, and that at high levels it won't be worth paying the constantly greater cost that level adjustment entails!

6. Racial skill bonuses! Three or more bonuses give you a level adjustment? Because a race that has +2 to spot, search, and listen is a totally munchkin race!

7. Miscellaneous! I'm going to point out the stupid here.
-Ability damage. You know, like what a wizard can do at level 1.
-Spellcasting ability above your hit dice is only +1 LA, ever! I'm writing a monster that grants 20th level spellcasting with 1 hit die!
-Spell resistance! Note that this book consider spell resistance to NOT stack with levels (although an argument could be made that it does), bu it gives +1 LA regardless of the amount! Which means you can be immune to magic at 1st level, not have spll resistance by 20th, and pay for your magic immunity over the next 19 levels!

[Username17]

Level Adjustments are failures in two ways. The first way is the concept, where you pay levels (which are generally the sorts of thing that are more powerful the more of them you have) for monster abilities (which is generally the sort of thing that comes in at a fixed power level). So the theory would be that you pay out a bunch of levels to be a [Monster] and then a few levels down the line, you're still basically that monster type only now the other party members include a Wizard who can summon your monstrous equivalents three at a time and you have a couple of non-stacking bard levels.

If Level Adjustments were hitting on all cylinders, they would be terrible. There would be games that start too low level for you to play a Werewolf, in which case you can't play a Werewolf. And there would be games that were high enough level that the levels you were paying for being a Werewolf were too expensive for the non-scaling Werewolf powers you had. And only for a very small period in the middle would you be allowed to play a werewolf and have powers that were commensurate with the level you were supposed to be playing at.

But beyond that, there are structural problems with how the numbers were calculated. Specifically, you are supposed to pay Level Adjustment for all your abilities. But actual levels come with abilities. So a level adjustment race is getting less for his hit dice than a PC class is. Essentially they are asking Level Adjustment races to multiclass their powers and levels in fucking aristocrat. So really, there are zero levels that LA races are playable at, because the lowest level you are allowed to play one they are already obsolete.

-Username17

[erik]

If LA just had a flat XP penalty rather than full level cost that would've solved a lot. By higher levels the cost is pretty much absorbed and become equivalent to having crafted some boss items/permanency'd spells (which would be grossly equivalent to your racial bumps).

[Prak]

There are a few different problems. One of them is that LA is only part of the cost of playing a monster.

Basically, if you want to play, say, a gnoll, you take the LA (+1), and add the HD (2) for an ECL (Effective Character Level) of 3 before you get class levels.

So a basic gnoll with 2 HD is supposed to be equivalent to a level 3 human barbarian, or wizard, or whatever.

Now, this itself has two problems. The first is that they are asking you to pay for HD and abilities separately, which I could almost swallow with, say, a Tanar'ri, which gets some significant benefits for just having the Tanar'ri subtype*. But on a gnoll, your 2HD gets you 12 average hp, a good fort, 2+Int skill points and a feat selection. You're better off taking literally any class and if someone asked "Can I take two ranger HD and add the LA?" I'd let them. That +1 LA is paying for Darkvision and a total +2 ability score boost (+4 str, +2 con, -2 int, -2 cha)

If you wrote a class that had a d8 HD, 2+Int skills, a good Fort, and got a couple ability boosts by level 2... well, people would take it, but they'd be dumb.

So, the first problem I see with LA/ECL is that it asks you to pay twice to play a monster.

The second problem is that if you look at their guidelines for LA in Savage Species, and then look at any monster, even in that book, there's at least a 50% chance that the guidelines do not produce the same LA as the one printed.

There are of course a ton of other issues, but those are the two main ones to me, and a subpoint of problem 1 is that they vastly overcharge for things, like Darkvision and rising above breaking even on ability mods even by just +2.

[Roog]

But beyond that, there are structural problems with how the numbers were calculated. Specifically, you are supposed to pay Level Adjustment for all your abilities. But actual levels come with abilities. So a level adjustment race is getting less for his hit dice than a PC class is. Essentially they are asking Level Adjustment races to multiclass their powers and levels in fucking aristocrat. So really, there are zero levels that LA races are playable at, because the lowest level you are allowed to play one they are already obsolete.

-Username17

This is why I have a soft spot for Scorpionfolk from MMII - they may be silly, but they make a great example of just how ridiculous the ELC system is.

They have CR 7 (12hd), and:

A scorpionfolk PC’s effective character level (ECL) is equal to its class level + 16. Thus, a 1st-level scorpionfolk ranger has an ECL of 17 and is the equivalent of a 17th level character.

The difference between CR and ECL is large enough that when the party fights a set of duplicates of the scorpionfolk character, the fight is meant to be so easy that the party gains no xp.

[Maxus]

And they specifically did it like that to discourage players from playing monstrous characters, because they don't like the idea of D&D with a Scorpionfolk, an ogre, a grimlock, and a ghost adventuring together.

[maglag]

And they specifically did it like that to discourage players from playing monstrous characters, because they don't like the idea of D&D with a Scorpionfolk, an ogre, a grimlock, and a ghost adventuring together.

In all fairness, they erred to the weak side to prevent broken stuff from slipping through the cracks, as many monster abilities become a lot stronger when in the hands of a party of players.

For example, a planetar is CR 16, 14 HD, and casts as a 17th level cleric plus a lot of extra abilities.

Basically, it's a problem that has no easy solution. If LA was lower/non-exhistant, even fullcasters would become obsolete because some monster somewhere would cast better with extra perks. Monster's CRs, HDs and powers are all over the place, so it's impossible to have a system that fits everything in any meaningful way short of rewriting all the monsters in a progression system.

[RelentlessImp]

One of the bigger reasons LA doesn't work as printed is because nobody does the sensible thing with it - that is, if everyone is playing something with LA +1, then the LA is supposed to cease existing. That's actually written in the 3.5 rules for level adjustment, but nobody actually uses it that way. (I can't find the exact source at the moment, though.)

I won't get into WotC thinking what constitutes LA and whether or not it's right (it never is), but that's one of the things people forget about LA - when everyone is ostensibly even on it, it's supposed to go bye-bye, or be on a sliding scale adjustment compared to the power level of the other PCs.

[PhoneLobster]

In all fairness, they erred to the weak side to prevent broken stuff from slipping through the cracks, as many monster abilities become a lot stronger when in the hands of a party of players.

No. "In all fairness" it is a matter of public record that they deliberately gimped LA/Monster characters because they wanted to sell a book on how to play monster characters, but they wanted to discourage actual players from playing monster characters because they for some reason felt bad about monster player characters being a thing in D&D games in the wild.

They were not "being careful" it was explicitly social engineering of their customers gaming tables because of an inexplicable fetish passed down from higher up in the designer hierarchy, at the cost of ripping off the customers that bought a book advertised as supporting a play style the company had (at the time secretly) determined it would deliberately undermine.

Anyway. Aside from that. The LA system is an ad hock hodge podge post facto hack job on top of a level based PC/essentially purely arbitrary monster based system, doomed to fail just for that. But then made all the worse because their design methodology was essentially a somewhat over complex and obfuscated "Advantage/Disadvantage" points system which is basically a flat out failed concept even if your were building it from scratch instead of trying to glue it on top of a completely alien system.... and then deliberately sabotaged even further because the designers bosses told them they didn't want anyone to actually use the thing.

[erik]

How is it supposed to go away when it is your basis of comparison to all the monsters?

If everyone is a class level 1 Stone Giant then you start with CR 1 monsters? Eh?

[Kaelik]

How is it supposed to go away when it is your basis of comparison to all the monsters?

If everyone is a class level 1 Stone Giant then you start with CR 1 monsters? Eh?

Relentless Imp has never particularly impressed me with his rules chops, so since no quote is provided, I will defer to "he probably just made that up in his own head off of a misreading of a vaguely related passage somewhere."

[RelentlessImp]

How is it supposed to go away when it is your basis of comparison to all the monsters?

If everyone is a class level 1 Stone Giant then you start with CR 1 monsters? Eh?

Relentless Imp has never particularly impressed me with his rules chops, so since no quote is provided, I will defer to "he probably just made that up in his own head off of a misreading of a vaguely related passage somewhere."

That's entirely possible, especially since I can't find the relevant passage now. I'll let you know if I ever run across it again.

[DSMatticus]

The closest statement I'm aware of to anything like that is the Pathfinder admission that Monsters as PCs works best when all the players pick monsters of the same CR. It still doesn't tell you to ignore the monster "levels," but it does tell you that the system works best if everyone gets to have roughly the same amount of them.

[Prak]

Well, 3.0 introduced LA as a sort of XP handicap for people playing more powerful creatures. If the game was first level, and someone wanted to play a hengeyokai*, they were considered a 2nd level character and gained xp accordingly in a first level party, and eventually things evened out. If everyone was playing LA +1 characters, then you just didn't worry about the xp handicap, but you probably still treated them as the 2nd level characters they ostensibly were for all other matters.

That's probably what RelentlessImp was thinking of.

*use of hengeyokai is not meant to imply LA was created in OA, it was just the first +1 LA race I could think of.

[schpeelah]

How is it supposed to go away when it is your basis of comparison to all the monsters?

If everyone is a class level 1 Stone Giant then you start with CR 1 monsters? Eh?

Relentless Imp has never particularly impressed me with his rules chops, so since no quote is provided, I will defer to "he probably just made that up in his own head off of a misreading of a vaguely related passage somewhere."

That's entirely possible, especially since I can't find the relevant passage now. I'll let you know if I ever run across it again.

This rule does exist as a special case for some of the UA racial variants:

None of the aquatic races have level adjustments when your entire campaign is set underwater and all the PCs have the aquatic subtype, or when playing a nonaquatic campaign. [+1 LA otherwise]

[tussock]

LA is an example of people not understanding logarithms.

See, being two levels higher makes you about twice as powerful (if you're a caster, also if you're not a caster and there are no casters present). That's baked into the 3e rules all over the place, challenge ratings, XP, encounter levels, and so on. It's a growth curve where your level is a logarithm of your character's raw power.


So when you get +1 LA from a thing, that's supposed to be ~+40% power, and when you get +2 LA from a thing, that's supposed to be ~+100% power (2-3x times as good as +1), and +3 is ~+180% power (4-5x as good as +1).

So when they said your monsters powers gave you seven different categories of power, but each one less than a perfect +1 LA, that should add to +7 LA. Where +7 levels is +1000% power, or 25 times as good as a +1 LA.


But then you also give up your 12th level of Wizard for the same thing you were giving up your 2nd level of Wizard for a long time ago, while also multiplying the power of a Rogue or Fighter by the same amount, and that can't work at all.

If 3 things = +2 LA, 5 things = +3 LA, 8 things = +4 LA, and 12 things = +5 LA, it could conceivably work for some characters if the monster powers stacked with class abilities correctly, if the "things" were really worth +40% power to those characters and all stacked with each other. So an Aranea with 3HD including 3 Src levels and some poison and speed and stats and webs is a minimal +1 LA and not more. Ogre +1, Troll maybe +2. Anything with spell-like abilities really needs spellcasting instead.

Stuff like Drow and Hobgoblin could just have an extra flaw, they're never worth a level. Writing from scratch your default Drow and Hobgoblin should be elite and use class levels for their stuff anyway, but so should Dryads and Ogre Magi.

[OgreBattle]

Dnd has feats as the "everything not covered by level and skills" section of character building, so I can see 'LA races' instead be 'feat adjustment races'. So playing as a drow makes you lose feat slots of a level equivalent to getting spell resistance or casting darkness.

This requires a system that has feats scale wih level though like TOME combat and prowess feats. TOME fiendish feats already set a precedent for level appropriateness in feats.