Level Allowances still SUCK!

[Username17]

This is a reminder to everyone... Level Allowances still suck.

The way they are calculated is retarded, in that a "Level" is supposed to be a hit die and some abilties, and Level Allowances give you hit dice or abilities. This means, for example, that if you calculate the "ECL" of a 20th level Human Paladin he comes to about ECL 28, and if you calculate the ECL of a 20th level Human Wizard he comes to about ECL 38 (because each of those commoner hit dice is worth 1 ECL, and each of those Fighter hit dice is also worth 1 ECL, so a higher proportion of a Wizard's abilities count for Level Allowance than does a Paladin's).

The way Level Allowance is applied in game is retarded too. If you collect a LA value your ECL goes up but your XP does not - saddling you with having to pay for your levels at tremendous interest because you're gaining XP a lot slower the whole time.

Even if we agreed in principal with the LA system - which we don't because it's retarded - the LA values for creatures are all laughably too high for all of them. I mean, come on! Paying a Level on top of three shitty hit dice to play a Bug Bear? What would you do that for? A Bug Bear with three Bug Bear hit dice is roughly equivalent to a 2nd level Ranger - and you're expected to bring one in at level four. Most of these races should be paying you for the chance to get played, rather than the other way around.

I mean seriously, who's a bigger benefit to a party, a 15th level Wizard or a CR 11 named character Fire Giant?

-Username17

[Sma]

So what else is new
I´ve been folloing all the recent debates and this is one of the reasons why the D&D Level system does not work beyond level 4.
After that your down to total DM fiat as far as what should be allowed to play and what not. And even before that Levels are not Equal for the different classes. The more time I spend thinking about the rules presented in the various books, the more I find out they only share a smallish subset with my concept of fantasy reality, they are cumbersome, unfair, and worst of all, counterintuitive.

They don´t follow a comprehensible inner logic, and defy attempts to make them work as a whole, or even building a workable world out of them.

K summed it up in the recent Alignment debate,
"It works if you don´t think about it."

So take this as an opponential "me too"

Sma
Stop thinking ! Start playing ! Seems like Amber is the way out

[User3]

Frank ---- The Anthropomorphic Baleen Whale is an exception to your premise. It's in the Savage Species book. And for 3 Racial Hit Dice and +0 ECL, it totally ownz.

Otherwise I agree with you.

[Username17]

So what else is new

Well, recently I was in a game where someone had brought in a half-red dragon human/tauric lamasu under savage progression. I don't know where the hell he got such a thing, or why that happened, but it made me cry.

It really made me cry that by 14th level he was going to have seven hit dice - and cast spells like a 7th level Cleric.

I mean, a seventh level Cleric is supposed to have seven hit dice. That part's free. All the other bullshit should come with hit dice too.

When you go through those savage progressions, it's always like multi-classing a spellcaster. When you take one of the off-levels, you don't advance your primary schtick in any way. But the multiclassing is between getting hit dice and getting abilities.

As long as being a monster gets treated fundamentally differently from taking any other class, it's never going to be balanced to play some freaky scaled lion decapedal monstrosity.

The Anthropomorphic Baleen Whale is an exception to your premise. It's in the Savage Species book. And for 3 Racial Hit Dice and +0 ECL, it totally ownz.

Well, good luck finding armor for one. But yeah, with the occassional creature which is a gross violation of their creature design rules, you occassionally get some things which are worthwhile (baleen whalemen), or even more spectacularly worthless (ECL 5 zombie).

I don't find those to be exceptions to the premise that the creature design rules suck though.

-Username17

[GhostWhoTalks]

The best argument I have ever heard for why LA is the way it is is that it is a deliberate super nerf deterent against all non "standard" character races.

Basically its that mysterious guy out at WOTC that fires the nerf cannon at everything that moves in a manner pandering to the wet dreams of real role play loonies who believe that Maximized Fireballs are the only tool power gamers need to destroy role playing as we know it.

WOTC doesn't want you to play these races, and that is why they invented LA, which means of course that Savage Species is a nothing but a cruel joke on anyone who bought it, but then again anyone who has read it through outa know THAT.

The problem is freaky monster racial abilities are only balanced compared to standard PC class abilities when at higher levels of play, and once they are balanced, they are essentially insignificant (flying is a big deal until anyone with a 3rd level spell can do it, possibly better, then it is pretty much nothing special).

So simply allowing people to take monster characters with those abilities for new characters at no extra cost once the game has progressed to that level might seem OK, as would simply adding in monster abilities as the character advanced to levels where they are potentially availble anyway.

But then the character is getting free abilities (the fact they could by that level have them by other means makes them no less free) and "standard" characters are left wondering why they didn't go non standard to get a raft of free monster gear.

The only real "fair" option for monster characters then is that the monster abilities be broken into unique powers that they pay a cost for, that cost being saved for OTHER unique powers of similar significance usable by standard characters, or better yet all those powers being available ALL characters at the same cost and "Succubus" is just a name you can stick on any character with fire resistance, seduction powers and flight.

Feats would be almost perfect. Of course THEN you need more feat sots, and need to allow them to be you know, actually kinda powerful, in order to account for most of the monsters out there.

Oh and this assumes of course that a character with a monster race might functionally look nothing like a monster of that kind from the MM, but you basically have to assume that for any balance, and if you had say, I don't know a whole rule book devoted to monster characters you would think they could outline some such system in it, as opposed to the mess that was Savage Species.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I don't think that any ability that does not scale in some way should have a LA penalty, with the exception of spell resistance, on account that SR is crap.

For example, I would almost say the Githyanki are worth an LA, on account that they get more abilities as they level up. (Not LA+2, but the basic idea is almost valid.)

Another example: The half fiend and half celestial templates. They add more abilities as they level up. Again, I doubt it's worth La +4 or whatever god-awful number it is, but the idea is still there.

However, that means that most things do not get a LA in addition to their level. bugbears have 3 HD, they're 3rd level. (Which still makes them a substandard choice, but at least I don't kick them in the nusts with an additional LA.)

Of course, that would make things like Fire Giants still hard to play, as a 15 HD fire giant is in no way as good as a 15th level fighter. And when the fighter beats you out, that's sad.

[GhostWhoTalks]

Well, racial hit die are also rather nasty and also a sure sign that WOTC doesn't want you playing those races in any real functional or adaptable manner.

I mean humans and elves and stuff don't have to take that one useless hit die of warrior or commoner or whatever it is in the MM, if they can knock that off and start from level 1 as a useful and interesting adventuring character class why can't a bugbear or a fire giant knock off their racial hit die and do the same?

(well because of big stat mods and free monster abilities I suppose, but you know thats the bit you expect your "monsters as characters" handbook to actually try and address)

If there were mechanics that allowed anything remotely like that not only would the 3rd bugbear character and 15th fire giant character be worth playing but they would then also be available and playable at levels LOWER than the original MM monsters hit die. (I mean lets just PRETEND most people play even as far as 20th level, so how many levels of that do you actually get to play as a fire giant?)

In fact not only that but they might be more worthwhile as a wider variety of character archetypes (instead of basically fighter or other pummelling things with weapons class), a bugbear or fire giant cleric or wizard might be just a tad more functional without the racial hit die (and lets not even think about the LA).

[User3]

It would be interesting if they had monsters that basically have class levels actually taking the levels. That is, your average Ghaele is a 15th level Cleric, and an Old dragon has around 13 levels of Sorceror.

Of course, that would bring in the whole (stupid) issue of 'unassociated class levels' to a much greater extend.
I mean, imagine trying to pretend that the Red dragon was a balanced CR 30 encounter with 13 levels of Sorceror.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I honestly beleive that all classes should be considered unasociated when it comes to monsters, but that's just me.

[RandomCasualty]

1091353238[/unixtime]]I honestly beleive that all classes should be considered unasociated when it comes to monsters, but that's just me.

The classed monster CR problem and LA are oddly enough linked in many ways, and it all actually comes back to the equipment problem.

Monsters don't have magic items typically, and they are balanced that way. Classed stuff generally does have magic items, so a fighter 5 isn't simply +5 BaB and 5d10 hit dice, but also a collection of magic items. Most of the abilities in fact are coming from the items not from the level.

Now when a PC makes a monster, he gets a huge influx of magical items. Which means a named minotaur *is* going to be much more powerful than a book minotaur, both because of non-average stats and because of magical items, and lots of them. It's why LA generally exists: to compensate magic item wise. You simply can't take a monster out of a book, like a minotaur and call it CR X then expect it to be the same CR as a PC too, because of all those magic items.

In fact it is the magic items that let PCs compete against monsters in the first place.

I think if we lump magical item abilities into class abilities and eliminate the dependance on magic items, we can look at actually getting rid of LA. Until we do that, LA is here to stay.

A human fighter will never be equal to a giant, because the fighter needs magic items to kill the giant, and the giant can hold its own without them. So a PC giant with magic items is going to be a powerhouse.

[GhostWhoTalks]

What? So the monster character is supposedly pulling out a magic item that gives him additional hit die, base attack bonus, spell progression, feats, skill points and all that jazz?

He is having an item that gives his monster hit die, which may well grant him almost nothing in the way of special abilities (or even some weaknesses), a minimum set of class features equivalent to a normal character, of whatever class type he now intends to continue with?

Yeah a minotaur with his racial hit die and la and all that doesn't seem so bad if he has some fighter levels and fighter equipment. But he sucks in a major way as a wizard, is pretty iffy as a thief and is generally not even so good as a cleric.

The "oh its an equipment problem (and solution)" only, vaguely, holds water with the single most equipment dependant class, the fighter.

Sure, doom any player daring and adventurous enough to want to play a monster to being a fighter only. Sounds like some pretty ad hoc rules and restrictive role play to me. Certainly not for instance a set of rules sold in an entire dedicated book expressly designed for the use of people wanting to play monster characters or run a whole campaign centered around them.

CR and LA could be fixed a lot better without accounting for equipment, which after all is essentially irrelevant if you assume characters of the same level, regardless of race/type, have access to the SAME value of useful stuff (duh).

And oddly that IS the assumption made at the moment and is the assumption most people generally seem to apply.

[RandomCasualty]

1091373224[/unixtime]]
Sure, doom any player daring and adventurous enough to want to play a monster to being a fighter only. Sounds like some pretty ad hoc rules and restrictive role play to me. Certainly not for instance a set of rules sold in an entire dedicated book expressly designed for the use of people wanting to play monster characters or run a whole campaign centered around them.

I dont really know how you deal with monstrous casters. How the current spell system works, you really can't. Because you're forced to say either "you pay nothing" in which case everyone wants to be a monster to boost their casting stat, or "you pay something" which means nobody is willing to give up a caster level for it. To make monstrous casters worth it, you'd have to employ an alternate system of approaching spellcasters. Becasue under the current caster system the question will always be "Is a +4 int worth 1 wizard level?" or something similar.

[Lago_AM3P]

As Frank suggested...

Why can't we just force monsters to take fakey levels of a generic class instead of having hit die, like warrior or expert and adept (only the only class ability is giving +1 to spellcasting level).

To play a monster, you have to have a certain number of these fakey levels, then your monster stuff gets layered all on top of that.

That way, monster racial bonuses substitute for class bonuses.

There are some problems with this method, but almost all of them are on the existing classes' end. The idea of sorcerors and clerics getting all of their non-spellcasting abilities at level 1 is retarded.

We would need some massive retooling of classes and power-by-level, but this is probably seriously the easiest way to integrate monsters into the game.

[MrWaeseL]

The youngest age category of phaerimm (from the monsters of faerûn or the player's guide to faerûn web enhancement.) totally owns. For 3 ECL you get i abberation HD (with 1 level of natural sorcerer spellcasting), some natty armor, stats bonusses, and the ability to cast all your sorcerer spells as spell-like abilities. WTF?

[Sma]

So it´s an automatic silent stilled spell, and your casting first level spells at level 4. I´m not sure if the ability to cast spells while being grappled and looking like a floating drinking horn, makes up for the loss of 3 caster levels against a wizard, or even against another sorceror who´ll actually get 9th level spells before reaching level 19. Seems underwhelming to me

But yeah, with the occassional creature which is a gross violation of their creature design rules, you occassionally get some things which are worthwhile (baleen whalemen), or even more spectacularly worthless (ECL 5 zombie).

I don't find those to be exceptions to the premise that the creature design rules suck though.

The shadar kai are pretty fun too, but still we´re better off ignoring savage species and la altogether and winging it.
But you´re always going to get players who don´t 'get' the rules and takes totally stupid calss combinations.

The question is do we want to penalize them for being a sorceror 10/Cleric 10 or not.
And if not how do we do so without rewriting the whole ruleset.

Sma

[GhostWhoTalks]

Like I said, the only way to do monster characters with any freedom of class choice and general usefulness (without rewritting the rules on normal characters) is to let them start as a class from level one with only very few of their monster abilities (the equivalent of a standard race) and make all those "free" monster abilities they get come at a cost of some character advancement resource that normal characters already get and expend on other things.

And if you made feats more numerous, and allowed that they might be a bit more powerful feats would be the perfect way to go.

Savage species should have outlined some kind of system like this, describing base monster races by monster TYPE not individual monsters (like Dragon, Construct, Monstrous Humanoid, Abberation, etc...) and then a fairly comprehensive set of monstrous abilities converted to feats (including perhaps part of their higher stat mods). Perhaps a brief section on how to rack up the number of feats available to ALL characters to allow for the use of the damn things to make things VAGUELY ressembling current monsters, and some cranking up of standard feats, or how to make monster feats available to non monsters so as to make things a little fairer to normal characters.

That, or indeed any system that created monsters that were ACTUALLY usable as characters would have taken, and been worth, a whole book.

A monster character doesn't need to be IDENTICAL in is various specialty tricks and bonuses to monsters in the monstrous manual, they need to function as a useful and entertaining potential player character and only really require a few quirky monster like abilities to sufficiently appear as a monster.

Like I said, you take monstrous feat flying, monstrous feat fire resistance, monstrous feat charm spell like ability, and the base monster race Demon, then bam, whatever class you take you call yourself a Succubus, AND you are fairly ballanced with many advancement choices. You don't look MUCH like the succubus in the MM mechanically, but you CAN'T look like that without causing all sorts of balance trouble to everyone, especially yourself, AND this way you get more choice, perhaps you don't want the wings but want to pick up some natural attacks... etc...

Its the way it should have been done, and it would have encouraged people to take monstrous characters without crippling them OR normal characters.

[GhostWhoTalks]

Oh, ah, that is of course with the exception of all the relatively low level monster races, especially of very humanoid natures with no, or very negligible special powers. (Orcs, goblins, kobolds, etc...)

Which they could and should have written up from scratch as standard +0 character races in the same style as the original standard races in the players handbook, that took what, 1 page of text per race, max, and they had HOW many pages in the Savage Species book?

Again, they should have used the existing monsters as inspiration, not a cast in iron guide as to exact bonuses and values the monster MUST have to retain some kind of very poor internal consistancy at the expence of rich playable characters.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

If you're going to allow to play non-standard PC races, then you have two choices. The first choice is to write everything that is playable up as ECL+0 races, from humans to elves to orcs to ogres to sentient singing fungi. This is the proper method because it allows players to play what they want without punishing themselves in the process. The bad side is that it limits your options as a DM because you've just reclassified half of your monster encounters as NPC, and much more importantly this method requires alot of work on someone's part, and sure as shit WotC ain't gonna do this.

The other option is that you go through the nonstandard races and decide how many levels that race is worth. The advantage here is that it's quick, and probably can be done as races are proposed as characters. The problem is that it is abitrary by it's very nature (And therefore you're prone to finding out you guessed wrong), and what's balanced against other characters at level five may very well not be balanced against them at level fifteen, especally if you're playing a caster. It's very hard, in fact almost impoissable to make this actually work on any real timescale.

-Desdan

[Draco_Argentum]

1091402545[/unixtime]]So it´s an automatic silent stilled spell, and your casting first level spells at level 4. I´m not sure if the ability to cast spells while being grappled and looking like a floating drinking horn, makes up for the loss of 3 caster levels against a wizard, or even against another sorceror who´ll actually get 9th level spells before reaching level 19. Seems underwhelming to me

You would be able to cheese out spells with xp costs though. That usually allows some brokeness.

The system would also mostly work if you rewrote a bunch of monsters as LA +x races. As long as x is the same for all characters in your game.

[GhostWhoTalks]

Writing everything up as an ECL +0 race need not mess up half your monsters and turn them into NPCs.

The monsters still exist, whenever you have a player play one its a character of the ECL 0 race, when the DM uses them as challenges its up to him, and as long as they are mooks of an appropriate level he has no reason to waste the time doing it by the character method rather than the monster method.

It would be nice if monsters and characters were created by the same uniform set of rules. But they aren't, so why extend the monster rules to make characters when it would make better nicer characters if you extended the character rules to make monsters?

In fact considering the uses that commoners, nobles and experts are intended for and usually put to it would be better if they were stated up the way monsters are rather than as "NPC" classes (it would also discourage the more annoying minority of players and DMs from pretending they are viable adventurer classes).

As to the other option, well thats why if theres anything beyond ECL +0 it probably shouldn't be worth levels, it should be worth something else, like feats or class features. And that is also why you don't just blindly take monster abilities as they are from the MM but modify them to be more suitable for characters, if you can't guess what an ability is worth or account for it properly you change it.

It is also why you would very carefully consider and test things and then make it into a nice handbook entirely dedicated to those who actually want to use monster characters.

A pity that wasn't done and instead a poorly balanced and useless handbook with virtually no new ideas dedicated to those who want to cripple monster characters right out of the game was released. (With all new useless prestige classes! As if we needed them, even by that point.)

[Desdan_Mervolam]

1091435182[/unixtime]]Writing everything up as an ECL +0 race need not mess up half your monsters and turn them into NPCs.

The point was that instead of being able to rationalize plucking a monster from the book as written because it's the right CR, you would wind up having to write up more encounters as NPC(with classlevels and so forth), making things a little more complicated. However, this isn't nearly so far from how things are currently handled anyway as it might seem, so that was not anywhere near the main concern I was trying to express.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

1091435182[/unixtime]]
It would be nice if monsters and characters were created by the same uniform set of rules. But they aren't, so why extend the monster rules to make characters when it would make better nicer characters if you extended the character rules to make monsters?

The problem with monsters is half the stuff they have is simply there because you want them to have it, and there's no way to coherently deal with rules handling those monsters. What is a beholder's antimagic eye worth for instance, what about a hydra's multiple heads or the Tarrasque's regeneration? And natural armor too, that's basically one of those "whatever the creator feels like giving them" stats.

You just can't create coherent monster rules trying to treat them like player characters, not without sucking all the flavor and special abilities out of the monsters and making everything seem like a carbon copy of each other, at least not without creating 100+ pages of various monster classes, which you could never hope to balance anyway.

And even if you did do that, you still won't solve the problem of monstrous casters. So you've got an ogre with 4 levels in some warrior-like class, that's still 4 levels he won't have in wizard.

[GhostWhoTalks]

But thats my point, any system that involves monster hit die or monster specific classes is unworkable because in order to be that monster you MUST be that class.

That is why monstrous abilities for monster characters must be bought at some cost available to all classes, a cost OTHER than levels of class.

A hundred pages plus (which most certainly would NOT consist of useless monster classes, especially like those outlined in that section in the savage species book) is no big deal, after all the current system for monstrous characters has its own dedicated handbook.

And yet again, like I said, thats why feats, or something like them, are the only way to handle it.

[Username17]

The other option is that you go through the nonstandard races and decide how many levels that race is worth. The advantage here is that it's quick, and probably can be done as races are proposed as characters. The problem is that it is abitrary by it's very nature (And therefore you're prone to finding out you guessed wrong), and what's balanced against other characters at level five may very well not be balanced against them at level fifteen, especally if you're playing a caster. It's very hard, in fact almost impoissable to make this actually work on any real timescale.

It's actually not all that quick. The thing is, that to make this work you actually need to bust out PrCs to advance these monsters into various character roles.

I once busted out some conversion tables for monsters to bring them up to speed, and it was a lot of work. It went by pretty quickly (I think I did something stupid like write 8 PrCs in 24 hours or something), but it still only scratched the surface of what you'd need to do.

Here's the problem: Monster Abilties don't scale, they simply are or are not. So if you play something like a Succubus, you've got a character who's sort of a caster/diplomat character - sort of like a Bard (and depending upon what level you start her at, she could be better or worse than a Bard). But if you give her a level of Bard she gains... some 0th level spells. So if you want to play a Succubus for more than one level, you need a PrC that goes directly from where she is to getting new level appropriate abilties.

And those level appropriate abilties are going to be different depending upon whether you want to play a Succubus in more of a Rogue role, Enchanter role, Cleric role, or Fighter role. And they're going to be different from the level appropriate abilities that any other monster is going to need, because no other monster starts at the same place that a Succubus does.

So you are looking at like four PrCs per monster if you want to do it like that. And that's an astounding amount of work. Not that it can't be done, it's just a lot of work, more work than even I am willing to undertake.

Far simpler, of course, would be to break the monsters themselves down into a few monstrous core classes that scaled up in CR and granted some selectable abilties. Once you've made it so that a Gorgon can be extrapolated from adding some levels to a Basilisk you'll be in a situation where the Basilisk is itself a playable character.

And once that's done, all that LA bullshit can go away for ever and we'll all be happier.

Edit: here was my first attempt at a fix by which people would just slap levels onto existing monsters and play them out of the box:
http://azure.bbboy.net/niftymessageboar ... 0[br][br]I have since decided that this is probably not the right path.

-Username17

[User3]

The real problem with LAs is that they don't do what they were intended to do: balance a monster's power.

Monsters are meant to do one encounter, and then never be seen again. Lots of their abilities are abstracted for just that purpose, but a character cannot be played with those kinds of abilties.

Take, for example, an angel or a medusa or a succubus. A succubus, for example, can seduce an entire city by simply flying around and charming every person she sees during the day, one dude every six seconds. Assuming she could keep this pace up under ideal sitations (where the commoners lined up to get charmed), she could concievably charm 14,400 people at a day, and at any one time keep around seven times that many people in a thrall at a time(the duration of Charm Monster is like 7 days for her caster level).

Even if she only kept four to five thousand commoners charmed at one time, thats way too much. Way too much.

A seventh level wizard or eight level sorcerer can keep around 30 people charmed at one time(or more if he's using charm person), and a 14th level one(who is as powerful as a LAed Succubus) can do about twice that.

Do you see the difference?

A medusa can stone a whole town, and that's cool, but if an angel used continual fire to light an entire mountain, thats bad.

Until monsters are held to the same standards as PCs, then they can't ever work with the LA system. I've always said that the monsters need to be rewritten entirely with "magic item wealth" being represented by special monster abilities that function like magic items in all ways(except for being non-transferrable).