Lorehead
First Post
I believe that you have confused me for one of my two good twin brothers, who cannot use contractions. It is an easy mistake to make. I am certainly not the five-hundred-year old, undying, demilich-like head of Data in disguise.Li Shenron said:Commander, your logic is flawless, but...
That depends entirely on how you define "a good thing." I can predict how certain specific proposals would work.You are assuming that the penalty should grow as the same rate as the level for the rule to be acceptable. You prove that LA achieves that and SKR proves that % penalty does not achieve that. But can you prove that achieving that is a good thing?
For instance, does this proposal penalize players only while they take gestalt levels? In that case, they will start out at the same level as the rest of the party, and only fall behind for a short time. When that happens, they earn more XP for being lower-level, and catch up to the single-classed party members. There are numerous class combinations where the first few levels of some class contribute much more to a build than later ones: one level of barbarian for a fighter with Extra Rage, four levels of fighter for a monk, two levels of ranger for a Two-Weapon Fighting build.
Will the penalty instead last for the rest of his career? In that case, he may as well keep going gestalt forever. A fractional XP penalty means that he will start out at the same level, stay at the same level much of the time thereafter, but gradually fall further and further behind. If anything, the opposite should happen: gestalt characters tend to outshine standard ones the most at low levels, and less at high levels. An enchanter-sorcerer magic missile machine gun is an incredibly powerful blaster at first level. By high levels, he will miss higher-level spells more than he appreciates his staying power. (My own take on a sor/wiz quasi-gestalt, the unbounded mage, is in another thread.)
No, he correctly pointed out that the character is penalized the least at low levels, when his racial abilities are most significant, and the most at high levels, when his racial abilities are least significant.SKR has some good point in saying that % has a flaw which LA doesn't have: the fact that most of the time the more powerful PC is not really penalized. But forgets to mention that:
(1) that it is more fair to penalized all the time is his own assumption, a character penalized 30% of the time is still penalized on the average, which is not necessarily worse
How, precisely, does percentile avoid this problem? At high levels, it gives the character even fewer HP than he would have with LA. At low levels, it makes the character with LA superior in every way, including HP.(2) LA itself has some a flaw which % doesn't: it makes it extremely difficult to play the character along a party with no LA, when the LA is high compared to the class levels (because of the HP problem)
Note that a character with a higher Constitution will always, eventually, end up with more HP past a certain point, no matter what LA you assign.
I basically agree.The point is that LA works very well only as long as it doesn't exceed +2. Higher LA require at least to play a high-level campaign, but still many people hate it. There are in fact attempts to make it hold better (UA optional rule for example).
"Necessarily" is such a strong word. But I have my doubts that any system simple enough to use could work in every corner case.ANYWAY I wish to discuss the topic about gestalt classes used in the same game with normal single-class characters. It is not the same as multiclassing, and it is not the same as playing a race with ability bonuses and special powers. It is very different indeed. So what doesn't work with the other two, is not necessarily going to fail with gestalt.
At the moment, the method is not fleshed out enough for me to evaluate. Suppose I want to play the following characters:Because you seem to have a much better grasp of math than me I'd definitely appreciate if you'd help calculating what would happen to a gestalt character with either methods, and to estimate if it's possible to devise a fair penalty.
- A fighter-ranger archer
- A fighter-barbie with a greatsword
- A fighter-sorcerer who would otherwise be an eldritch knight
- A cleric-wizard who would otherwise be a mystic theurge
- A rogue-wizard who would otherwise be an arcane trickster