All aboard the Leader-ship

[awayfarer]

I was tossing around an idea for a half dragon (gold) paladin, and while I'm interested in giving him Leadership, I'm not fully certain what is meant by this...

A character’s base Leadership score equals his level plus any Charisma modifier.

My first guess was that this refers to the characters total class levels. Alternately, I was thinking that it might refer to ECL. Anyone know which is right?

 

[Infiniti2000]

My first assumption would be "character level" because it references 'character' in the same sentence. This is not the same thing as ECL and is defined as:

character level
A character's total level. For a character with levels in only one class, class level and character level are the same thing.

 

[Cabral]

I would go with character level. Effective Character Level isn't really a sum of levels. It's something added to a sum of levels.

 

[brehobit]

Given the nature of the feat, I'd actually (house-rule) it to ECL. A dragon without class levels should be able to take the leadership feat IMO.

Mark

 

[Cabral]

Hit dice = class levels. Therefore, unless it's a very young dragon, he'll qualify anyway and then get a nice a charisma bonus.

 

[awayfarer]

I was jsut thinking, if it really is only hit dice or class levels, that seriously screws over some races. Azer come to mind. Not that you see many Azer PC's, but that one seems a cler example.

 

[Infiniti2000]

How does it seriously screw them?

 

[Vuron]

If it's a template like Half-Dragon or Half-Fiend then leadership is based on character level

So a 6th lvl Half-Dragon Paladin is 6th level for the purposes of Leadership

However a 6th lvl Bugbear Fighter would add the Monster HD as levels to the class levels to determine character level. Thus the 6th level Bugbear fighter would be 9th level (3 levels of Humanoid + 6 levels of Fighter) for the purposes of Leadership.

The problem with the Half-Dragon Paladin vis a vis leadership is that his low character level vs his ECL make his initially recruited cohort suboptimal.

Taking our example the 6th level Half-Dragon Paladin is equivalent to a 9th level human PC. However he can only recruit up to a 4th level Cohort (Character Level - 2) whereas a 9th level human paladin could potentially recruit a 7th level Cohort. While the 4th level Cohort should gain levels faster than a 7th level Cohort the fact that it can be no closer than 1 level behind the Paladin will always keep the Cohort less powerful than a cohort for a +0 ECL PC.

Considering a bunch of Paladin class abilities are level dependent (Turn, Lay on Hands, Mount) the +3 LA really negatively impacts the Half-Dragon Paladin in a PC setting. The increases to abilities hardly negates the loss of level related power. If you do choose to do this character I strongly suggest using the ruleset for buying off level adjustment.

 

[awayfarer]

How does it seriously screw them?

An Azer has two HD and a +4 LA. If the level adjustment is not applicable to Leadership, that 4 point LA is hurting them since leadership is based off of character level.

Lets say you're making a 12th level Azer character. You start with 2 racial HD, add in a +4 LA and than take 6 levels of paladin. The Azers ECL is 12, however, their character level is 8. They basically have two levels of Azer and 6 levels of paladin. Your base leadership score (Before charisma is counted) is 8.

By comparison, any race with a starting ECL of 0 would be making a character with 12 class levels. Assuming leadership is based on class levels/hit dice, this characters leadership score is 12 before you add/subtract their charisma mod.

Does that sound about right?

 

[kigmatzomat]

We just use HD+ECL adjustment since, as pointed out above, ECLs should already be balanced. There's not much value in adding a leadership-specific nerf to ECL>0 races, IMO.