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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Owen K.C. Stephens" data-source="post: 860662" data-attributes="member: 3190">Generally, I find racial hit dice both confuse players (the players I mostly deal with, anyway), -and- weaken character races. Keep in mind that adding a racial hit die does increase a race's effective level (look at the rules in Savage Species). So, if my ECL of +7 for a fire jovian is correct (and I've aleady talked about where those ECLs came from and why GMs may want to change them for their own games), then adding a racial hit die means a 1st level cleric fire jovian would be effectively a 9th rather than 8th level character. Since giants only get d8s and cleric attack progression anyway, this is universally inferior to having no racial hit die and taking 2 levels of cleric.No, obviously cleric is not the maximized class for fire jovians. A jovian barbarian does -much- better, though admittedly he's still at a disadvantage in an 8th level game due to low hit points. However, he'll easily be able to manage a 32 Str, meaning with a huge greataxe he can get a +12 attack bonus and do 2d8+16 damage. That's tough for other 8th level fighter types to match. If he goes into rage, things just get worse.In my experience, players making characters from high ECL races manage to compensate for their weaknesses with magic items, tactics, or spells from allies. And if these classes don't make people pause before taking them, then the ECL is clearly too low.Bonus hit points is an interesting idea, and I suppose you could do it without unbalancing things, but it doesn't really match how creatures and races are written up in 3e. You could give a race a bonus Toughness feat, but I don't know that'll really satisfy anyone.For the most part, don't play an ECL +7 character unless you're in at least a 12th level game.I'm glad you're enjoying B&B!I'm doing a lot of work for the EverQuest line, and have another Star Wars project lined up for Wizards, but none of it can be talked about yet. I haven't chosen a new independent solo book yet, though I do have some discussions ongoing. Sorry to be so mysterious. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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