Cambion racial stat modifiers - WTF?

[Matrix Sorcica]

The preview of Demonweb Pits has a Cambion with several +3 stat adjustments? Typo? Madness?

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[Imruphel]

Odd stat modifiers first happened in MMII... that travesty of bad art and bad design. I hope it's just an error (but I am sure it won't be).

 

[sckeener]

ok...+3 is bad...but the first thing I saw was 6 hd and +5 level adjustment....

who the heck is going to play a 6hd but 1st level character who, to get to 2nd level, has to earn enough xp to be 11th level?

that is crazy....

and I don't quite understand how going from

Normal cambion +5 Str, +3 Dex, +3 Con, –4 Wis (minimum 3), –10 Cha (minimum 2)
to
(marquis) +7 Str, +5 Dex, +5 Con, +4 Int, + 6 Wisdom, +0 Charisma

is worth only +1 lvl adjustment...

 

[Bagpuss]

ok...+3 is bad...but the first thing I saw was 6 hd and +5 level adjustment....

who the heck is going to play a 6hd but 1st level character who, to get to 2nd level, has to earn enough xp to be 11th level?

I've got a feeling there are a good number of designers that don't really understand how level adjustment works.

 

[Razz]

I like how it's favored class is a prestige class...something that NEVER gives an XP penalty. So what's the point of making it favored? It's supposed to be a favored CLASS, not prestige class.

Cambion has typos written all over it, I assume

 

[Cam Banks]

Great good gods. That's awful!

I don't usually look unfavorably towards WOTC books, even when I don't care for all of them, but that's just silly.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Felon]

What really blows my mind is the -10 Cha penalty, which becomes an Intelligence penalty if it would drop your Cha below 2. They actually put a lot of thought into giving the class a stupidly high Cha penalty.

There's lots of other crappy touches too, like favored class being a PrC and having a set of spell-like abilities usable 7/day. This creature seems at odds with many concepts of good design that designers have often lectured us on in the past.

 

[sckeener]

What really blows my mind is the -10 Cha penalty, which becomes an Intelligence penalty if it would drop your Cha below 2. They actually put a lot of thought into giving the class a stupidly high Cha penalty.

they put a lot of thought into it...and then give a way out by taking just one more level adjustment penalty (in for a penny and all that)......the Cha penalty goes away and they get a int bonus to boot..(and a difference of +10 wis, +2 str, dex, & con)

 

[Felon]

I've got a feeling there are a good number of designers that don't really understand how level adjustment works.

Well, unfortunately, none of them had a good grasp on LA, even by the time 3.5 rolled around and they had an opportunity to fix it.

They really didn't seem to appreciate how debilitating it is to cough up a "shaft level", particularly when you've already coughed up levels for any hit dice the monster has. To them there was no correlation there; a gnoll coughs up two levels for two utterly crappy levels of humanoid, then another level of shaft for the +1 LA. Don't even try to look at a bugbear....

There were steps they could have taken. For instance, if they thought the various "at will" abilities that most monsters have would be disruptive, then they should just converted at-will usage into limited-use abilities, at least for the PC version.

But they just didn't think playing a non-standard creature should be that good of an option. Which is damnably odd considering how often in the D&D novels and computer games you wind up seeing monstrous creatures featured prominently in the cast of characters. Heck, did Planescape: Torment even have any ordinary characters?

 

[Doug McCrae]

They really didn't seem to appreciate how debilitating it is to cough up a "shaft level", particularly when you've already coughed up levels for any hit dice the monster has.

It's a feature, not a bug. Monsters are deliberately underpowered as PC races compared to humans and demihumans in order to make them less common.