ECL Races, EVER worth it?

I got to the point of combining the elements and Star Wars for my races, since I don't really care for most of the systems used for "balancing" LA races. I remove the racial HD, ignore them completely and allow the player to play the LA'd race at level 1 with a character class. However, they suffer a -1 per each +1 LA per level to BAB, saves, and skill rolls. Each time the character levels, the penalty drops by 1. By removing racial HD (which I figure out as being worth 75% of a level), I drop the LA in some cases (depending on how useful the extras are). It's worked out pretty good so far. I find I need to tweak some of the LA's sometimes since some powers that seems useful really aren't in a practical sense and some powers that seem not as useful turn out to be rather beneficial in ways I never thought of. This way the LA race (which I don't use a whole lot of) doesn't end up way off the pace in mid to upper levels.

Kane
 

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Somebody just pointed this out to me:

I have a gut feeling that Pixie might be swinging the other direction in terms of the LA. They're +4 LA (pretty big) with no racial hit dice ... but for that you get:

-4 Str, +8 Dex, +6 Int, +4 Wis, +6 Cha (a net +TWENTY in ability scores)
Fly 60
SR 15+Class Level
DR 10/Cold Iron
Spell-Like Abilities: Caster level 8th. The save DCs are Charisma-based.

1/day - lesser confusion (DC 14), dancing lights, detect chaos, detect good, detect evil, detect law, detect thoughts (DC 15), dispel magic, entangle (DC 14), permanent image (DC 19; visual and auditory elements only), polymorph (self only).

But the biggie is Greater Invisibility ... ALWAYS ON. Somebody came across that little gem and wants to turn it into a rogue.

Poor unloved Bugbear.

--fje
 

jmucchiello said:
As I always recommend, convert LA to XP deficits. An LA +2 on a "0 HD" humanoid is a 3,000 xp penalty (2 levels). The character is always 3,000 xp behind, which is 2 level at 3rd level and 0 levels at 10th level.

Hmm, I think I did the math on this once, and it turns out using an XP penalty means the "penalized" character is usually the same level as the non-"penalized" PCs, and only one level behind otherwise and only for a short while ... which means that most of the time, the "penalized" PC is the same level as the other PCs and still gets to use all of their goodies they're supposedly being penalized for.

But you may be talking about something else when you say "XP deficits," so if you explain what you mean a little more I'll run the math on it and see what I come up with.

MoogleEmpMog said:
:(
Sean, with all due respect, I've always thought this was an awful decision. Wouldn't it be better to make the Core races cool to players, rather than make the non-core races mechanically weaker (if only a bit, in most cases)?

The core races _are_ cool. They're just not new and exciting to the people who have been playing 3E since 2000 and always want to be "on the edge." They've "played out" the class/race combos they like for the core races and are looking for something else.

Players who've never played before should consider an elf or dwarf as new and interesting as an aasimar; why should those who've played the former many times be discouraged from trying the latter by mechanical considerations?}

If they're interested enough in playing an aasimar, they should accept the slight penalty for playing one; it's not like the aasimar is LA+3 or anything like that, it's a slightly weak LA+1.

Also, it assumes a Core, Greyhawkish campaign setting. For a DM who runs a non-core game, this decision-making process makes all LAs subject to possible revision.

Sure. If you're running a campaign where everyone has easy access to flying, having a winged PC shouldn't have any LA adjustment for being able to fly. In an all-Underdark campaign, "new" PC races shouldn't have a level adjustment for having darkvision.

If the famous people ARE mostly aasimar, hobgoblins and mind flayers, having two of those three races close to crippled and one weaker than average strains the suspension of disbelief - more, I suspect, than the inverse does in Greyhawk, where demographics account for the greater power of core race characters.

I don't think you're comparing the LA of those three races, are you? :)

Yes, it's all relative, and feel free to adjust the LAs to suit your campaign. But to have any sort of internal consistency, D&D (and by extention, standard d20 fantasy) has to assume a certain type of campaign, and that's a campaign where the PH races are the default and the standards by which everything else is judged.

Worst of all, not all designers seem to subscribe to the same theory about LAs. When one (say, the poor hobgoblin) has a LA calculated using your "err on the side of caution" plan and another (perhaps the half-giant or goliath) has a LA calculated to be equal to a character level, the hobgoblin isn't just sub-par - he's clearly pathetic. Worse, a DM who opens up a variant like LA buyoff to make the hobgoblin playable ends up with overpowered half-giants and goliaths.

Yep, that's part of the problem of having a hundred or more d20 designers out there. That's also why I like to explain my design decisions so people know where I'm coming from and can fiddle with it if they disagree.

The LA system is a great concept, but it's one of the areas that could be greatly improved - and IMO, a design philosophy that aims at balancing the LA races, rather than making them deliberately sub-par, would be a better way to go about improving them.

As one of the guys who helped develop the current LA system, I agree with you. It worked for the small scope we intended but now it's grown beyond that and doesn't fit in a lot of places.
 

seankreynolds said:
Hmm, I think I did the math on this once, and it turns out using an XP penalty means the "penalized" character is usually the same level as the non-"penalized" PCs, and only one level behind otherwise and only for a short while ... which means that most of the time, the "penalized" PC is the same level as the other PCs and still gets to use all of their goodies they're supposedly being penalized for.

But you may be talking about something else when you say "XP deficits," so if you explain what you mean a little more I'll run the math on it and see what I come up with.
No, you have what I said right, and I stand by it. Tell me: Is there really a whole level of difference between the 20th level Cleric Elf and the 20th level Cleric Aasimar? No, they may as well be the same level. You might disagree with the amount of XP difference to use but you cannot tell me that when you get up into high level play that a character with 15+ levels of PC classes and a +1 or +2 LA race is meaningfully more powerful than an identical character of a +0 LA race. The magic items on both 15th+ level characters far outstrip any racial traits in either race.

Perhaps the XP deficit should be greater, I chose to base it on the XP table because it already exists. It would take a huge playtest group to find the right formula. But as I see it, Level Adjustments do not work, penalizing far more harshly than they should.

And for monsters with Hit Dice, LAs are even more of a problem. A Nymph Cleric-1 cannot hang with party of 14th level characters. But this is more of a flaw with the idea that HDs = Levels in a PC class.
 

seankreynolds said:
The core races _are_ cool. They're just not new and exciting to the people who have been playing 3E since 2000 and always want to be "on the edge." They've "played out" the class/race combos they like for the core races and are looking for something else.

If they're interested enough in playing an aasimar, they should accept the slight penalty for playing one; it's not like the aasimar is LA+3 or anything like that, it's a slightly weak LA+1.

I just don't understand why you think players who've "played out," in their opinions, the core races should be 'penalized' for chosing something else. Sure, playing an aasimar isn't crippling the character. Even playing a hobgoblin isn't, quite, crippling the character, as long as he takes a non-spellcasting class.

Nonetheless, those characters will be weaker than their equivalents: Hobgoblin Fighter 3 vs. Human Fighter 4 (or Dwarf Fighter 4), Aasimar Cleric 19 vs. Human Cleric 20, etc. I suppose I just can't see how such an outcome could be positive for the game.

seankreynolds said:
Sure. If you're running a campaign where everyone has easy access to flying, having a winged PC shouldn't have any LA adjustment for being able to fly. In an all-Underdark campaign, "new" PC races shouldn't have a level adjustment for having darkvision.

I'm not talking about situational LA modifiers, though (Savage Species proposed something similar regarding the ability to swim). I'm talking about nothing more than a change in tone, say, from humanoid-dominated to goblinoid-dominated. Why add extra work for the DM by making him judge each goblinoid's LA, trying to discern if its designer meant it to be slightly underpowered compared to a core race character? What does NOT adjusting (or simply rounding up) LAs to favor certain races take away from the ordinary campaign?

seankreynolds said:
I don't think you're comparing the LA of those three races, are you? :)

Yes, it's all relative, and feel free to adjust the LAs to suit your campaign. But to have any sort of internal consistency, D&D (and by extention, standard d20 fantasy) has to assume a certain type of campaign, and that's a campaign where the PH races are the default and the standards by which everything else is judged.

Well, hobbies and aasimar are the same, LA +1. Mind flayers were thrown in as the second most common LA race I've heard players asking after. :)

Again, how does attempting to balance non-core races to the same standards as core races impact the ability of D&D to assume a certain type of campaign? Doesn't the presence of the PHB races in, well, the PHB, set them apart from the outset? Especially combined with their demographic representation according to the DMG?

seankreynolds said:
Yep, that's part of the problem of having a hundred or more d20 designers out there. That's also why I like to explain my design decisions so people know where I'm coming from and can fiddle with it if they disagree.

I'm always glad to see designers explain why they did something. Thanks! :)

seankreynolds said:
As one of the guys who helped develop the current LA system, I agree with you. It worked for the small scope we intended but now it's grown beyond that and doesn't fit in a lot of places.

I look forward to seeing its next incarnation! If it's not too much trouble, what would be, just off the top of your head, the number one thing you'd change about the LA system if you had complete freedom to rework it to taste?
 


Rework

Playing "monsters" as characters is currently handled by the ECL (and LA +X) mechanic such as presented in Savage Species through straight builds and monster classes. Monster hit dice are treated as "equal" but some stink (Fey) and some are better than any PC class offers (Outsiders). Losing levels in exchange for special powers isn't balanced and is, IMO, too hard to compare with in order to reliably aim for balance.

I think the next generation of rules should use Character Class like progressions for playable monsters. Hit dice every level, a specific hit die size per creature, and the option to multi-class out of the monster class at any level.
 

HeapThaumaturgist said:
But the biggie is Greater Invisibility ... ALWAYS ON. Somebody came across that little gem and wants to turn it into a rogue.
--fje

Yes, I'm playing a pixie fighter/rogue right now and it rocks. Flying, invisible archer who can make his own sleep arrows and can fly down to sneak attack and flank. IIRC, there are some other racial bonuses to hide and move silently also. Being 4 levels behind, they really suck at being sorcerers but make wonderful rogues and even fighters with their DR.
 

jmucchiello said:
No, you have what I said right, and I stand by it. Tell me: Is there really a whole level of difference between the 20th level Cleric Elf and the 20th level Cleric Aasimar? No, they may as well be the same level.

I agree.

You might disagree with the amount of XP difference to use but you cannot tell me that when you get up into high level play that a character with 15+ levels of PC classes and a +1 or +2 LA race is meaningfully more powerful than an identical character of a +0 LA race. The magic items on both 15th+ level characters far outstrip any racial traits in either race.

I don't disagree. However, using the XP-penalty system rather than the LA system has two serious flaws.

1. It rewards powerful races at lower levels because the XP totals are so small that you are almost always the same character level as a human (86% of the time for a 10%-penalty race compared to a human of level 1-5). That means that you're almost always more powerful than a human at low levels (because if you're the same character level, you still get all of your racial goodies that make you better than a human), and in the infrequent times that you're actually a level behind, you're still as good as the human because your racial abilities compensate for that missing level. In other words, the XP-penalty system means at low levels you're the same (at worst) or better (at best).

2. It penalizes high-level characters because the greater amount of XP total of the high-level character means your XP deficit (compared to the human) is greater, which means you're always a level behind, if not more. A human with 190k XP is 20th level, whereas a 10%-penalty race has 171k (just barely 19th level), a 20%-penalty race has 152k (not quite 18th level), and a 30%-penalty race has 133k (almost 17th level). In other words, using the XP-penalty system gives you the same sort of level disparities that the LA system does, and (barring extensive playtesting) you really don't know if the numbers you picked are right, so you may be penalizing powerful races even more.

So if you're using XP penalties to get of the unfairness of LA, you've succeeded (by making it a no-brainer to play an XP-penalty race at low levels). If you're using XP penalties to make it fair to powerful races at high levels, you've failed (you end up in the same boat as the LA system, except that it's Christmastime for the powerful races at low levels).

I did a bunch of calculations, it's all right
here.
 

Sean's comments have been pretty much on the nose. I thought I'd add a couple more insights; I hope they're useful.

It's easy to forget that the game is an evolving entity, and that what seems obvious in 2005 wasn't so in 1998, 2000, or even 2002.

When PH, DMG, and MM were designed in 1998-1999, R&D simply didn't worry much about how one might honestly make aasimars, hobgoblins, drow, or ogres fully playable as PCs. They just designed all those monsters as best they could, translating their statistics from 2E to 3E in ways that seemed appropriate. The rules of of "LA" or "ECL" weren't really anywhere to be found (tho IIRC the DMG 3.0 had a vaguely playable kludge which at least allowed for the concept).

By the time 2000 rolled around, the FRCS team found themselves facing the difficulty of how to handle some of these "extra-powerful" races (particularly drow). As written, the drow were clearly better than regular PC races--not just as 1st-level characters, but at every single level. Even though the various abilities might not be as significant at 20th level as at 1st, the drow with 20 character levels is still mechanically superior to the elf with 20 character levels. That means that the player looking for mechanical advantages should always play a drow in preference to an elf, which runs counter to the assumptions of D&D and of the Forgotten Realms (Drizzt notwithstanding) and undermines the veracity (and verisimilitude) of the world.

In a perfect world, the aasimar, drow, svirfneblin, and other FR races would be of the same power level as the PH races, meaning that the choice between human and aasimar or drow and elf would be power-neutral (and thus entirely dependent on the player's preferences). But rewriting all those races for FR wasn't a realistic option (nor was rewriting the PH races to be of a similar power level as the extra-powerful races).

The solution that R&D arrived at was the concept of "level adjustment." Since a character's level was the clearest measurement of his overall power, adjusting that level was the clearest way for the extra-powerful races to "pay" for their benefits.

Is it a perfect solution? Of course not--it's a kludge, applied after the fact to handle a situation not anticipated by the original ruleset. (I don't mean this as a slam on either team--the 3E team's primary mission in designing, say, the hobgoblin was to design a good monster to fight rather than a PC to play, and the FR team was just doing the best they could with what they had to work with. All things considered, I think that both groups did the right thing.)

That solution was carried further through Savage Species, which examined most of the critters in the MM using the same tool. But remember that it's still just applying a kludge to monsters that weren't designed with it in mind. Is the hobgoblin a full level better than, say, an elf? Of course not--but with those juicy stat mods it's hard to argue that it isn't at least somewhat better mechanically. (And now we're back to Sean's point about "rounding up.")

By the time 3.5 rolled around, the decision was made to include LA information right in a monster's writeup (rather than forcing DMs to guess on their own). That makes it look like the monster and the LA were designed hand-in-hand, but for any monster designed before 2003 or so that just isn't true.

Fast forward to more recent design work, such as the goliath. I hear players complain that the goliath's way better than, say, the hobgoblin, even though their LA is the same. To that I say "you're absolutely right." Unlike the hobgoblin, the goliath was designed from the ground up to be a playable PC race. Thus, it represents the "cutting edge" of what a +1 level adjustment might look like. When doing what goliaths do best (using big weapons to smash monsters), the goliath is absolutely worth its +1 LA at the vast majority of levels (yes, it's a little fragile at ECL 2, but that goes away pretty fast). Sure, it feels a little inferior when it's doing something it's not designed for (like throwing fireballs), but that's like complaining that Domino's Pizza doesn't serve a good steak--it's not the point of the race. (And don't let anyone tell you a goliath can't be a spellcaster--I've seen goliath clerics, druids, and favored souls kick tall ass, as long as they focused on melee combat.)

More recently, though, you've seen fewer and fewer LA +1 races designed for PC play showing up in our books. That's intentional. The cost of a level adjustment, even when it's fairly applied, is perceived by many (maybe most?) players as simply too great a cost to pay for the cool features such races often get. The warforged, raptoran, and illumians all appeared as LA +1 races at various points in design or development. In each case, we aimed to bring them in at LA +0 to address this concern and to allow people to play them as starting characters. There's no doubt that some of these "push the boundary" a bit--certainly, the low-level warforged is a pretty tough customer--but overall we're pretty comfortable with the end results in each of these cases (and much happier than if they were more powerful and LA +1).

Looking back from today, if R&D could go back in time we'd likely make all the races in the PH a bit better. We'd give out some mental stat adjustments (such as, say, +2 Int to elves to back up the "elves are preeminent wizards" claim that gets passed around like candy--who does PR for these guys, anyway?) and a few more minor special powers (resistances, natural armor, weak spell-likes, etc.). That would, in turn, allow the "LA +0.5" races such as hobgoblins, aasimars, tieflings, and the like to become LA +0 "power-neutral" options for players to select.

We'd also probably kick a bit of power out from under the drow, svirfneblin, githzerai (+6 Dex? Bah), and other races that we'd like to see get played as PCs at least occasionally. Again, if these guys were "power-neutral" options people would choose to play them because they find them cool, not because they're uber-powerful.

And if we were really feeling rambunctious, we might even pick out a few "monsters" from the MM and make sure they were playable as PCs of a level equal to their HD (bugbear, ogre, minotaur, I'm looking in your direction...). If the bugbear had his current stats and 4 HD instead of 3, for instance, might he be playable "as written" as a 4th-level PC? Very possibly.

Anyway, there you go. Hope that's somewhat informative.
 

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