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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OneWinged4ngel" data-source="post: 4456258" data-attributes="member: 37292">Yes and no.Yes, it really is a set of design guidelines for adapting monsters as PCs rather than something you just pull out of a book and suddenly you know exactly how to build and play the ice giant because the written work told you so.  Further, all houserules (or even all rules) can be said to be an implementation of rule zero, so that hardly seems to be a point...No, It's actually more of a 'system' than LA is.  There is an element of user interpretation in both systems.  The main difference is that with LA, the writers already did the interpreting for you on each and every monster.  I'm not going to actually be giving you a rewrite of every monster in every MM simply because that's a wholly unreasonable amount of work for me to do without getting paid as a game designer (I do have a life to carry on, after all), though I might do adaptations on request (as I have done for some in the past who were using this system).  It is significantly more methodical than going to someone and saying "hey, here's a monster, figure out how many levels you lose."  You actually have tons of things to correlate all those abilities to, whereas LA tells you to break out of the level system and try to figure out how that correlates to anything else (which is a tricky equation, to say the least, because the entire rest of the system wants you to have full levels, and you run into stupid things like the aforementioned "oops, you get no save against instant cloudkill death when it just annoys the rest of the party").It is a replacement for the LA system, it is not a written adaptation of every race and monster to that new system.In the LA system, 'you have a set of abilities and traits that is paid for by a level loss compared to a normal character.'  That is literally the entirety of the system.  When you want to make a monster a PC, you need to take that monster and adapt it to that system (which, by your definition, means that it's not a system, which makes little to no sense).In the Monster Class system, 'you have a set of abilities and traits that is gradually acquired through taking levels in a monstrous class, then you have to multiclass to your real class.'  Again, that's pretty much the entirety of that system.  Each monster has to be adapted to that in a quite complex way:  You need to make an entirely new class for every race.  Not to mention a ton of crazy little problems directly inherent in that system (such as that if you actually do have that class below max level, you don't really start out as your race).  And again, it seems like by your definition, that's not a system.In this system, you have a set of abilities and traits that is paid for or emulated by aspects of the game that are not levels (point buy, feats, spells, class features, etc).  That is a very fundamental and significant paradigm shift, and a wholly different system.  By your definition, LA is not a system.  Your definition seems a little misplaced, particularly given the context ^_^;Very much so <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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