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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grover Cleaveland" data-source="post: 2652364" data-attributes="member: 34932">What is "unnatural?" By whose standard? Are you seriously suggesting that just because something is from another plane it isn't part of the natural order? The inevitables would disagree.Then why do they grow bigger as they advance in hit dice? A balor, for example, becomes Huge when it advances to 30 hit dice; it has everything to do with size, *unless* they're advancing in class level. Perhaps you're thinking of advancement between castes (for example, an amnizu becoming a cornugon) - that's something of a different matter. I think in such a case advancement by class level would be much more likely than advancement by hit dice, or else the baatezu would risk dropping in hit dice when it was transformed into the "higher" form.I'm confused. You're implying that outsiders don't have free will, but a few do out of some mutation or the like? That seems improbable as well as unsatisfying.Far more likely, if one shows evidence of free will, they all must. This doesn't mean that more than "one in a million" are going to choose to act contrary to their own natures, but it does mean that they're all going to choose whether to be rogues or sorcerers.I'm not sure how you can justify making them automatons to fate philosophically. How does a rampaging glabrezu choose to turn right instead of left (or vice versa)? How does it decide whether to eat a halfling first and the dwarf second? Who plans out the complete life-paths of all outsiders of a given type, and how do they account for changes non-outsiders may make to this pre-planned destiny? I don't think you've thought out the implications of predestination, or you don't understand what "free will" actually means. If an armanite has the ability to decide on its own whether to gore or use a spell-like ability, it also has the ability to learn how to be a barbarian or a ranger instead of lounging around in the Abyss growing fat on the souls of the damned. If it doesn't have the ability to make decisions on its own, it's going to end up goring when a spell-like ability would make more sense and charging at mortals in an empty field of battle because the mortals in question decided to sleep in that day - unless you're postulating an omniscient puppetmaster who is capable of unerringly predicting the actions of everyone in the multiverse, in which case no one has free will.Like I said, it's not a defensible position. I never said deities don't have stats, only that said stats use up large portions of a book that could far more profitably be used in other ways. You're absolutely right that "official" isn't always best (certainly, the relative power levels of fiend lords and gods is ridiculously off), but since you were quoting the rules at me (putting "always" in bold face) it seemed that this was what you were basing your argument on, so I responded in kind.In any case, we seem to have reached an agreement of sorts: as fiends are currently designed, they should be able to gain class levels if they want to, and to say otherwise requires quite a lot of reworking of our basic assumptions concerning both their natures and the nature of the cosmology in general.</blockquote>

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