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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5572627" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with that analysis is that it assumes that the Goliath is fairly priced at LA+1.Now, of course the problem here is that LA is a very bad tool and a crude one at that.  I personally would probably never allow a character with a race of more than LA+1, and hypothetically if I did I'd do some adjustments to how it worked (XP penalties as well as or off setting the level adjustment).  So, it's not like I can say with any definitiveness whether something is LA+1 or LA+2 and good arguments can be made either way in most cases.  For example, below a certain level for LA+X the character may be less powerful, but above another level the character may be clearly more powerful compared to a LA+0 race.The problem I have is with the very concept of races like the Goliath.  One of the main purposes of a class based system is to prevent the sort of hyperspecialization that tends to dominate point buy games.  The goal of a class or a race within a class based system  is typically to force on to the player an array of 'useless' benefits that add breadth and balance to the character at the expense of the height of raw power in a single area.  So for example, you'll typically see some noob taking a LA+X race and saying, "If I drop [a list of non-synergistic abilities] would that make the race LA+X-1?"  And of course it wouldn't.  The abilities are typically minor precisely because they don't synergize with each other.  They are just somewhat helpful in a variaty of other lesser and unrelated situations.   Likewise, you'll see noobs propose some sort of base class which takes all the benefits of some strong class, drops all the minor and sundry benefits of that class, and then replaces them with some very strong ability from another class or a direct enhancement of their primary schtick.  So for example, a noob might ask, "Here is my class, it's just like a wizard only it has no BAB progression, no weapon proficiencies, and no bonus feats.  In exchange it gets an animal companion and wildshape like a druid.  Is that balanced?"In a point buy system, the answer might be a reluctant 'yes' just because the math adds up.  But in a class based system there is no reason to allow such hyperspecialized classes in the first place because they undermine the entire system.So when someone shows me a race like Goliath, where you get loaded up with awesome melee bling, I'm immediately skeptical.  One way to see exactly why is to look at the one aspect of D&D that is often point buy: attribute scores.  Under point buy system, buying up an attribute from 17 to 18 is much more expensive than it is to buy it up from 8 to 9.  Why is that?  The answer is of course because you get so much more advantage out of being specialized in the thing you are supposed to be good at, that it often completely outweighs being rather bad at things you'll rarely do.  Examine with that in mind the Goliath's -2 penalty to Dex.  You might suppose that this makes for some sort of handicap to the Goliath PC, but you'd be wrong.  To see why, consider the case of the human PC twink with 18 STR and 18 CON.  To gain these large bonuses, he must live with an 8 in every other attribute, and depending on the DM he might well be happy to do so.Now, an Optimizer builds his character with an 18 STR and an 18 CON using a goliath.  Having done so, he still has 16 points to spend on abilities!  He can therefore start not only with a 12 in INT, CHR, and WIS, but with a 10 in DEX - meaning that despite his handicap of a -2 DEX he actually is more dextrous than the human melee brute.  In effect, he's traded the human feat and extra skill for a +4 to INT, +4 to CHR, +4 to Wis, and +2 to DEX.   He's more skillful than the human as well as more dexterous, and this before we add in all of sundry minor abilities of the race many of which are also synergistic with the +4 bonus to Strength.  Or he might dump CHR as useless, and do +4 to DEX, +4 to Int and +6 to WIS relative to the human character with the same build.  And of course the true optimizer might well come up with an even more effective set of attributes melee focused character than the one I suggested, I was just showing how large the potential benefit of that unbalanced stat array could be.Yes, within the gross adjustment of the rules it might be a long time before the Goliath character truly realized the maximum benifit of his racial template, but I've little doubt he'd get there.  On the basis of my experience with point buy systems, it's almost always better to pay the steep rates to be exceptionally good at one thing, than it is to spread around your points.  Goliath and the like are examples of using the class system to do that very thing.So, within the limited options of the rules, I'd prefer +2 LA to both the Goliath and the here suggested race.  But honestly, I'd not allow either because mechanically they are class enhancement packages and not races.</blockquote>

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