How would you handle a half-celestial PC in your campaign?

[mmu1]

I'm actually playing one right now (a fighter) in a game that's intentionally fairly high-powered, and at 16th level (or ECL 16) it's not remotely game-breaking.

He dishes out a lot of damage and has excellent SR and saves, but he still doesn't come anywhere near in power to single-class casters... If you can handle those at high levels, you can handle a half-celestial. As a matter of fact, I'm now convinced that playing some sort of ECL+ race is the only way to go when playing a fighter at high to epic levels, unless you enjoy being a sponge for abuse and don't mind dying frequently to ensure the casters get their spells off unmolested.

 

[Schmoe]

One of my players just recently had his character die, and so he decided to bring in a half-fiend. Although I was very hesitant about it, it fits in very well with the story, and so I decided to allow it.

Generally speaking, I don't think I would allow high (>2) ECL characters until a relatively advanced point in a campaign. When a 1st level half-fiend is adventuring with a 5th level party, it just presents too many oddities. The discrepancy in HP will be quite large, and yet the ECL character will have abilities that may very well trivialize an encounter that would otherwise be challenging and interesting to a party of that level.

There's a lot to think about with an ECL character, and since I'm drunk right now and my head hurts from a full time job and 20+ hours of programming for my overdue school assignment, I think I'll just leave it at that. Confusion bad. Simplicity good.