Upper_Krust said:
But the flipside to that coin is they get the size, strength and base damage for free then.
Who the hell wants to be medium size when you can be titanic size 'for free'.
Yes- and that's okay. Why
should people be limited to making characters of a base Medium size if they're actually
starting at the level of godhood? If you build a character from lower levels, then as you yourself noted it isn't a problem. It only becomes a problem if the character gets created whole-cloth at the Immortal level. But at that point, you need to answer the question- why limit the players? They aren't playing the game at that level because they want to be the usual limited mortals who get lucky and find a way to thwart the BBEG, after all. They're playing
GODS. Breaking limits is what they're about.
Upper_Krust said:
I have divinity constructed so that your ECL is equal to your (Outsider) HD + Divinity Template. Its something I find works very well.
Which is fine, but it doesn't mean that other means can't be used or that another way might not work even better. Let's just take one example off the top of my head: what if you make one of the Elemental Rulers (i.e., Grumbar, Akadi, Kossuth, or Istishia)? They're Greater Gods, but they're also very clearly Elementals rather than Outsiders. That right there throws a monkeywrench into the neat-and-tidy Outsider + Divinity Template calculation- Elemental ECL is different from Outsider ECL. Should we force people to take a different set of divine abilities just because these Elemental deities aren't balanced with the Outsiders?
Upper_Krust said:
They are spirits, not natural creatures.
You and I seem to have different definitions of "natural" in this case- to me, anything which exists is by definition natural, since it's a part of the nature of reality. Whether it happens to be part of the subset of reality that makes up the Material Plane is irrelevant to the definition of the word- the laws of the Elemental Planes may be radically different than those of the Material Plane, to go back to the example above, but they
are natural laws nonetheless.
The only things I would consider to be
unnatural in this context are Far Realm denizens and their activities, since my campaign postulates that the Far Realm is "that which is beyond reality."
Upper_Krust said:
I don't mind people using differnt rules for equipment and so forth, but I would like my rules for equipping immortals to be as simple as possible.
By keeping the base 'neat and tidy' it then makes things simpler to convert when you want to break from the norm.
I believe you're coming up against a wall here. Simplicity is not always desirable- in any design there comes a point when one must complexify or lose critical details that held the whole together. Form and function are sometimes at cross-purposes; if you force the form to be beautiful then it loses the function that made one start putting it together in the first place, or on the converse side if you concentrate exclusively on utility then it ends up looking bland or ugly.
IMO, if you try to take size out as a separate factor now, you're basically trying to rewrite the rules for making monsters at all- which will radically reduce the utility of your system to the average gamer- just because you wanted to keep a certain subset of calculations looking neat and tidy. It just isn't worth it.
And yes, this isn't about Immortals exclusively, this is about monsters in general- because most of the beings affected by this problem are, in fact, meant to be "monsters" that the PCs will face and (presumably, hopefully for them) defeat.
