Infiniti2000 said:
According to Monte Cook, the author of the DMG, it'll be a drop of one CR.
Mmmm. CR is a wonky thing. I wouldn't really say a magic equipment-less 14th-level fighter is that much more of a challenge than something like a hill giant or a stone giant. He'd better have a pretty well-built feat selection.
You make some good points. It seems obvious that the the table is probably not the best choice. I'm looking for an alternate to pure HD because it's definitely not on a 1-to-1 ratio with class levels. I was thinking that the LA assumed the important part of the base CR for a particular monster, but clearly not.
CR and LA are not tied together at all. A monster's CR reflects on how much the designer thinks it'll challenge a given and well-balanced party of roughly four characters. LA is supposed to be more of a guesstimation of how powerful the monster is by its level, compared to a character class -- and the comparison is made by an optimal monster build against the class it's got the greatest synergy with. In most cases, this'll be the non-spellcasting classes, as there are very few monsters, if any, with any significant LA that make good primary spellcasters.
What you have to consider is what the HD grants each character or monster. Monster levels vary significantly in quality here.
Take outsider levels as one example: d8 HD, full base attack, all good saves, 8 skill points. Compare that to a rogue or a fighter. Compared to a rogue, you get slightly more hit points, better saves, and a better attack bonus. That's got a value you can easily compare to the value of the rogue's class abilities. Or, compared to a fighter, you get slightly less hit points, but better saves and far more skill points. Again, it's a trade I think isn't necessarily too unfavorable. The most important thing either type of character would lose is a definite party role, as he wouldn't have something definite _to do_ in a fight.
Now, outsider and dragon levels are the best monster levels you can take. Other monster levels are worse -- but never so bad that two of them isn't equal to or better than a typical non-spellcaster class level, when seen from a PC perspective. Undead only gain a wizard-like base attack progression (1 per 2 levels) -- but if they get to advance at a rate of 2 levels for 1, that's equal to a fighter, with better saves, and 2d12 hit points at each level, rather than 1d10+Con.
Using the hill giant example, we can see he has 12 HD, a LA of +4, and CR of 7. His ECL would be 16. I can't for the life of me agree with that number, it's just plain ridiculous. My initial calculation would have been, as you note, 12/4+4=7, the same as the CR. Well, at least he would (theoretically) have the same impact in a fight. For playing, though, he's clearly stronger, so that can't be right.
Take the ECL 16 hill giant and compare to a 16th-level human melee fighter. 12 giant HD yields a base attack bonus of +9. That's about 7 points behind what the human fighter's will be. Incidentally, the hill giant gains a +14 bonus to his Strength score, which gives him a +7 bonus to all melee attacks, above and beyond what the human gets. Of course, he also has a size penalty of -1, but his size also grants him reach and size bonuses to things like grapple or trip checks. He'll also get a +7 bonus on all melee damage rolls above what the human has. Then he'll also have a +8 Constitution bonus which in the long term will be more than making up for his deficit in terms of hit points, and a +9 natural armor bonus, which, while it must be weighed against a -1 size penalty and a -1 relative Dex penalty, still ensures him a high AC against regular attacks (though a sucky touch attack AC, but those will probably hit either character anyway). Weigh all that against the human fighter's advantages, like a higher Int and Cha, more and better feats, and an extra iterative attack or two (but these aren't necessarily _that_ important, depending on how good the odds for hitting with the first attacks are), and I'd say the giant doesn't look that shabby.
The thing to remember about CRs here, again, is that they assume a balanced party. Against a party that consists of only fighter-types, giants are _murder_, and worth a significantly higher CR than if your group includes someone with a few decent Will save effects. Pin a 7th-level fighter in melee against a hill giant, and he'll lose. Make him a few levels higher, and he'll still get smashed.
On the other hand, on the off chance that you wanted to make the world's greatest hill giant wizard, then the LA is clearly a bit high. At least after you've added a few wizard levels.
One idea would be to go through all of the monster and devise new LA figures to use with my method. That's too much work. The existing LA has to be useful in some way, given the HD and CR of the creature. Can anyone help me with a formula or some advice that would help me create one? Maybe CR+LA? For the hill giant that would be ECL 11. For the young brass dragon, it would be 11.
I don't care how complicated the formula is, either.
The best 'formula' is probably making trial builds and looking at what the monster levels actually grant you. A good, simple starting point is always to determine whether the monster would have a higher attack bonus (figuring base attack, ability, and maybe size modifiers) than a fighter of the same level. If it does, it's got a fair chance of outshining a fighter of the same level, depending on what its other abilities are. A glass jaw (poor saves of some kind, low hit points for its ECL, some other weakness) will tend to yield a build where you might want to consider lowering the LA very slightly.
Take the hill giant again. At ECL 11, he'll have a much better melee attack bonus than the fighter (by +4; -2 BAB, +7 Str, -1 size). He'll probably have a superior AC, given some form of armor or protection that's more in line with his ECL than what a typical giant gets, courtesy of his natural armor bonus. Each of his attacks will deal far more damage. He'll also have roughly equal or better saves, and more hit points than the fighter. Compared to the fighter, he'll lose out on feats by a big stretch, but he'll have a couple of other advantages to help that out, along with his generally superior stats.
Similar considerations apply to the ECL 11 brass dragon -- it's still got a slightly better melee attack bonus than the fighter, but more importantly, it's got a lot of other perks that makes it a more well-rounded character. Good saves across the board, more skill points, the ability to fly at will granting it a great deal of mobility, and so forth. Within the framework of a party, that's probably worth a little less than being a better specialist, but the value difference isn't worse than that it's worth costing a few additional levels.
