Ogres As Characters

[jgsugden]

Absolutely. He meant them to be considered Giants for all purposes.

I agree. Of course, I also think the guy that designed the half-ogre has little or no understanding of balance issues, so I tendnot to care what he intended.

From experience, I can say that half-ogres can ruin a game. They are too strong and possess too much of an advantage due to reach for them to avoid being unbalanced. Some abilities should *not* be in the hands of PCs (outside of temporary magical effects). *Exceptional* strength and innate reach are both in this category. The game was balanced with certain constraints in mind (ie; PCs will have attack bonuses roughly around the X range at Y level and, PCs will deal about Z damage per melee attack at Y level, PCs will have to use strategy to combat foes with reach, etc ...). If you break those boundaries, the balance issues go out the window and the game end up with some things being far too easy. Sure, polymorph can grant these advantages int he short term, but that is a short term strategic application of a spell, not a continual ability that is involved in every fight.

There are obviously enough issues present that DMs/players should be careful before incorporating half-ogres as a class. I *strongly* urge DMs to make a few mock characters and run them through mock situations (as if they were PCs) to see if they cause problems. If that proves too cumbersome, at least warn your player that his PC may be yanked out from under him if it proves to be unbalancing to the game.

 

[SeRiAlExPeRiMeNtS]

At +1 ecl the half ogre is too much... I let one of my players to do one ate +1 ecl, but with 2 giant (they are giants aren´t they?) hit dice and I still think that they are too powerfull...