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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 3766507" data-attributes="member: 43283">*nod*No, I understand you. I think I just expressed myself poorly.I'm kinda curious to try statting out an Everstone monster explicitly, just to get a feel for how they did it. If they really did build it exactly like a character (base of 40 starting points, +5 per level) then it suggests some interesting possibilities, kinda along the lines of Palladium Fantasy with something like a third of the critters potentially being playable (subject to GM discretion).The Monstrous Manual.... I dunno about this thing. While I'm glad they included the standard CR, as well as the CR based on points spent (Monster instead of Character), I'm not quite sure about the accuracy of the point-based method overall.As for the discrepancy between BESMd20 and D&D character...I'm not entirely sure about how much discrepancy there is. Given that Everstone then diverges, I want to at least poke at it a bit before I start pushing the combats.Everstone hands out the HD based on race, classes have the BaB progression of a Wizard unless they explicitly purchase it higher, classes only get 5 CP per level instead of BESMd20's default of 10, and the iconic classes (the Magi) all have innate magic.The feeling I get off of Everstone is that it was made with the desire to start the game rockin', and then try and balance the power ramping up and having groovy stuff. Cutting the CP awarded in half looks like a pretty deliberate attempt to slow things down and smooth the level of play. Also the fact that the classes are explicitly given Attributes seems like an attempt to guide the overall game progression as well as making it more like the D&D sort of game that people are most likely to be familiar with.My purpose in posting the CR for the player races above is two-fold.The first is for anyone reading over the Everstone book that says, "Hey wait a minute!!! It looks like the Golems are seriously better than Everstonians. Shouldn't there be some sort of an LA or some way to balance them out? What's to stop the entire group from playing Golems, especially since it looks like they're allowed to become Magi ?!?!?"Yeah, the races are a bit scattered around in terms of their potential combat/conflict effectiveness (which is really what the complaint boils down to). The Everstonians are slightly better than the default assumption for humans in D&D (which are CR .3) and the Fey (without the additional Racial Attributes they can buy) are doing a bit better than the Dwarf in D&D, which I've seen called "strong" for an LA+0 race. Warforge are often felt to really be an LA+1 race, and you can clearly see that the Golem is a powerhouse.The other purpose relates to the first one, and that's combat and XP.The whole point to trying to "balance" races through things like XP penalties, Level Adjustment and so forth is so that nobody feels particularly cheated in play. In terms of combat, it sucks when one character is constantly outshone by some other one that's a funky race with cool powers.The simple approach to things is to simply assume that a class level is worth 1 CR and not worry about it. Add on the additional CR from the races involved, and now you've got a base idea for how strong the party "really" is. If you want to "look under the hood" as it were, you can do a similar thing for the classes, and get an even closer guesstimation.In handing out XP, I really want to try out the idea of handing out XP based on how much of a challenge the encounter _really_ was for the group, instead of the usual "X creature is worth Y experience because of the abilities it has". If it doesn't work, then I'll just go with some other approach.</blockquote>

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