Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pax" data-source="post: 1671128" data-attributes="member: 6875">Because the rules (not just the ones in UA) say so, is why.  Level adjustment is added to your "actual level" to get your "effective level".  And Savage Species aside, racial hit dice are not levels per se (although they count towards, again, effective character level in terms of XP needed to advance).  If you make a 5th level character (5 HD) who is a Half-Dragon (Level Adjustment +3), that is the same as an 8th level character (8HD).  That's the basic concept of Level Adjustment, and nothing in UA's three-and-a-half-page treatment of Gestalt rules suggest that that concept is at all changed.  So it doesn't matter if the two characters are Gestalt, or Standard.  The half-dragonmay be a Gestalt Fighter(5)-Sorceror(5), or she might be a single-class Barbarian(5) ... it doesn't matter.  His Effective Character Level is still "hit dice plus level adjustment" - in this case 5 HD, plus a level adjustment of 3, to toal 8....  The monster HD are potentially arguable - though as I said, racial hit dice are racial hit dice, and not class levels; gestalt characters combine the features of two classes per level.  Since a racial hit die is not a "class", implicitly, it's not eligible for a Gestalt setup that combines two "classes".  The thing to keep in mindis, unless yoru campaignis specificallyusing Savage Species rules, there is no such thing as "a monster class".  There are base classes, prestige classes, and racial hit dice.  Gestalting allows you to combine any two classes (no more than oneof which may be a prestige class), but doesn't specify that Racial Hit Dice can be combined with anything in such a manner.  Now, personally ... I don't have a problem gestalting racial HT with a single other class, I simply don't think that the rules intended to allow for such.  Though it never got started properly, in the one Gestalt-rules arena I tried to get going, I did allow racial hit dice to be treated like levels in a class for gestalt purposes.  However, I would absolutely never allow someone to "gestalt their level adjustment" - LA is all about hit dice; no 8th-level character should have a +3 LA and still have 8 hit dice, period - not even if he's "only" a sorceror(8)-Fighter(5).  That's just not how Level Adjustment works - nor should it be.</blockquote>

Verification