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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rendarkin" data-source="post: 266079" data-attributes="member: 5817">My problem with templatesLet me ramble briefly (I'm not sure where I'm going, so partially this is just me thinking rather than comingin with an agenda) on my concern/problem/thoughts with templates:Unlike the previous editions 3e made a stab at gauging characters powers.  First you have level, then the DMG gives you an average GP/level of treasure.  These let you, at a glance, see if a random party is equivalent to another.  In the simple case a 5th level average party is equal to any other average 5th level party.Then it starts to get fuzzy.  How about a party on the low-end of average treasure against a party on the high-end?  What about a party full of 25 point buys against a 32 point buy party or against a party that rolled 4d6 but rolled like demons?  Suddenly you have factors that are still within the guidelines but unaddressed in the rules.  Perhaps a 6th level party would lose against a 7th level party with 10 more points of stats, but what the ECL in this case?Then it real gets weird.  Templates.  Monster races.  They made ECL to try to gauge this and it's a good attempt.  For monster races (where you have a base monster HD), it makes sense because you just tack on the character class right after and there's no gap in the acquisition of levels.  The whole problem with this, for me, is in the weird case of an established character getting a template.  It doesn't seem right that a 10th level wizard lich would have suddenly have a gap to 11th level or that a 17th level cleric lich would have a similar gap to 18th level.  It should be difficult, very difficult, to become a lich.  It should take work and be expensive as hell (they got the GP right but the xp and level reqs wayyy too low in 3e for my campaign, but I can always Rule 0 that...).  but once you become a lich you shouldn't suddenly hit a 25,000 xp hole that you have to climb out of.But it's not just templates.  As I've said a couple of times lately artifacts (minor or major) can be acquired in a campaign and they have no market value.  They have a tremendous impact on the character, but can't be calculated expressly because they have no value by design.  What's the ECL of a 10th level fighter with a Hammer of Thunderbolts?  Surely he's tougher than any other average 10th level fighter, right?  But how much tougher?It gets harder for spellcasters who are capable of casting permanent spells and making magic items.  They actually convert their hard-earned xps into permanent magic.  So while, in effect, they get an ECL (they are literally spending their xps that WOULD have put them up levels), they end up breaking the treasure curve and have more magic items and powers than their level would allow.  If my 15th level wizard is happy to keep bleeding off his xps and make items, he can have as many items as he wants (assuming he doesn't get killed).  The DMG saying a 15th level character has, on average, 200,000 gp means nothing if I make item after item, staying at 15th level.  What's the effective level of a 17th level wizard who saved up the 25,000 XP to cast 5 wishes (via back-to-back scrolls) to get a +5 inherent bonus to Int?My point is this: The character level and average gp values are a nice starting point for a system to evaluate the power of a character.  We never even HAD a system before; even raw levels didn't correlate (few would argue in 2e that a 10th level thief equalled a 10th level fighter, for example).  But there are so many missing factors that it only helps to begin to make an approximation in any but the dullest of campaigns (meaning campaigns which don't have anything weird or unusual in them to raise these various issues).  People can (and have) come up with solutions to one or some of these issues (make a PrC that gives you a template at the end, for example), but most of the individual soluations haven't struck me as "right" yet -OR- (the big issue) they don't all fit together to make a coherent, integrated SYSTEM of character power evaluation.I'm not knocking anyone's solutions and, sadly, I don't HAVE a character power-gauging system designed to submit.  Obviously I don't advocate just giving up since the existing rules are incomplete, either.So I'm fervently looking under stones and poking in on thought-provoking groups to try to get the info to find (or make) such a system.  There's a lot of clever people out there and an elegant solution's gotta be reachable.It just might take a while longer <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Thanks for letting me ramble.  Sorry for any grief I caused.</blockquote>

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