What is "better", a Celestial or Half-Celestial?

[Celebrim]

Greybar: The reason it is the default method in savage species is it assumes that for the most part, abilities do not become _more_ important with increasing level and quite the contrary actually become less important - for instance the +1 natural armor bonus.

This is all well and good for most monsters, but the problem I have with both the Half-Fiend and Half-Celestial templates is the _full_ energy immunities (not merely resistance) actually become more powerful at higher levels than low ones, and the spell like abilities follow a progression that causes them to increasingly contribute to the power of the character with time (like any other spell progression). I don't think you can just therefore write off such abilities the way you might scent, natural armor, natural attacks, or even fly as not being a particular contribution at high levels. Rather, the situation is more like that mentioned for SR dependent on character level in that power will tend to remain useful (and arguably more useful) with increasing level and thus cannot be discounted.

Elder-Basilisk: Maybe I am overstating my case, but the reason that I think it is important to look at the template in the worst case is in practice _I think that is the only time it is going to be taken_. I think most of the time a player is going to want to play a half-celestial, he is going to be thinking of taking Fighter or Paladin and he is principally going to be considering the template if he doesn't have to play it from first level. I mean, if you are starting at 1st level clear half-celestial is right out of the picture whether it is +3 ECL or +5.

 

[Fedifensor]

Half-Celestial Survivability

Elder-Basilisk: Maybe I am overstating my case, but the reason that I think it is important to look at the template in the worst case is in practice _I think that is the only time it is going to be taken_. I think most of the time a player is going to want to play a half-celestial, he is going to be thinking of taking Fighter or Paladin and he is principally going to be considering the template if he doesn't have to play it from first level. I mean, if you are starting at 1st level clear half-celestial is right out of the picture whether it is +3 ECL or +5.

The home campaign I'm running started at 5th level, allowing people to take characters with templates. Surprisingly, most of the players chose humans. One chose a centaur (without character levels since it had a +5 ECL listed in the FR book), and I made an NPC half-celestial paladin for the group (at the time, it was listed as +3 ECL).

In the game, the 2nd level half-celestial paladin was horribly overshadowed by the other characters at the beginning. He went to negative hit points more than all the other characters in the group combined. Currently, as a 5th level character in a group of 8th level characters, the paladin is only beginning to be a survivable character. As a main fighter, the one attack per round makes him only useful as a barrier to protect the spellcasters. The centaur, meanwhile, is an absolute terror on the battlefield. With Str and Dex both over 20, and 2 attacks per round, he decimates opponents both in HTH and ranged combat.

Since the ECL is moving to +4, the half-celestial character won't get a 2nd attack until the group hits 10th level (one level away from the human fighters getting a *3rd* attack). The centaur character is also having the ECL increased, but that's still only +2 over his HD total. The large stat bonuses and increased movement rate balance this out nicely.

Yes, the immunities are very nice. But basing level adjustments entirely on immunities to special attacks is a mistake. You could make a creature immune to every special attack in the game, but if they're a +9 ECL in a 10th level game, they can drop from a single swing from an orc greataxe. This is the problem with the template format - it doesn't scale with character level. If you made a half-celestial template +1 ECL per 5 character levels (or fraction thereof), it would be much more playable.