Why do you use LA in your campaign?

[Andre]

I'm not particularly fond of the way that Level Adjustment works. It feels inelegant, and produces often sub-optimal results.

I think possibly the worst offender is the way that Level Adjustment invariably penalizes PCs via reduced Hit Dice. Each Level Adjustment means a lost Hit Die, and the game wasn't really built on the assumption that less Hit Dice would balance out against other capabilities. So you end up with real paper tigers that have some really buff abilities and stats but go down very quickly. That's great for a monster encounter, but translates piss-poorly to a playable character.

The second biggest problem is perma-opportunity cost of things like caster levels. Is playing a druid lizardfolk really at all attractive when you're facing +1 Level Adjustment and 2 HD worth of humanoid levels you can never get back? For a bunch of physical stat boosts that become meaningless the moment you get access to wild shape? The favored class pick is almost a joke.

While you can ameliorate that somewhat with the optional mechancs for buying down level adjustment, there's simply no way to trade in monster levels, and if the LA is +3 or greater, it's going to take you into epic levels to buy off the LA anyway.

And of course, there's no reverse Level Adjustement. So playing an obviously sub-optimal creature like a kobold or goblin gets you no sort of compensation to bring you back up to ECL 1.

I'm just thinking out loud, but I wonder if one approach is to create a "class" for LA that includes minimal hit dice, skill points, and feats. Each +LA would be a level in the "class", which would eliminate a lot of the problem with paper tigers.

Another idea is two classes, one built for spellcasters (that grants +1 level of spellcasting ability) and one for non-spellcasters. Obviously the former would get less than the latter, but otherwise they'd work the same.

Seems easier than designing racial levels for +LA creatures, though also less flexible.

This may not address the other problem of LA - that the racial benefits aren't worth the same at all levels. A stat bonus is more useful at low levels than high, whereas SR that scales with level can be useful throughout a character's career. Not sure how to address that one, other than to have different LA's for different levels (low, medium, high, epic). Which may just make a bad situation worse...

All just food for thought.

 

[Piratecat]

Notjer, the problem comes when one player wants to play a human fighter and the other one wants to play a drow vampire. You can really ignore LA if all the PCs are of equivalent power -- but if they aren't, it's not really fair to the other party members to pick a race that is clearly superior to their PCs. LA is just an attempt to equalize that.

 

[Dragonbait]

I use LA to piss off the players that try to play the half-bronze-dragon-halfling barbarian with the Celestial template and a Titan Bloodline

 

[Henry]

If level adjustment is not an issue, then I'm playing a Titan Barbarian at First level. Gongrats on playing that little halfling rogue.

Level Adjustment values may be slightly off in some cases, but I've always personally been happier making it more advantageous to playing a "demi-human" or human race than something very far removed from human experience, just because I'd rather see the game be still humanocentric. We're not slighting actual ethnicities, we're making a game that's very fantastic at least loosely grounded in human experience. I'll admit I'm specist towards humanity.

 

[Wolfwood2]

My DM dislike the idea of LA and so do I. Some races are just better than other. I don't think a vampire PC or a drow should be punished with LA just because of the fact that they're more superior than other races.

It's important to realize that LA is a metagame tool that only applies to PCs.

An NPC vampire fighter has exactly the same ability to improve himself and get better at fighting as he would if he were human, with the advantages of a vampire on top of that. Drow wizards are not two levels behind regular elf wizards of the same training, experience, and talent.

So in the context of the game world, an Ogre Magi wizard can learn new spells as fast as a human wizard. He does not have a harder time mastering magic in context of the game world because of his giant hitdice and level adjustment.

 

[QuaziquestGM]

I feel compelled to point out that Red Hair is a feat. Ravenloft Setting.

 

[Victim]

LA prevents monster races from being free power.

The problem is that the costs are somewhat wonky. In many cases, creatures will have a large level adjustment for their stats and special abilities added to their HD. Other monsters (generally weaker ones) will have several stats and advantages (large size, for instance), a tiny level adjustment, and then rely on the monstrous HD to even things out. Some LA races are bargins, and others really suck. Granted, that's true of spells, feats, PrCs, etc. But LA races seem to tend toward more extremes.

Especially since the value of an LA race varies wildly with levels. A half dragon at level 1 (ecl 4) is hard hitting, but fragile despite his natural armor since he only has 1 HD. But at higher levels, the extra Con and natural armor easily make up for a few missing HD (except for pure HD effects like Blasphemy), and the character retains a significant offensive advantage.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I feel compelled to point out that Red Hair is a feat. Ravenloft Setting.

it also grants bonus spells. Its not a fluff only feat.

 

[Bacris]

We've used the LA buyoff method in our campaigns - the +1 LA races by and large tend to be not really worth that extra level unless it's an optimized build - and most of my gaming groups are not optimizers, so it hasn't really been an issue.

I think the only time we actually enforced it was when a player was playing as a medusa (think that was the race...), but that was a limited duration campaign, and a hound archon, but we used racial levels for that.

LA is a good IDEA, but poorly implemented, as it can really penalize players for concepts when the mechanical benefits just aren't worth it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I feel compelled to point out that Red Hair is a feat. Ravenloft Setting.

You win the thread.