Would you play a Class with an XP adjustment?

[Stormborn]

3rd edition has had Level Adjusted races since the begining, based on the idea that you could play a more powerful race in exchange for progressing as a character more slowly.

However, would you play a Class that was slightly more powerful than other classes if it meant you leveled up less frequently than your peers? Basically a class where you had an XP penalty of say 10% or 25% or even 50%.


The idea behind this: In most Sword and Sorcery/High Fantasy novels magic users are frequently seen as much more powerful than their fellows. Ars Magica grants this by having all players play a mage and others at the same time. But what if you didn't want to play a magic user? Could you have an Ars Magica style (AM is just an example, don't get caught up on that) mage class in a d20 game, obviously more powerful than the other classes, if you penalized the class in some way such as XP? Thus say a 4th level Swordsman would be balanced against a 2nd level Mage, or the like.

 

[Sigdel]

Wouldn't that be like in 2ed with every one having different XP charts? And besides, wouldn't the system even it's self out on its own? Even with the XP penalty?

 

[sword-dancer]

Why not?

 

[Bastoche]

Because it depends what sort of campaign you want to play. Just getting rid of all magic items and changing nothing else will automatically make all spellcasters much more powerful than their counterparts.

If one player carves playing warrior and like to be effective, denying him that right in face of spellcaster for campaign inner-logic consideration is a recipe for out-game troubles.

 

[Mercule]

No. Standardizing the XP table was one of the really good things that 3E did.

 

[Zappo]

Bad idea IMO. Very bad. Extremely bad.

• It breaks the CR system, making it useless; throwing a CR 6 creature at a super-powered-class 6th level character is no longer a challenge.
• It breaks the XP system as well. Say you have a party with three 7th lev characters and one 5th lev super-powered-class character who is on par with them despite being 5th. The SPC character gets substantially more XP than the other three, for no reason.
• It breaks multiclassing.
• It produces all the problems of high-LA monstrous characters, chief among them the lack of hit dice.
• Unlike high-LA monstrous characters, whose problems tend to diminish with time, such a rule would create characters whose problems tend to increase with time since their "LA" keeps growing. At 2nd, they are 1st and have one less HD than the others; at 20th, they are 15th and have FIVE less HDs.

And, besides those issues, the idea is entirely pointless IMO. D&D already has several perfectly good ways to represent characters that are more powerful than others. They are called "being higher level", "being a LA race", and "having a template". There is no 'unusually powerful character' concept that cannot be represented within existing rules.

 

[Arnwyn]

Would you play a Class with an XP adjustment?

In theory, yes I would play such a class. I did so in 2e with no problems, and would do so in 3e.

 

[painandgreed]

In general, no. I'd say just redesign the class to fit the current level chart.

In something strange like a really low magic game where wizards would get an X penalty, maybe. Depends on the DM and how they presented it. Even then, just redsigning the wizard class or making "wizard" be a LA+1 race might be better.

 

[jgsugden]

Yes ... it isn't that big a deal, due to lower level PCs gaining more experience. If you're ok with being 1 or 2 levels behind the rest of the party, the experience penalty washes out and you find a nice balance where you stay a consistant number of levels below the rest of the PCs ...

 

[lukelightning]

Sean Reynolds has an excellent explanation of why XP penalties don't work.