A Slippery Slope: Level Adjustments Under The Microscope
There are times when an Ask-The-GM’s question doesn’t inspire one of us, or is too attached to the mechanics of one specific game system, or doesn’t have enough depth to justify a full blog post, or has already been answered by one of our articles, or for some other reason simply doesn’t suit the approach that we’ve developed for responding to enquiries put to us. When that happens, we usually simply drop an email to the person who asked the question to offer a quick answer. Sometimes, by broadening the question or generalising the specific situation described in the enquiry, we can make our replies more generally useful. And sometimes, one of us will simply grab the ball and run with it.
Recently, Johnn and I were asked,
How do you go about leveling up a character that has a level adjustment of +1, when it comes to feats? Meaning, if a character his level 2 but has an ECL of 3, does he get his level 3 feat or does he have to wait till his levels equal 3?
This is obviously in relation to a d20 system of some kind, probably D&D 3.x. It’s a very specific question about a specific game system mechanic, which is something that we try to avoid in ATGM questions. Johnn and I both agreed that it fell outside the scope of ATGMs, but I felt that there was enough to be said on the broader subject that it would make a suitable blog post. So, with Johnn politely egging me on from behind the scenes (because he wants to hear what I have to say on the subject), let’s dig in.
This question relates to three different areas of game mechanics. One is levelling up, the second is the usage of a level adjustment, and the last is relative power levels and level adjustments in general. I intend to spend most of this blog post talking about the last of these, but let’s tackle them in order:
On Levelling Up
The first question I’ve already examined, at least so far as Prestige Classes is concerned, giving the best answer that I’ve found to date in an article entitled Shadow Levels. So let’s exclude them from the subject, at least for the moment, and talk about standard class levels, and the general process of levelling up.
I’ve run a number of different D&D games over the years, and each one has had a different approach to this question.
- My first campaign was a fairly straightforward AD&D dungeon-bash. Characters levelled up immediatly they got enough xp. This made the addition of a level seem trivial. This procedure was also used in most of the games I had played in prior to my assumption of the GM’s “hat”.
- My second campaign was another straightforward AD&D dungeon-bash. Characters had to level up by returning to town. This proved inconvenient during play. The few campaigns I had played in that didn’t follow the instant-power-up approach had used this method.
- My third AD&D campaign was so short-lived that no-one got to level up.
- My fourth AD&D campaign started off as a dungeon-bash but quickly grew to embrace a larger realm. It attempted to compromise between the two standard approaches by defining critical points in each character classes’ progression, when the character gained significant new capabilities; at such times, the character had to be trained appropriately by someone who already had mastered such abilities (defined as having had them for at least ten character levels) in order to acquire them for themselves. In the meantime, they got all the upgrades of the new level except those for which they specifically needed to be trained (you can see the first glimmerings of the Shadow Levels concept emerging here). This meant that at regular intervals, the party would have to locate suitable individuals for training, but most of the time gaining a level did not interrupt the adventure in progress. This worked well in general, but some characters were affected with a disproportionately high frequency.
- My fifth D&D campaign was the first Fumanor campaign. It was designed as an AD&D campaign, then became 2nd Ed before the start of play, and ultimately became D&D 3.0 after a brief interlude as Rolemaster. With spells from D&D 3.5. (And if that sounds complicated, it was!) Levels were acquired using the instant-power-up approach to enable the campaign plotline to proceed without interruption, but this was a source of constant aggravation to me because I later realised that the halt to acquisition of levels when a character maxes out his experience is supposed to be a game-levelling feature within the system*.
- My sixth D&D campaign took the system I had used in the fourth campaign and updated it to accommodate D&D 3.0 and 3.5. This system worked reasonably well.
- My seventh and eighth D&D campaigns are sequels to the first Fumanor campaign, and I’ve written about them many times before here at Campaign Mastery. They inherited the instant-power-up of the preceeding campaign, but with a modified system of dispensing XP, which I discussed in A Different Experience. The result has been a more reasonable rate of progression in levels, which has avoided the problems of the first campaign.
- My ninth campaign also uses the instant-power-up model coupled with the shadow levels idea and the amended XP procedure. Before the modified method of xp award calculations was introduced, it was suffering from the same problems as the first Fumanor campaign, but since this tweak was brought in, things have proceeded in a far more satisfactory and moderate manner.
- My next campaign is expected to to be primarily interdimensional in scope and will be an Epic-levels campaign. It will also be a sequel to the current Fumanor campaigns. For all of these reasons, it will follow the same methodology as seven and eight.
- The 11th campaign is still nothing more than a distant one-day-maybe. I have only vague notions of what might be in it. If it ever happens, it will take the model used for my sixth campaign and update it to incorporate the shadow levels and modified xp tables – in other words, all of the above tricks will be brought together to form what is hopefully my definitive approach to the problem.
*: A game-levelling feature is a rule or rules that are designed to keep character power levels from exploding too quickly. In this case, either you interrupt the scenario for characters to train, or they forego experience once they max out until they can break away from the scenario to do so. The problem is that players get unhappy if they can’t earn xp any more, and even more unhappy if they can’t get what they have ‘earned’ for umpteen weeks play, ie the Level. So you either push verisimilitude to the breaking point, or you give in and go for the computer-game-style “instant level gain”.
The Mechanics Of Level Adjustments
This is where I actually address the question that prompted this article in the first place – so heads up, Enquiring GM!
Level Adjustments are defined very poorly in the DMG (page 173). Instead, it dives straight into how to use them, and even then, it isn’t terribly clear. Hence, the question arises in the first place! Wizards Of The Coast do a little better (but only a little better) in their . The easiest way to handle level adjustments without confusion is to treat the level adjustment plus the number of hit dice as levels in “monster”, ie treat the character as multiclassing without penalty. For example, A Bugbear (3HD) has a level adjustement of +1, so a 1st-level Bugbear Cleric has levels “Bugbear 3+1 / Cleric 1” and is a fifth-level character. Note that I indicate the level adjustment seperately after the “+” sign for clarity.
For his three hit dice, plus 1 level adjustment, the character gets everything listed in the monster manual entry under “Bugbear”, plus the ability to take class levels. The first character level that he takes – “Cleric 1” in my example – shifts all his numbers on table 3-2 of the PHB, “Experience and Level-dependant Benefits” from 4th to 5th level – meaning that he has a maximum of 8 ranks in his class skills, 4 ranks in his cross-class skills, gets no feats or ability increases, and needs another 5,000 XP to progress to Cleric level 2.
When the character does so, he will become a 6th level character, and will gain an additional feat.
Skill Points: The unanswered question
Note that the character HAS no class skills until he takes the character class level, all his skill purchases are cross-classed. For his first three character levels he gets no skill points – or, more properly, his skill points are pre-allocated to the skills given in the monster manual.
A more troublesome question is whether or not the character should be given a set of skill points for the level adjustment. The DMG ignores the question, and even the Rules Compendium, which is so good at clarifying various aspects of the rules, is silent on the issue. This can be debated either way without coming to a satisfactory answer, subtly changing the meaning of a level adjustment within a campaign. (I tried to define the difference for this post but ended up tied in linguistic knots and using up more discussion space than the question warrants).
I resolve this question by looking at it from a metagame perspective: Is it possible that a player would feel hard done by if they were not to recieve the skill points? Yes. In the long run, will one level’s worth of skill points make that big a difference? No. Decision made.
In effect, this principle states that before the character takes his first class level, he has “Bugbear 3+1 / Cleric 0”, and that the “extra” skill points can be used to give the character a start in appropriate class skills for a cleric. This makes so much sense that (to me at least) it fully justifies the decision made.
The meaning of level adjustments
Having clarified exactly how level adjustments can be made to work sensibly, we can start to look behind the curtain and get a glimpse of just what they are intended to symbolise.
CR vs. Level Adjustments
In theory, you could backtrack from any creature in the Monster Manual as though each hit dice was a class level, determining how many feats the creature has, how many “psuedo-class abilities” they should have, what skill points they should have, and so on.
But, in practice, some creatures have more abilities or more effective combinations of abilities than others, which is why CR is not the same as Hit Dice. And when you backtrack through, you find that you need some extra “psuedo-levels” to contain these additional capabilties. The CR is set according to game balance and has been tweaked according to play-testing experience.
So why can’t you use the difference between CR and HD to determine the level adjustment? Or simply use the CR directly for the monster levels? Because it doesn’t work, that’s why (I know – it surprised me, too – before working up this post, I had been doing exactly that and assuming it was the right answer).
As I explained in A Different Experience, each +1 CR theoretically increases a creature’s power level by a factor of 1.414, the square root of 2. A Bugbear is light on special abilities, so it only has a CR of 2 – they’re tough creatures, but not as tough as a typical 3HD creature. A Coatl, by comparison, has 9 HD and a CR of 10 – but has a level adjustment of +7.
The numbers can’t be easily reconciled – they vary independantly of each other because they are measuring different aspects of the monster construction. The Coatl is a great example to look at more closely; it isn’t that much tougher than a ‘standard’ 9 HD creature, as shown by the CR of 10, but the abilities that it has make it comparable to a 16th-level character – hence the +7 level adjustment. Except that if you probe a few other entries, you soon find that this method doesn’t work consistantly either.
The bottom line is this: I don’t know HOW the authors came up with their level adjustment values – they might have been plucked from thin air, as a “this sounds about right,” for all I know. Perhaps the technique is correct but not all abilities are created equal – I suspect this is the right answer, but just don’t know (which irritates the heck out of me).
The same can’t be said for CR by Fantasy Flight Games has a very detailed and cogent explanation of how to determine CR – and how to adjust it for additional abilities. Would that there was a similarly cogent analysis of how to determine a creature’s level adjustement somewhere!
So the key point is that the two are NOT the same thing. Not even close.
Working With Savage Species
Savage Species is a sourcebook from Wizards Of The Coast that at first glance is absolutely brilliant – and at second glance is totally redundant – and at third glance is abysmally confusing. If you look at the reviews at Amazon, you’ll find opinion similarly divided.
Here’s the basic premise: take a creature’s hit dice plus level adjustment, ie ECL, and divide everything about the creature – size, HD, abilities – up into proportional slices. So that if you looked up “Bugbear” in the book, you would find that a “4th level Bugbear” had everything that our 3+1 version using the core rulebooks have.
Then you extend those tables all the way up through the advancements shown in the Monster Manual for bigger, stronger creatures.
Sounds great, right? Except that the tables are all messed up. They didn’t stop there; they didn’t get the equity level right; and they inserted rules that require that you to advance all the way in a “monster class” before you can take a character level, and stuck absolutely no requirement for age onto things.
To make Savage Species the brilliant supplement that it should be, and a viable alternative to the method from the core rulebooks, you need to employ some house rules and a bit of research.
Start by relating the creature to a real-world creature. What you want is the growth and aging pattern of the creature. These can be radically different from one creature to another.
The next thing you need to do is decide on the typical lifespan of the D&D creature, and label the growth curve of the real-world creature appropriately. What this does is permit the determination of a required “age” (in game years) for the achievement of another level of monster “growth”.
Once you have that, you put in place a house rule that says that monster-characters must always take a character level except for the first level gained after crossing an age threshold, when they must take a monster level. Furthermore, you designate some of the growth levels as ‘optional’ so that you can have a variation in size for age. If you’re feeling generous, you might add additional rules permitting some monster levels to be brought forward or delayed, but that’s the general principle.
Typical Growth Charts
Here are eight typical growth charts. All of these have some foundation in the real world, but these were all drawn quickly using a vector graphics program, so don’t consider them gospel! These are a representative sample, not an exhaustive list – there are thousands of variations.
- shows a straightfoward linear growth.
- shows a species that grows quickly in its early years and then slows, having achieved 90% or so of its ultimate size.
- shows a species that grows very slowly for a long time before suddenly rocketing up in size.
- shows a more complex growth pattern in which an initial burst starts slow but gathers pace before the creature size stabalises for a period of time before resuming steady growth.
- shows a stepped growth pattern, where sudden spurts are seperated by regular periods of size stability.
- shows a slow growth followed by a spurt followed by more slow growth – this is not far off the typical human model.
- shows an early quick growth that slows before accellerating again.
- shows a steady, rapid growth, that abruptly slows to a different steady growth rate.
As stated above, there are many other patterns possible. The important thing is to get a reasonable graph and then relate it to the entries in a Savage Species table.
An example
Let’s look at an example (I’ll be making this up, as I don’t have a copy of this particular rulebook). Let’s say that we have a monster, the Kreetu, whose table is broken up into ten ‘monster levels’. The Kreetu will use chart F from the examples above:
The first step is to relate the growth pattern to information on the “Kreetu” table (if there were actually such a thing). This is charted on the vertical axis, assuming that the horizontal is used for age. It might be height**, or length**, or creature size**, or weight†, but the simplest answer is simply to call it “monster levels”. Assuming an 18-year maturation, since the ‘Kreetu’ are supposed to have ten of them, we get this:
The next step is to drop vertical lines down the chart to determine the age at which the ‘Kreetu’ achieve each stage of their growth:
(This is a little overcomplicated, I’m afraid I got carried away). Anyway, from this, you can determine the following:
Lvl 1 = 1.8 years
Lvl 2 = 2.8 years
Lvl 3 = 3.5 years
Lvl 4 = 4 years
Lvl 5 = 4.2 years
Lvl 6 = 5 years
Lvl 7 = 6.2 years
Lvl 8 = 7.9 years
Lvl 9 = 13 years
Lvl 10 = 18 years
From this information, you can customise as necessary.
- You could specify that a Kreetu is not mature enough to take a class skill until it reaches level 3 – that’s 3.5 years, and mandates that the character’s first three levels are in ‘Kreetu’.
- Or you could look at these results and decide that the growth rate is much faster than it should be, and multiply the numbers by three – so that 3.5 years would become almost 10 years – which is roughly the age when humans were apprenticed in medieval society.
- You could make the 3.5 year growth ‘optional’ so that at the 3.5 year mark, the character could choose to be a typical level 3 Kreetu or could take a class level and be smaller than the typical Kreetu – foregoing Kreetu levels 9 and 10. At the 4.2 year mark, this runt must take his third level of Kreetu, at age five he must take his 5th level, and so on. At the age of 13, he would achieve his full growth as an 8th-level Kreetu.
- Or you could permit the Kreetu to take Level 6 at 4.5 years instead of 5 years to get one that matures early and is bigger than the average Kreetu.
- Or you could simply give a Kreetu a six-month window, game time, in which to take the next monster level. That won’t make much difference to a youngster, but you can get a lot of adventuring done in six months of game time.
- Or simply make all Kreetu levels optional after some minimum number.
You have a wealth of options that you can make available to the player regarding his character’s physical growth. But more importantly, you aren’t forcing 20 or 50 or 200 years of growth into 2 or 3 or 5 game years, and so are getting sensible answers.
That last point is the reason why I came up with these rules. I had a player in one of my campaigns who wanted to play a treant – actually a treant variation from the campaign called a Verdonne (smaller, faster, smarter). At the rate the party were earning levels at the time, I could see that he would become a 200′ tall 20-level creature in about 6 months of game time – something that should have taken a century or two. Applying this system made the character a sapling, just short of Medium height, with total levels equivalent to those of the party. He earned 2 character levels at the same rate that they did before achieving the right age to have the option of taking a monster level. He deferred for another character level before taking an additional level of Verdonne (he wanted the Medium size, having tired of the size penalty in combat), and the d10 hit die was not to be sneered at, either (his class levels were all d4 HP).
Some additional notes:
**: Height and length are amongst the most obvious choices, and the most difficult to use. This is because height/length doubles with every size category – so a straight line would actually represent explosive growth.
†: The density of organic matter is pretty much constant, and presumably the same would be true of an elemental or a golem or whatever – only the amount would change. Therefore this is the same as the volume. To get a rough calculation of the volume of a humanoid body, it’s pi × s × s × h/4 where s is the distance from shoulder to shoulder and h is the height at the shoulders. Pi, of course, is 3.1415927.
With these changes in place, Savage Species represents a sensible extension to the method in the Core Rulebooks.
Conclusion
Once you wrap your head around what’s involved, the combination of character levels and non-humans expand your repetoire as a GM almost infinitely. There’s nothing to prevent our Bugbear Cleric from taking a prestige class to go with his Cleric levels, for example. GMs get far more use out of the potentials than any single player can, because species can be chosen that deliberately enhance the character class abilities, or which evade many or all of the vulnerabilities of the class, or that are just plain interesting.
However, the potentials are so vast that if the GM permits a PC to take such an option, he is practically mandated to take advantage of it himself, or he can find his opposition overwhelmed by a savvy combination.
Which reminds me – one of these days, I’ll have to tell you about the flaws in Dragons, and what I do about them… but that’s a subject for another Blog.
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April 29th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Level adjustment is kind of a black art, sure, but the numbers aren’t entirely random. For one, the ECL is *always* at least as high as the number of monster hit dice, no exceptions. CR is often lower than that for creatures without a lot of special abilities in combat, since CR is based on being defeatable by a party of 4 PCs of that level without losing more than 1/4 of hit points, using 1/4 of spells, or consuming 1/4 of available one-shot and charged items.
LA then rises for abilities that will make a big difference in adventuring vs. a single encounter, particularly if they are clearly better than class abilities of a PC with the same number of hit dice. At-will abilities are worth more than abilities that can only be used 3/day or similar, since those will have a greater impact on an 8 hour adventuring day, even if they had the same impact on a quick combat. For instance, lots of outsiders have an at-will greater teleport. If you only see the beastie once before killing it, this is merely an interesting feature that makes it hard to pin in place tactically. An adventurer with this can ignore hazards and escape from traps freely, forever. So, it’s worth more toward LA than CR. Think in terms of a magic item that duplicates the ability. If it would be far too expensive for a character at that level to possibly have, LA goes up.
PCs also have more treasure than NPCs, so the monster character will already be automatically stronger than an NPC version of the exact same creature. Ability score bonuses are worth more – in a quick fight, they may have no more value than a simple low-level buff spell. As an adventurer, they’ll have that buff always, it can’t be dispelled, and it stacks with future buff spells. Way more valuable.
Monsters with a LA above 3 become a bit fragile, since they have a lot less hit points than an equivalent character, but they’ll have abilities that the PC can’t possibly get. Used properly, it all works out. But that’s true of the base classes, too – badly played, you can easily be defeated by a critter that shouldn’t have stood a chance.
April 29th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
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April 29th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
@ reemul – very helpful contributions, good points. I still wish that Wizards had put it in writing somewhere – “this ability is worth +1 LA for every 4 HD” or whatever. Thanks for the input!
April 30th, 2010 at 1:53 am
Aside from the article being interesting, I’m amazed you can remember all of those campaigns.
-Tourq
.-= Tourq´s last blog ..Special Thanks =-.
April 30th, 2010 at 1:56 am
@Tourq: LOL! The ones that lasted are easy to remember, and the ones that didn’t ended spectacularly, so they are also memorable. Glad you found it worth reading.
April 30th, 2010 at 7:24 am
Well, @reemul already explained LA vs. CR pretty well.
Another point I would like to make, and one I am toying with house-ruling out of existence, is that taking a non-standard race (e.g., bugbear) and using its monster hit dice plus LA is always going to be weaker than a PC with a standard race/class combo. Why? To encourage players to go with a standard race/class combo. Pure and simple. WotC jiggered the math so that playing a non-standard race gains an advantage in cool points and funky powers, but loses on raw ability. It took me a long time of thinking I was building the characters wrong (and, for quite a while, actually building them wrong trying to compensate) to recognize this.
Also, be careful with giving PCs skill points for the LA levels. Part of the balance in there is that non-standard races generally get much better stats at the cost of skill points and save bonuses.
I like your concept of tying monster levels to age categories. I think your method there is more complex than I’m interested in, but it helps me visualize the difference between a 1st-level ogre and 5th-level ogre. The biggest problem with slicing and dicing abilities that I’ve seen is that there are often core abilities that define the creature. Shouldn’t even a first-level blink dog have blink? And scent? Which of those can you put off to a later level?
The whole thing is definitely more (dark) art than science.
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..“The Annie Lennox Collection” – Annie Lennox =-.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Effective Character Level (ECL, or Hit Dice + class level + level adjustment) is only used to determine how many experience points you need to advance to your next character level, and for wealth per level. It doesn’t actually affect your skill rank cap, feats, or anything else on the experience chart; for that, use character level (Hit Dice + class levels).
So, a bugbear cleric 1 is a 4HD character (3 from bugbear, 1 from cleric) and has a maximum of 7 in his skills, gets the same number of feats as a 4th level character, etc. But in order to advance to 2nd level cleric, he needs to pick up enough XP to go from 4th level to 5th level.
You can see this manifest in the “monster class” tables, which basically add monster HD to LA and come up with a chart with as many levels as ECL, with obvious places that nothing advances (like skill points or Hit Dice). Its a convenience thing, really.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:16 am
@Cam – Which is precisely why I don’t understand why it takes an entire page to very badly explain this concept in the book. And to give apparently contradictory information. It’s really very simple. The levels you sink into your race are just like levels you would sink into another class. If you earn three levels of fighter before taking that level of cleric, you wouldn’t be shocked to discover that you need to earn XP to become a 2nd level cleric as though you were a 5th level character. Nor would you be surprised that you earned benefits as a 5th level character.
So why is it so hard for WotC to explain that? Are they just trying to dance around any kind of “race as class” connotations?
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..“The Annie Lennox Collection” – Annie Lennox =-.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:27 am
@Lugh: re “blink” – number of times per day, or even per week; duration; some sort of skill roll to use. Those are just three of the possible ways you could slice such an ability.
By all means, simplify the solution offered as you see fit.
@Cam Banks: That’s certainly one way of interpreting what the rules say, possibly even the most common way. It’s also the way I interpreted it in the first draft of my post! But when you look closely at what WOTC have written in the DMG, it’s not so straightforward, and many questions are left unanswered, at least in my edition of the 3.5 DMG. I would categorise it more as an “inconvenience thing”, personally, and I don’t think there are any definitive answers to the question. Thanks for caring enough to contribute, I appreciate it.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:38 am
@Lugh: The key questions are whether or not the LA represents “Levels you sink into your race” and whether or not everything on the relevant line of the PHB table is adjusted by the +1 or just the XP.
I don’t think WOTC’s writers and editors took the possibility very seriously when they were writing that section; certainly the absence of editorial quality control argues that they didn’t care very strongly about it.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:51 am
@Mike – Maaaaybe. But, blink dogs blink. It’s right there in their name. It’s what they do, it’s built into their ecology, it’s their signature move. Reducing it to a number of times per day shifts the whole feel of the monster around. The skill check might be a possibility, but would also change the feel (hey, how come the *monster* blink dogs never fail their checks?).
Other critters have similar issues. Would a 1st-level medusa just have a petrifying gaze with a really low DC? Would a 1st-level mind flayer not have a mind blast, because there’s no way to skip the bite attack?
They’re all fixable. But they’re also all fixable in different ways. There is no simple pattern you can apply. Hence, art.
As for the levels question, I’ve actually always read the page in the FRCS (the most comprehensive discussion I’ve found) as implying that you don’t get any of the other benefits. A bugbear cleric gets a new feat when he has three levels of classes, and the bugbear levels don’t count. The bugbear levels only count for calculating XP. Which is plain goofy. And contradicts most of the actual examples I’ve seen in the text. And is not the way I’ve ever seen anyone else play it. And doesn’t entirely seem to be what they meant to say.
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..“The Annie Lennox Collection” – Annie Lennox =-.
April 30th, 2010 at 9:20 am
@Lugh: Actually, most powers and abilities are not instant, and so can be fixed with limited durations of effect. So the Medusa might petrify for an hour, then 2, 6, 12, 24, and then indefinitely – or whatever (not having looked up the HD and LA).
As for the FRCS – I’ve never hung around there, so I can’t comment on how comprehensive their discussions are, but I would be interested in their reasoning. Right or wrong, I always try to explain my thinking, the supposed logic of my position, but some sites simply give an ex-cathedra answer without supporting their position.
April 30th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Wow. Putting a duration on the petrification definitely changes the medusa. Among other things, it explains how they eat.
Still, my general point stands. Any of the issues can be fixed. But, each one requires a “hands on” fix, and occasionally a bit of cleverness. And, sometimes, a bit of re-imagining of the creature in question.
Er, by FRCS I meant Forgotten Realms Campaign Sourcebook. As one of the first 3.0 books to include LA races, they actually devote a whole page to the subject. The page includes extensive instructions on how they work. Instructions that end up being way over-complicated and a muddle-headed mess.
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..“The Annie Lennox Collection” – Annie Lennox =-.
April 30th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Oh, Okay. I was under the impression it was a website. So that means they’ve had at least three chances to straighten the mess out and have been out at a party every time the phone rang.
As for your general point, I agree. Still, a bit of cleverness and reimagining never goes to waste. As in the case of the Medusa, where the notion of a time-limited petrificaion also explains why they happen to have that ability in the first place. Once they achieve maturity, they can choose the duration (anything from permanent on down) – but because whenever they encounter characters, they use it full-strength as a defence, and so only a few specialists ever discover the flexibility the have with the ability.
May 11th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
The answer given in this post is completely wrong, as Cam points out.
(1) The SRD is explicit: “Creatures with 1 or less HD replace their monster levels with their character levels. The monster loses the attack bonus, saving throw bonuses, skills, and feats granted by its 1 monster HD and gains the attack bonus, save bonuses, skills, feats, and other class abilities of a 1st-level character of the appropriate class.
Characters with more than 1 Hit Die because of their race do not get a feat for their first class level as members of the common races do, and they do not multiply the skill points for their first class level by four. Instead, they have already received a feat for their first Hit Die because of race, and they have already multiplied their racial skill points for their first Hit Die by four.”
There really shouldn’t be any confusion here. Those two paragraphs tell you EXACTLY how to handle monster PCs.
The only thing level adjustment is used for is to calculate ECL, and the role of ECL is also explicitly spelled out: “Use ECL instead of character level to determine how many experience points a monster character needs to reach its next level. Also use ECL to determine starting wealth for a monster character.”
I’m not sure where your confusion is coming from, but ECL is used for absolutely nothing except XP and wealth.
You claim that ECL should be used when determining if a character should gain feats, but once again the rules are explicit:
“A monster’s total Hit Dice, not its ECL, govern its acquisition of feats and ability score increases. ”
I’m not sure what you find confusing about the phrase “not its ECL” that’s leading you to conclude that it should be read as “totally use its ECL”, but the meaning seems pretty clear to me.
You also claim that the character has no class skills for its monster HD, but this is also EXPLICITLY wrong. From the SRD once more:
“Monster characters treat skills mentioned in their monster entry as class skills.”
.-= Justin Alexander´s last blog ..Rewrite: Infamous – Fault 2: THe Main Story =-.
May 11th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
The SRD you refer to is one GM’s interpretation, not canon. I referred to the actual published core rulebooks – the DMG and Players Handbook -and they are not so explicit. Since there is more than one legitimate interpretation of the official rules, confusion results. The SRD you cite is certainly one such legitimate interpretation – for all I know, it might even be the one that the game authors and editors at WOTC had in mind – but it is not the only legal one under the rules as published.
I am always careful, when writing these pages, to distinguish between my own house rules and interpretations and the official ones. I also try to explain the fundamental assumptions and logic that led me to that interpretation. Your comments seem to have missed that distinction, Justin. The author of the SRD you cite has filled in the blanks of the rules as published with logical inferances but has not distinguished between official rules and his own deductions, presenting the whole with an authoritarian “this is the way it is now and shall ever be, amen”. The style gives the site an air of authority that implies, as you have, that this is the only interpretation.
It’s not.
In fact, if you go to the home page, you will find a link to a page describing changes from the official d20 SRD. And while, on that page, the author claims: Translating the d20 SRD for use on the Web has necessitated several presentational and organizational changes. I have not added, removed, or changed any rule mechanics in the d20 game engine. I would contend that organising rules with inherant confusion such as the official rules on this subject necessitates interpretation and rationalisation. I consider the hyperlinked SRD to be a valuable resource – but not canon.
Having taken quite a lot of time and space to disagree with you, I want to end by thanking you for summing up an alternative answer – that might even be closer to canon – so clearly. The more clearly we can articulate different interpretations, the easily GMs can choose the interpretation that they find right for their game. And that’s the point, when you get right down to it: the rules are just a foundation, apon which each GM builds a different house.
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:25 pm
… do you really have no idea what the System Reference Document (SRD) is?
Okay. Fine.
MM, pg. 290: “Creatures with 1 or less HD replace their monster levels with their character levels. (For example, a goblin sorcerer) loses (its humanoid) attack bonus, saving throw bonuses, skills, and feats granted by its 1 monster HD and gains the attack bonus, save bonuses, skills, feats, and other class abilities of a 1st-level character of (a 1st-level sorcerer).”
DMG, pg. 172: “Characters with more than 1 Hit Die because of their race do not get a feat for their first class level as members of the common races do, and they do not multiply the skill points for their first class level by four. Instead, they have already received a feat for their first Hit Die because of race, and they have already multiplied their racial skill points for their first Hit Die by four.”
DMG, pg. 172: “Use ECL instead of character level (when referring to Table 3-2: Experience and Level-Dependent Benefits in the Player’s Handbook) to determine how many experience points a monster character needs to reach its next level. Also use ECL (with Table 5-1: Character Wealth By Level) to determine starting wealth for a monster character.”
MM, pg. 292: “A monster’s total Hit Dice, not its ECL, govern its acquisition of feats and ability score increases.”
DMG, pg. 172: “Monster characters treat skills mentioned in their monster entry as class skills.”
Look familiar?
The rules in the SRD are identical to those found in the rulebooks. You’re just flat-out wrong. About everything.
Justin Alexander recently posted..Thought of the Day- All-Star Balance
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Justin, I do know what an SRD is. I have several for the d20 system. And they don’t all agree with each other. Every GM puts their own spin on rules that are poorly explained, and I’m not the only one who considers these aspects of the rules to be poorly explained by WOTC. As for the rules you quote, some are in my copy of the core rulebooks in the places you specify, and some are not. But in any event, extracting 19 lines from five locations in two sourcebooks is hardly what I would consider straightforward.
You may also wish to note that what I have specified are clearly described as House Rules – look just under the title of this post and you will even see “House Rules” as a category. The question was asked, how do I go about levelling up in this circumstance. Not what do the rules say, not what do other websites or GMs do, but what do I do. These were designed to overcome percieved flaws in the standard situation, or more specifically, to overcome contradictions in the information available, not all of which made sense when they were all combined together.
You don’t have to agree with me. I can respect people who honestly think differently. But I would argue that it is impossible for any GM to be “flat-out wrong” about anything, given this line from the DMG page 4: “You are the master of the game – the rules, the setting, the action, and ultimately, the fun.” But the earlier editions said it more clearly: the DM is free to change anything he sees fit to better suit his campaign. Naturally, the players have to have a voice – after all, if there are no players, there’s no campaign – but the DM has the final say.
November 11th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Dude, you just download the official d20 srd from wizards.com
Not that difficult.
November 11th, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Ralph, the official SRD is an abbreviated summary of the rules. If there was no difference between the two, there would be no point to WOTC publishing a PHB and a DMG. It follows that the SRD may offer a guideline but it is not to be considered a replacement for the rules books. And the whole point of the opening section of the article is that the official rules in the DMG are unclear on the subject. You might also want to refer to my replies to other comments making essentially that same point as your comment – but I appreciate your attempting to contribute to the discussion anyway.
March 28th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
I just want to say, your entire article is wrong. It’s laughable. Please tell me, when I add LA to character level, what happened to a frost giants 2 other feats, their ability increase, and skill points.
Here.
Ok I read this blog, the first red flag is this:
This is obviously in relation to a d20 system of some kind, probably D&D 3.x. It’s a very specific question about a specific game system mechanic, which is something that we try to avoid in ATGM questions.
That alone is enough for me, to never return to this site again, no offense here, but if they are coming right out and GUESSING that this question is about something, and it is something they try to avoid, then I would avoid using them as a reference point. But I digress; there is much to tear part here.
My second issue is, this bulk of whatever it is, about how he uses leveling up, I don’t care about how he makes his players level up in AD&D and 3.0 and 3.5, so I’m not sure why he waited almost 2 pages to actually start addressing the players question, it literally has NO bearing on level adjustments.
The Mechanics Of Level Adjustments
Ok, here is where we are start seeing them “attempt” to answer the question.
1. Level Adjustments are defined very poorly in the DMG (page 173). – Actually it isn’t. If you want to get down and dirty about it, they used a specific term with dealing with it. Effective Character Level is the term that is used when dealing with level adjustments, that has a clear and concise use that are not hidden, and are not hard to find. It very important that we do not confuse Effective Character Level and Character level. Below are the sources for where ECL is used or defined.
a. PG. 172 of the DMG: Use ECL instead of character level when referring to Table 3–2: Experience and Level-Dependent Benefits in the Player’s Handbook to determine how many experience points a monster character needs to reach its next level. Also use ECL with Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level to determine starting wealth for a monster character.
b. PG. 172 of the DMG: Add a monster’s level adjustment to its Hit Dice and class levels to get the creature’s effective character level, or ECL.
Now here is the next part of the article that I need to show mistakes in:
The easiest way to handle level adjustments without confusion is to treat the level adjustment plus the number of hit dice as levels in “monster”, ie treat the character as multiclassing without penalty. For example, A Bugbear (3HD) has a level adjustement of +1, so a 1st-level Bugbear Cleric has levels “Bugbear 3+1 / Cleric 1? and is a fifth-level character. Note that I indicate the level adjustment seperately after the “+” sign for clarity.
I can debunk this in one easy example. If it was true that level adjustments are actually added to character levels, then if you look Frost giant, why does it only have 5 feats listed, when actually it should have six, because its character level would be boosted to 18, and thus by this article grant the frost giant two more feats over its current five, because it is 14HD creature and a +4 level adjustment.
Going further with this example, why don’t the giants skill points equal the total that would come from being a level 18 character. You can never choose to withhold spending of skill points, you MUST spend them each level, and where it has a jump bonus of +17, it should be +21, which is 18 + 3 = max skill rank, if you are allowing level adjustment to be added to character level as this article states you should.
Now, while we talk about skills, this article states:
Note that the character HAS no class skills until he takes the character class level, all his skill purchases are cross-classed.
With all due respect, this is just blatantly wrong. Animals have class skills added based on relevancy, class skill does not mean you have to have a class.
PG: 301 Monster Manual 3.5: Assign whatever skills you think the creature ought to have. The number of skill points a creature has depends on its type, Hit Dice, and Intelligence; see Table 5–4. Assume that any skill you choose for the creature is a class skill, and each rank costs 1 skill point. The maximum rank for any skill is the creature’s Hit Dice + 3. A creature with less than 1 Hit Die is treated as having 1 Hit Die for the purpose of determining skill points and maximum skill rank.
I will also break down their example given for the Bugbear. The article just assumes that the level adjustment is the reason they get a feat, when actually, it isn’t. The damn creature starts at 3HD. That’s two feats, the creature has two feats. However, if you subtract the bonus racial abilities it gets — +4 Strength, +2 Dexterity, +2 Constitution, –2 Charisma, then where in the world is the +1 ability increase this bug bear is entitled to? WOTC just forgot it?
Come on. Why the bugbear doesn’t have a 7 to move silently, its skill points don’t add up if you figure up where the extra skill points from LA +1 being added.
Feats, Skill ranks, and Ability score increases, come from increases in character level, not effective character level.
The other point I want to make is, if you add level adjustments to character levels, for determining feats, skills, abilities, then what is the penalty for taking advanced races. The level adjustment is a penalty.
Now, get the hell off the internet and stop confusing people. If you don’t usually handle these questions, and you had guess which system it was, you should back the hell off answering questions.
March 28th, 2013 at 6:32 pm
If the fact that we attempt to avoid specific questions about specific game mechanics, as opposed to general answers about questions that would affect multiple GMs, is enough for you to depart, never to return, then goodbye and good luck.
If you insist on quoting parts of the article out of context, then your criticisms will not be missed.
Your final paragraph is insulting and further disinclines me from taking the comment and criticism seriously.
I notice that you make no attempt to answer the question, just to criticize our attempt to do so.
Nevetherless:
Many of the specific points you raise have already been discussed in the comments section. I dismiss the majority of the rest as being nonresponsive. For example, you bluntly allege that how characters level up has “No bearing on Level Adjustments” – something with which I disagree, and which I spent those two pages of which you complain explaining. Unsupported allegations don’t make it so.
As further proof of the absence of value in your complaint, consider your response to “Level adjustments are very poorly defined in the DMG”. I agree that “Effective Character Level” is defined. Where does it relate that to Level Adjustment? Defining another term, no matter how related it might be, does not constitute defining the first term. Furthermore, the definition provided is contradicted multiple times in multiple places, as I demonstrated in the comments after the article.
I can answer your use of Frost Giant as an example contradicting the approach I recommended even more easily: You are quoting their Monster Manual entry which is only marginally relevant to the species use as a race for Player Characters.
The same holds true for your comments about Bugbears.
As for the question of Skills, Animals are not sentient monsters are not character races.
Now, “get the hell off the internet” (to use your own vernacular) and stop spouting bile. Attempting to help someone with a problem, even if that problem is not clearly described by them, is never a waste of time. Those who can, do; those who can’t criticise.
April 11th, 2013 at 8:36 am
The rules in the DMG are completely clear on how Monster Hit Dice and ECL should be handled. See the quotes from Justin Alexander from MM and DMG, I’m not repeating those here.
DMG p.172 tells you exactly how Level Adjustment relates to ECL and monster hitdice.
“Add a monster’s Level Adjustment to its Hit Dice and class levels to get the creature’s Effective Class Level or ECL.”
That’s the only effect of LA: it changes your ECL. Nothing more nothing less and completely clear. The rest of the text then goes on to explain stuff about ECL and Monster HD.
If you’re considering the Bugbear, just look at p.311 of the Monster Manual where it defines Monstrous Humanoid. It explicitly explains what a Bugbear would get for it’s 2 Monster Hit Dice.
—–
There is only one System Reference Document v3.5. It can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35
It is the subset of published WotC material that is licensed under the Open Gaming Licence (OGL). It mostly contains stuff from the DMG, PHB and MM, but also a little form a few other books. By it’s very definition it’s identical to the matching rules in it’s printed counterpart. It is a subset of the published material that can be used by others without WotC permission.
It is therefore preferred when discussing official D&D 3.5 rules to use quotes from the SRD, because it avoids any potential copyright issues.
—–
You clearly don’t like D&D 3.5 and are not familiar with it. Otherwise you would know that quoting an entry in the Monster Manual is completely relevant to the discussion, because barring math errors by the developers, they are contructed following exactly the same rules as Player Characters.
The Frost Giant Jarl on p.122 would be a completely valid PC with 14 Monster HD, 8 HD from class and a LA+4 for a total ECL of 26.
Monsters in D&D 3.5 are built using the same rules as Player Characters except for wealth and items they have access to. That means that any published monster with a LA is valid for this discussion.
April 11th, 2013 at 9:42 am
@Renting:It’s not what the DMG says but what it doesn’t say that is the problem, Renting. You make the assumption (and state it explicitly in your comment): “nothing more, nothing less.” What’s more, it was a lot less clear in the 3.0 DMG.
Your second section relates to the SRD. I beg to differ with your comments – there are lots of SRDs, though there may only be one official one. And it is even less helpful when it comes to ECL. It does no good to quote text when that text is not relevant or does not answer the question. I stand by what I wrote: if there was no difference between the SRD and the DMG, why on earth would you shell out A$80 or so for a copy of the DMG?
I don’t know who you are referring to by “you” in your third section, but I’ll presume that it’s me, as the author of the article, and not one of the commentators. I take even greater exception to the suggestion that I “don’t like D&D 3.5 and [am] not familiar with it”. I’ve only been running multiple campaigns using the system over the last decade or so. I certainly wouldn’t do that if I didn’t like the system, and couldn’t do that if I were unfamiliar with it. The rest of the comment then makes a bald assertion: “Monsters in 3.5 are built using thee same rules as Player Characters” – in fact, it makes it twice, and it is easily disproved. If you look at the stat block provided, you will find no mention of an ECL. Instead, you will find, for the last entry, “Level Adjustment +4”. So what’s the relationship between a “level adjustment” and an “effective character level” or ECL? It may be simply a change in termonology, but how are we to know? The use of the word “Effective” in ECL implies that ECL is something different to the “Actual” level adjustment. Your comments on the “Frost Giant Jarl” also immediately show that you have simply skimmed the entry in question, and seem to assume that “Jarl” is either the name of an example frost giant or the name of a character class available to frost giants. Jarl, as is shown at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarl, is the scandinavian title that is the equivalent of Earl, or – in this context – leader, and the first line of text starts “A frost giant leader is often a barbarian, cleric, fighter, or sorceror…”. I disagree completely with the mathematics you offer in referance to the HD. I would read it as 14 Monster HD equals 8 from class plus 4 from LA plus two from who-knows-where. And I’m blaming a lack of consistency and clarity on the part of WOTC for that difference in interpretation. It might be that your math is correct in terms of what they meant but they never say so anywhere! Twelve extra levels is a BIG penalty to be loading on a PC, especially since it carries them past the point of functionality of the standard XP tables and into the realm of Epic Characters. Your entire line of arguement in this third section doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.
Now, instead of arguing about what the holy sanscrit from the Greater God WOTC says in its holy scriptures, why don’t we all focus on a better and more productive question: what should it say, and why? That would be a far more useful debate.
September 26th, 2013 at 9:46 am
Ok now this is my question. I have a friend that I am joining for a level 5 campaign. The problem arises where I’m playing a Minotaur (from the monster manual with a LA of +2) and apparently my DM says I have an actual level of 9 so I have to make a different character. Can someone tell me what this means?
September 26th, 2013 at 12:30 pm
@Brandon: What does it mean? It either means your DM really doesn’t want you to take a minotaur for your character (2+5 equals seven, not nine) or has made a mistake in his math – or you have misinterpreted the rules if you have read that “+2 LA” as meaning that you get to add two extra character levels (just to cover off all the possibilities).
In theory, if you were to have only three character levels and an LA of +2, you would have a net level total the equal of your more straightforward 5th level fighters, etc.
But perhaps for this campaign the GM is using some exotic interpretation of Level Adjustements – possible since they are so poorly explained. I would ask him how a +2 LA gives +4 levels (perhaps non core-races are automatically being given a +2 LA in addition to any in the Monster Manual) because you don’t understand his ruling – but in the meantime, start working on an alternate character.
September 12th, 2014 at 7:41 pm
Mike, looks like you accidentally deleted a comment last year. Lemme restore it for you:
Three years later and you’re still getting this wrong, eh?
Also, free tip for future reference: When someone tells you they’re
referencing something on pg. 122 of the Monster Manual, you might try opening your copy of the Monster Manual and at least glancing at it so that you don’t look like an illiterate buffoon.
Justin Alexander recently posted..Check This Out – The Fermi Paradox
September 12th, 2014 at 9:27 pm
Nothing accidental about it, Justin. It contributed nothing to the debate other than to insult me and contained nonsense as you should know since you publish a blog yourself. But, since you insist:
1. “Three years later” – I not only don’t agree that my interpretation is any less valid than any of the others espoused, but the comment itself is nonsensical because even if I had changed my mind, the text of the article would not magically have rearranged themselves to say something different. Therefore this comment is nothing but nonsense.
2. I did check my Monster Manual at the time and saw nothing to contradict my statements. Therefore the suggestion that I did not do so, and the comment that not doing so made me “look like an illiterate buffoon” is nothing but insulting and inflammatory.
I maintain that sloppy alterations in nomenclature left a confused and confusing mess capable of multiple interpretations. Nor does the article claim that my answer is the right one – it points out the confusion and then says (and I quote) “The easiest way…” which clearly implies that there are other, more complex ways of resolving the confusion.
In fact, the comment contributed so little beyond attempting to bait me that I assumed it was a spam comment posted in your name and deleted it.
Not that it matters one bit what the official resolution is. I’ve always defined my answer as a House Rule (a “House interpretation”, really) and proceeded on that basis. Other people are free to answer the question raised as they see fit – but virtually none of them have attempted to do so. They’ve been too busy attacking my honest attempt to provide the answer that I would use.
To quote from my Blogdex, which indexes all the articles to date on the occasion of the 500th article here at Campaign Mastery, this article is described as “One of the most contentious articles I’ve ever written looks at Level Adjustments in D&D 3.x. I offer my way of doing them, which is definitely NOT canonical – because the canon is firing confetti, in my opinion. You may not agree with my interpretations and the way I house rule the treatment of level adjustments. Or they might be exactly what you need to make sense of a confusing part of the rules. I’m fine with both” – which I regard as the last word on the subject.