Template CLs, Specifically Vampires


Rules Questions


My PCs have recently become undead. Two of them are vampires, one is a graveknight, and one is a skeletal champion. After a short time, it has become increasingly clear that these options aren't balanced.

Vampire is +2 CR, grants six feats, 32 skill points, 18 ability score points, fast healing 5, a 4th-level spell at will, virtually complete immortality, and the ability to double your max hit points.

Graveknight is +2 CR, grants four feats, 32 skill points, 16 ability score points, a large increase in melee damage, and some other things. I've tinkered a bit with the template.

Skeletal champion is weird in terms of how it increases the CR of a PC that gets it. If I'm doing the math right, it's a +2 CR for anyone that didn't have racial HD before taking it. (The two racial HD it grants get modified by the HD to CR table for skeleton, which makes those two levels equal CR 1, then the template adds another one.) It grants one feat, 8 + 2xInt mod skill points, 4 ability score points, +1 BAB, and +1/+1/+2 to saves.

There are various other factors to consider, and I have, but it seems clear to me that there's a large disparity between these three. Vampire certainly seems far more powerful than any two class levels, while Skeletal Champion is notably weaker, depending on how you weight the value of basic undead immunities/weaknesses.

Can anyone give me some insight as to what I might be missing here? Should I just houserule the CR adjustments up/down?


When Paizo brought out their new system they made a conscious decision to remove an element that had previously been in the game for working out the effective character level (or ECL) of monstrous characters. They did this for a variety of reasons I won't get into here, but it means that you should not use CR for working out the new power level of characters in comparison to the rest of the party. The reason for this is that while you might encounter a vampire or graveknight as an enemy only once (or perhaps a couple more times if you don't kill them right) players who change into these creatures get the templates abilities all of the time, which fundamentally changes their power levels.

In Pathfinder the level adjustment for a vampire would be about +6, for a graveknight it would be about +5 and for a skeleton champion it would be about +2. In other words if all your PCs were 10th level, the vampire would have an ECL of 16 (even though he was still only a 10th level character), the graveknight an ECL of 15 and the skeleton champion an ECL of 12. Looking at the templates like this you begin to see the disparity you were talking about.


Ah. I was under the impression that the elimination of Level Adjustment involved making CR adjustment the replacement for that mechanic. At least, that's what the "Monsters as PCs" section of the Bestiary said to do. Is there something written more recently that provides guidelines for calculating ECL of PCs with templates, racial hit dice, and so on?


Andrew Parker 132 wrote:
Is there something written more recently that provides guidelines for calculating ECL of PCs with templates, racial hit dice, and so on?

There hasn't been. The only thing written about monstrous races as PCs is what the Bestiary says. What Phil L wrote above is almost equal to what the 3.5 system was, and the Paizo system is different from that. The Paizo system introduced using CR as opposed to ECL (HD+LA).

However, there are no official rules (yet) on how to handle monstrous PCs. Even the Bestiary section on "Monsters as PCs" says that you can use CR as a baseline, but you should monitor the PCs closely to see if powerlevel issues arise, and then adjust accordingly.

I imagine that Paizo will at some point in the future publish a book that addresses these issues (similar to WotC's Savage Species), but until then it is up to each individual GM how to balance monstrous PCs. Templates are the most difficult to balance, in my opinion.

Sovereign Court

Paizo made a point of giving no rules for it, just a possible suggestion with a warning, which means that all monstrous and/or templated PCs are homebrew and you can do what you like with them.
I guess that they thought they should either do it properly (detailed sourcebook) or not at all.

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