I have heard of people "buying off" level adjustments, how does this work? Race levels? Is this just something people house rule or is there a "rule book" way to do it?
Fizz
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I have heard of people "buying off" level adjustments, how does this work? Race levels? Is this just something people house rule or is there a "rule book" way to do it?
Fizz
Hmm, sacrifice a feat or two, maybe? Ability penalties? Give up an extraordinary or supernatural ability?
I haven't read anything official on it.
They're using the variant rules from Unearthed Arcana most likely:
Basically, at a predetermined set of levels, the character can spend XP to reduce its LA by one. The process an repeat over and over until the character has an LA of 0.
But you can never "buy down" racial hit dice in your effective character level.
Word of warning in this area.
I have a player that pretty much always takes a half-celestial and I've found this system to actually make this just too good an option for a player like that over the long run.
Sure it takes a lot of time and effort to trade in those level adjustments, especially the first and 2nd one but after that trading them in is actually rather cheap. By the time your two levels below the rest of the players your earning a lot more XP per encounter so suddenly it takes a lot less time to pay off this debt.
Certainly your going to notice a lack of extra goodies - especially hps, but its not as bad as one might suspect. A Half-Celestial has a whopping +4 LA but by about 10th level gets a lot of benefits as well. Enough benefits to pretty much make up for most of the downsides regarding lack of level. Once the player has finally paid off that 4th level adjustment he's far behind the rest of the players but he will catch up with them at a phenomenal speed, rapidly jumping two levels at which point he'll have a huge number of benefits and only be two levels behind, he'll eventually get to only 1 level behind as well though it will take a little longer. Reality is that a 12th level half-celestial fighter is a lot more potent then a 13th level human fighter.
Word of warning in this area.
I have a player that pretty much always takes a half-celestial and I've found this system to actually make this just too good an option for a player like that over the long run.
I'm in complete agreement with Jeremy here - the UA system is well designed, except it really provides for *NO* actual penalty. The way it works is at certain points the character simply loses the LA. I don't actually think they intended it this way, just didn't think it out fully.
The system is at certain level points (3*LA, then sooner later) they lose the XP that would make them that level, as well as dropping by +1 LA. This leaves them at the same character level (not ECL).
The way I handle it is to actually charge them a level. So if a +1 LA race was 3rd level (4th ECL) and about to level to 4th, they lose the xp and drop down to bottom of 3rd level, and also lose the +1 LA, actually dropping their ECL to 3rd.
As Jeremy pointed out though, they should actually be lower than their fellow party members at that point, and will gain xp faster to catch up, which should be fine. Same cost that casting Wish or something has - a temporary advancement loss for some benefit.
My players and I felt that the ECL system resulted in an unfair and progressive EP penalty for characters needing racial level adjustments. As party average levels increase, the characters with level adjustments experience larger and larger EP penalties that can reach 70000 EP's for a 20th ECL character with a four-level adjustment. We went to a house rule involving negative experience points. All first-level characters started at 0 experience. Level adjustments were assigned a negative EP value (-1000 for 1 level, -3000 for 2 levels, -6000 for 3 levels, and -10000 for 4 levels) and earned experience went to pay off the negative EP values before characters could add positive EP's and class levels. This allows characters with racial levels to pay them off up front and keeps the ECL penalty from becoming 15000 to 20000 EP's per level for higher-level characters while still leveling the playing field at lower levels. The system has playtested well in our hands so far.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Word of warning in this area.
I have a player that pretty much always takes a half-celestial and I've found this system to actually make this just too good an option for a player like that over the long run.
I'm not terribly surprised that this is true for a +4 LA race, but does it apply to the +1 and +2 LA races (which are much more common and probably more what the rule is contemplating)? The difference between a 12th level tiefling fighter and a 12th level human fighter seems fairly negligible given that the benefits of being a tiefling (darkness and the extra ability score bonus) just aren't that significant at those levels.
I'm not terribly surprised that this is true for a +4 LA race, but does it apply to the +1 and +2 LA races (which are much more common and probably more what the rule is contemplating)? The difference between a 12th level tiefling fighter and a 12th level human fighter seems fairly negligible given that the benefits of being a tiefling (darkness and the extra ability score bonus) just aren't that significant at those levels.Word of warning in this area.
I have a player that pretty much always takes a half-celestial and I've found this system to actually make this just too good an option for a player like that over the long run.
I have to agree with Sebastian here; the difference in effectiveness between these characters is small enough that the EP penalty for the character with the racial levels is far out of proportion to the benefit, especially at higher ECL's. Thus, the house rule I mentioned in my previous post.
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A house rule that I've come up with is that a new pc that takes a race with a level adjustment instead starts with NEGATIVE xp.
So a race like Aasimar, the pc would still be 1st level like everyone else, but they start with -1000 xp.
A creature with a LA of 2 would have -3000 etc...
I find that the abilities they gain become less powerful over time, since other players can gather items to give similar abilities anyway.
I'm not terribly surprised that this is true for a +4 LA race, but does it apply to the +1 and +2 LA races (which are much more common and probably more what the rule is contemplating)? The difference between a 12th level tiefling fighter and a 12th level human fighter seems fairly negligible given that the benefits of being a tiefling (darkness and the extra ability score bonus) just aren't that significant at those levels.Word of warning in this area.
I have a player that pretty much always takes a half-celestial and I've found this system to actually make this just too good an option for a player like that over the long run.
We had a half-ogre monk that definitely wasn't amazingly over powered for its +2 LA. We allowed her to pay down her LA, and she still hadn't caught up in level when most of the party was at 13th level. She was 12th, and held her own, and she didn't seem like she was getting by with anything.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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We had a half-ogre monk that definitely wasn't amazingly over powered for its +2 LA. We allowed her to pay down her LA, and she still hadn't caught up in level when most of the party was at 13th level. She was 12th, and held her own, and she didn't seem like she was getting by with anything.
So, was the buying off of the level advancement balanced by the fact that she was a level behind? I'm not sure I fully understand whether you were satisfied with the result from your post.
So, was the buying off of the level advancement balanced by the fact that she was a level behind? I'm not sure I fully understand whether you were satisfied with the result from your post.
We had a half-ogre monk that definitely wasn't amazingly over powered for its +2 LA. We allowed her to pay down her LA, and she still hadn't caught up in level when most of the party was at 13th level. She was 12th, and held her own, and she didn't seem like she was getting by with anything.
Sorry about that. Yeah, she could buy down one level, caught up, but was still one behind. Overall, it worked out fine, and by the time everyone would have reached 14th level, she would have caught up as well, and a 14th level half-ogre monk wasn't really out of whack with a 14th level human cleric, barbarian, warlock, etc.
In most cases, the LA is so not worth it for most PCs, that the LA buyoff rules in Unearthed Arcana are well worth it.
For the most part LAs are assigned based on what Class would be ebst for the race. And if you take a class that makes maximum use of your racial abilities, you should be about even. I'm talking things like pixie rogues, large melee combatants etc.
But if you take a class that does not play to your race's strengths, you are royally boned.
And it gets even worse if you are a spellcaster, now you are spell levels behind. Take the mentioned half celestial and let's make him a cleric. He is now casting spells a full 2 spell levels behind the human. Not caster levels, spell levels. While the human cleric is throwing around level 5 spells, the Half Celestial is casting level 3 spells. Is the template really worth that much? I don't think so. At elast being a cleric he can still compete (and compete well) in melee, but if he was a wizard, he would be even worse.
It's good, but not that good. And when we look at the details of UA's buoff rules, it works out not all that well for the half celestial. You get some pretty cool goodies, but it costs you and LA of 4. Even using the rules from Unearthed Arcana, your PC can't buy off the first level until CHARACTER level 12, that is ECL 16!!, and then can't buy off the second level for anther nine character levels, ie ECL 25. Hardly seems overpowered to me.
And as pointed out earlier, the buyoff rule helps to power up those LA 1 and 2 races a bit more, and make them more attractive.
Also, note how the buy off rule only helps spellcasters to get close to an equivalent LA 0 race at higher levels, but helps the melee guy to actually get ahead. Seeing how high level play is actually dominated by high level spells, it seems anything that can give the melee guys more oomph while not similarly overpowering the spell casters is a very good thing.
Yep, the level-breaks for the buy-off are very important to note. An LA +3 race is the highest you can get to and be able to buy off the LA entirely before hitting epic levels. Also note this is based on [i]class levels[/i[] and not racial HD. A LA +4 race would be as follows:
First buy-off
Class Level 12
Second buy-off
Class level 21
Third buy-off
Class level 27
Fourth buy-off
Class level 30
If the race also has racial HD, you're looking at a pretty high-level character indeed...