It was left out because it didnt really work in the first place. The effect of those abilities gained by high level adjustment races changed dramatically as you went up in level. Even in cases where the abilties gained meshed well with the chosen class, say a minotaur fighter, at low levels the character would be way too strong, and at mid to high levels the lost levels would dramatically outweight what was gained by the race.
Basically Level Adjustment wasn't good enough to do what it set out to do, so there wasn't alot of sense in including a rule that didnt work to begin with.
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i dont have a problem with the level adjustments it just opens up more fun races to play. i would however limit the access to some of the power and maybe do like phb2 and throw in an experience penalty at the level intervals to make up for the extra power gained.
(players handbook 2 3.5 had a system that you could buy off your level adjustments. you paid 1000 xp*your ecl-1 at a level that was 3x your level adjustment so a level adjusment of one paid 3000 xp at level 3 and a level adjusted +2 paid 7k xp at level 6 and another 9k at level 9. you would of course change this to match pathfinder xp standards.
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The problem with LA is that you are missing hit dice equal to the LA. This reduces HP, BAB, saves, caster level, everything. The benefits of the race often do not make up for this handicap.
The best way to handle this is racial hit dice. The character doesn't miss out on base stats completely, but he loses class feature progression, which helps balance the more powerful racial abilities.
The upcomming advanced races guide should scratch that itch. It should provide rules and advice for running non-standard races in the game along side standard ones.
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I've no plans to use any LA races but I MIGHT give a thought to savage species (with tweaking).
This may be of interest to you.
The problem with LA is that you are missing hit dice equal to the LA. This reduces HP, BAB, saves, caster level, everything. The benefits of the race often do not make up for this handicap
Not exactly. You're missing class levels equal to the LA. The monster's racial hit dice can often exceed its CR, and CR is used for LA in the posted rules.
Example: A Hill Giant PC joins a 7-th level party with no class levels. It does, however, still have 10 hit dice (d8), and the five feats that go with them. Furthermore, when the rest of the party hits level 9 and a half, the hill giant PC gets a free level (from 2 to 3), then again at party level 12 and a half and 15 and a half. At party level 16, the hill giant is level 12 in some class, for a total of 22 hit dice (with all 11 feats and 5 stat boosts that go with it).
That's not too shabby so long as you don't mind having one average stat and three horrible ones (including Dex). The dex penalty is a pretty harsh one, though. Now, if you're a caster type, it's rougher, so I hope you picked a monster with decent innate abilities, as they won't get any stronger.
You may be better off coming up with a custom progression with your GM.
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The way I see the LA/CR system.
Think about a lvl 5 vampire rogue. Technically a CR6 as a NPC monster. ECL13 as a player. This guy, played smart, would obliterate a decent number of lvl 6 PCs/NPCs before any harm would come to him.
Now, a lvl 12 vampire rogue. He's a CR13 'monster'; or ECL20 as a PC. While he is still formidable as a CR13, being a player - lvl 20 characters/CR 20 monsters would probably one-standard action him.
Even as a lvl 20 rogue, some classes would laugh in his face and proceed to effortlessly annihilate him cause of 'lol, you're rogue
The system doesn't really work for players.
The problem with LA is that you are missing hit dice equal to the LA. This reduces HP, BAB, saves, caster level, everything. The benefits of the race often do not make up for this handicapNot exactly. You're missing class levels equal to the LA. The monster's racial hit dice can often exceed its CR, and CR is used for LA in the posted rules.
Example: A Hill Giant PC joins a 7-th level party with no class levels. It does, however, still have 10 hit dice (d8), and the five feats that go with them. Furthermore, when the rest of the party hits level 9 and a half, the hill giant PC gets a free level (from 2 to 3), then again at party level 12 and a half and 15 and a half. At party level 16, the hill giant is level 12 in some class, for a total of 22 hit dice (with all 11 feats and 5 stat boosts that go with it).
That's not too shabby so long as you don't mind having one average stat and three horrible ones (including Dex). The dex penalty is a pretty harsh one, though. Now, if you're a caster type, it's rougher, so I hope you picked a monster with decent innate abilities, as they won't get any stronger.
You may be better off coming up with a custom progression with your GM.
Most of that seems correct to me, but the bolded part seems off. Per the Bestiary, you only add the ability increases for every 4 HD or class levels added eyond what the creature starts with. The base 10 HD of the Hill Giant don't provide any ability bonuses other than what the Hill Giant already has listed.
And, I'd never go with Hill Giant when the Stone Giant is so much better both statistically and for roleplay. I really dig the Stone Giant.
Sorry, that was unclear. I meant 5 ability score boosts total, including those already rolled into the creature's stats.
As you said, there are definitely better choices than hill giant, in any case. Though it'd make an interesting inquisitor build if you could get the Wisdom up enough.
That comes to the next problem: In RAW, such monster PCs would always have the same base stats. There's no mechanism for converting those stats into racial modifiers. I suggest starting with the d20srd rules for monsters as races, as it does a half-decent job as covering problems like attribute variance for creatures with exceptionally high or low stats.
ECL is often hated because it made a good effort to make sure oddball races would not overshadow the core PHB races. ECL were set VERY conservatively which is the right thing to do, extra options should't be better than the PHB options.
It is kinda like LA's are round holes, but MM monster stats are mostly square pegs or rigged polyedrals. if Monster manual Monster A has a special ability that makes it not fit the round hole of LA+2. it automatically got bumped up to LA+3.
ECL also was set assuming the player would pick the class the race was MOST powerful with. So picking an ECL race that best suited Barbarian, but playing a Caster means you paid ECL for things that don't even synergize with your class. {and that's not even figuring the painful loss of caster levels in general.]
So for powergamers, they were headed off at the pass being charged in FULL for any ECL abilities. For roleplayers they got bent over if they took any class but the one class the ECL had been set accounting for.
The way I see the LA/CR system.
Think about a lvl 5 vampire rogue. Technically a CR6 as a NPC monster. ECL13 as a player. This guy, played smart, would obliterate a decent number of lvl 6 PCs/NPCs before any harm would come to him.
Now, a lvl 12 vampire rogue. He's a CR13 'monster'; or ECL20 as a PC. While he is still formidable as a CR13, being a player - lvl 20 characters/CR 20 monsters would probably one-standard action him.
Even as a lvl 20 rogue, some classes would laugh in his face and proceed to effortlessly annihilate him cause of 'lol, you're rogue
The system doesn't really work for players.
It's a little different than that; ECL doesn't exist that way in PF. Vampire isn't a creature, it's a template. In this case, the template is applied to a "normal" PC race. The CR of a PC-grade member of a normal PC race is equal to its level, not one less than its level. (Note the words "PC-grade", indicating that they have better equipment, etc. than a normal NPC, as listed in CRB under Gamemastering.)
Given that, your vampire rogue 5 is actually CR 7 (5 plus 2 for the template), meaning that it fits in with a level 7 party. After the party hits level 9.5, the vampire gets one free level, so it's level 6. After that (hand-wave here: I assume only one free level, as the non-class portion of the monster is used up at this point), progression proceeds as normal, with the vampire lagging one level behind the rest of the party.
This fits neatly with simply applying the template directly as a level adjustment to any standard race, provided that you close the gap using the template's CR adjustment rather than the entire base monster.
Honestly, the whole "monsters as PCs" thing works better in this system than I thought. It won't work for everything, but that's kind of a given.
Bottom line is, LA didn't work very well, and it works even less well for PF. But PF's equivalent mechanism works pretty well, subject to some of the same problems with casters and other classes with features people would like to see stack. For those people, I recommend making a custom progression or class archetype to fit the race.
LA -could- be made to work if a race/species was designed as a race/species with an LA and care was taken to make sure that, say, a Bugbear with LA +2 or whatever was designed such that a Bugbear Fighter 1 was around as good as a level 3 PC and a Bugbear Fighter 15 was about as good as a level 17 PC, and so on. The whole system is much harder for casters because lost caster levels are harder to compensate for, but start from there.
The problem was that savage races in 3.5 weren't designed that way at all. They were designed to be used as monsters, and then LA was a kludge applied on top. In the best cases, LA produced something that was a reasonable approximation of an appropriate character. In general it produced something that didn't scale correctly with level, or allowed unholy terrors of characters at low levels - often both on the same character.
For LA to work well, I really think that you need to design a race with it in mind, and think of the race as almost more like a class that you can only take at first level. You're still going to run into problems with spellcasters (for the same reason that Barbarian 1/Fighter 1 is typically a more powerful character than Barbarian 1/Sorcerer 1), but it's a place to start. Another reasonable way to go about it - and the way I like the most - is to just whittle the race down to a LA +0 race, then make anything else you feel is important a racial feat. If any of those things are things you think are REALLY VITAL, you can force characters of the chosen race to pick them as their first feat.
That comes to the next problem: In RAW, such monster PCs would always have the same base stats. There's no mechanism for converting those stats into racial modifiers. I suggest starting with the d20srd rules for monsters as races, as it does a half-decent job as covering problems like attribute variance for creatures with exceptionally high or low stats.I can help you here. Let's look at page 6 of the Bestiary under Ability Scores:
Unless otherwise indicated, a creature’s ability scores represent the baseline of its racial modifiers applied to scores of 10 or 11.
So, to get the modifiers, subtract 10 from all even-valued scores and subtract 11 from all odd-valued scores. Now a PC from those races can spend his/her point buy and then reapply the modifiers. This does mean that there are no ability increases to be freely allocated for the base racial HD, but that's probably for the best.
That works, at least for point buy. Not as neat for the old 3d6. (braces for rant about rolling ability scores)
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That works, at least for point buy. Not as neat for the old 3d6. (braces for rant about rolling ability scores)
Why doesn't it work for rolled stats? Roll, assign stats, add modifiers.
If a minotaur has an 18 Str in the Bestiary, that means he has a +8 racial bonus. You add that to a Minotaur PC regardless of stat gen method.