If limit hasn't been reached, I'm in.
* My Name is Immaterial groans inwardly that he's been sucked in by another of Taw's games.
BWAHAHA
FD: You mean like the extra points for taking lower-tier classes in your game, right? If so, sure.
No, no. I meant
LA Buyoff. Unless you're letting people with T4/5 classes take the LA without the usual penalty? Basically, how LA works is that if you take a template on character creation, it changes your Effective Character Level, which determines your threat level and how much XP you effectively have. This means that it increases both the difficulty of the enemies the character faces as well as the treasure they earn, but most importantly they require their ECL worth of XP to advance to their next class level.
So for example, a Warlock 1 with a LA+2 template would have an ECL of 3, because their template effectively makes them equivalent to a LA+0 race with three class levels (though, notably, they lack all of the normal features of leveling up -- bonus feats, class features, &c. What this means is that in a party of CL1 characters, where the rest of the party would need 1,000 xp to advance to class level 2, the character with a LA+2 template would require 6,000 xp to advance to class level 2, which would be how much a CL3 character (remember that with LA+2 a CL1 character's ECL is 3) would need to advance to CL4.
Hence, it's fairly obvious what sort of tradeoff LA is. It plays several roles: RP facilitator, by creating unique opportunities; short-term benefit (at CL 1 you are more powerful); and very long-term benefit provided LA buyoff is allowed (aka at 20th level a character with a template who payed the XP cost to buy off their levels would be more powerful than if they had never taken LA). The tradeoff is that it takes a character with LA vastly more time to advance in level, even if buyoff is allowed, which in turn means that they are slower to acquire class features and have to rely on the raw bonuses from their template to hold their own past the point where it's a real advantage. This is especially detrimental to casters, who desperately need class levels to increase their potency in combat.
Also, a couple templates for approval/rejection. I'm working on ideas for a warlock. I'll give a basic summary of each so you don't need to dig through books.
It's listed as LA+2 (cohort), which would mean that normally it's only used for NPC characters, but to my understanding it's pretty commonly houseruled as a PC template.
Size: Tiny
Speed: 15'/fly 60' (Good)
DR 5/cold iron
Low-light vision
Special attack: Sleep songs: Lullaby: 20' radius, DC 14 Will save, effects as per the spell. Successful save prevents having to save again for 24 hours. DC is CHA-based. Sleep: Requires two or more Petals separated by no more than 100' to be singing in unison, AKA will never be used by a PC. If you did for some reason create a situation where a NPC Petal sang with the PC, 100' radius DC 14 will save to avoid being affected as per the spell.
Ability Modifiers: STR: -8; DEX: +10; CON: +4; INT: +4; CHA: +8
Obviously BAB, HD, saves, &c. would be based off of the class. It's pretty clear what the tradeoff is: LA+2 means harder levelups (unless you decide to give it for free), the painfully low STR and Tiny size means that the character basically has almost no gear (hence being a warlock), but will also have decent size and dex bonuses to AC (hope you're never flatfooted).
So the path here would be a combination of party face thanks to high CHA and long-ranged support in combat.
And actually, if you bar that, I might just go plain-jane human, since most of the other low-LA templates are either basic racial variations or complete absurdity. That said, I'll say this: If you allow me to take that template, I would sincerely recommend NOT making it free LA (aka I take the normal penalty), but DO allow LA Buyoff (meaning that as per
this, I can pay an XP cost equal to [(current ECL -1) x 1,000] to reduce my LA by 1 at every third class level.
Author
Topic: Dungeons and Dragons 3.5: The Order of the Silver Wolf OOC--Great Revival (Read 27737 times)