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Thanks for your response.

I think the Extra True Vessel feat could be useful even for a character....especially in Planescape where half-celestials do show up. If the party will be travelling to a Lower Plane, it might be useful to have a human vessel or something, so that the presence of the half-celestial doesn't bring the might of an Abyssal lord down on the characters, for instance..

Anger of Angels has been really good (as has the Book of Exalted Deeds) for generating some cool ideas...

With regards to the Angel races in Anger of Angels, I was a bit confused by the approach for Level Adjustment.

Normally (at least according to Savage Species), you have your HD adjustment, plus your level adjustment, which equal your ECL.

In Anger of Angels, am I to take it that the listed Level Adjustment is actually the ECL of the characters? ie. A 1st level seraphim cleric would be appropriate in a group of 10th lvl characters?

Or is it actually just the LA? In that case, the 1st lvl seraphim would actually only actually be a good match for a party of lvl 14 characters?

If it's the later, the adjustments seem a bit high. The powers that go with these angels aren't that strong, and it would mean that many of them have LA's twice as large as their HD...

Banshee

Aren't the abilities some of the Angel types have rather weak for such high LA's? Could a Seraphim lvl 1 cleric survive in a party with lvl 14 characters of normal races? I think he/she would be at a significant disadvantage.

With that Seraphim, for example, as a level 1 cleric, he's going to have an average of 5d8+0 hp (26 hp average), +4 to some skill checks, a natural AC bonus, some minor elemental resistances (not very effective at that level.......ie. a spell such as Cone of Cold might average 49 dmg at that level, and due to the low HD, the save would have an excellent chance of failing, and the resistance is not nearly high enough to prevent the character from being killed in one round) , DR (completely ineffective at lvl 14), and a few other minor abilities and spells.

A human cleric at lvl 14, on the other hand, is going to have 14d8 hp (66.5 hp average), turning, and lvl 7 spells, including protection from elements and numerous other powerful divine spells, and a BAB of something like +9 or 10.

Maybe it's not a problem with the races in Anger of Angels so much as the current method of calculating LAs that we are forced to work with....

Banshee

I do think they've got a number of useful abilities....and I'd forgotten about their Outsider immunities. Even with a feat, however, I don't consider the spell resistance of 14 as a lvl 1 character adventuring with lvl 14 characters to be very high. The problem is that if you assume that most opponents are between levels 10 and 15, those opponents need to roll between a 1 and a 5 on a D20 in order to break through the resistance.

I guess I'd have to try one out in play and see how it comes out.

Very cool book though. I'm going to need to redo the hierarchy to take into account the other celestials which have been released (ie. lupinals, firre eladrins, tulani, etc.). But a lot of things I can use in my Planescape campaign. At various times over the last 7 years we've had two half-celestials, a few aasimar, and some tieflings, and the book has a lot of material which would be useful for them.

One celestial I'm surprised nobody's converted yet is the Aagathinon from 2nd Ed.

Banshee

Oh, I understand.....I figured they were probably limited so you couldn't use the others.

Regardless, you did a great job with the book. Don't take the issues that I've brought up as outright complaints....I'm just trying to offer constructive criticism. The races are cool......but I've been just concerned with the LA's. That said, it might be as much about the method of calculating LAs and ECLs that has been created by WotC as anything.

The current method gives very little value to monster HD.....which means that all the special abilities get tacked on later, and as a result you can have creatures with tonnes of abilities, but which will die quickly in two hits.

Most of the angels in Anger of Angels seem to be affected by this. Due to the high LAs but low HD, you'll have many characters with 3 HD adventuring with parties that are in the level 8-9 range. At that range, the spell resistance, damage resistance, and elemental resistance have limited effectiveness, because for spell resistance opponents would have enough levels to punch through it, for damage resistance, many opponents have access to magic weapons which negates the DR, and for elemental resistance, the characters have bad enough saves and low enough resistance that spells will punch through the resistance.....and given that the saves are pretty low, the character might very well fail and die with one attack.

I don't necessarily see that as a fault of the book, the more I consider it, so much as a flaw in the method that has been provided to us to calculate LAs.

Banshee

Is it possible that a scaling LA might work better? I was thinking on this yesterday.

What if it was easy to add the first point of LA, or the first few points, but the more that you add, the more you need to add to get the next point of LA?

ie. if a character has one extra ability, they might get an LA of +1.

But if the character is to be pushed to an LA of +2, they'd have to add 2 more abilities.

This would mean that for characters with a few abilities, they're still penalized by LAs, but if characters have more abilities, the LA isn't increasing quite as quickly, thus resulting in characters that aren't running around with 25 hp with a party of lvl 12 characters as an example.

My numbers here aren't exact....just to try and provide a basic idea of the concept I as toying with..

Banshee