Level Adjustment, Does It Really Even Matter?

[Fouredged Sword]

Honestly the fast and dirty way to do things so that they are somewhat balanced is to use the highest of the creatures hd, cr, or spellcaster level as the ecl for a player who wants to play a monster race. It is not perfectly balanced, but no more so than classes.

[Jormengand]

Illumians are still awesome (they’re my favorite race overall), but it’s a little misleading to talk about a bonus feat making humans good and then say that illumians are like humans turned up to 11. They’re both good, but they’re good for completely different reasons despite having a mostly-fluff link to each other.

Oh yeah, but it's just funny how one of the most powerful races aside from humans are another kind of human. I was more saying that illumians take your power level up to 11, rather than the stuff that humans get (although it's not necessarily dissimilar, depending on what you're using that feat on).

[Nifft]

Humans are good because they get the feat and the feat got boosted with power creep. In core-only or similar power you'd usually want a +2 over a feat.

The Human bonus feat is also good for reducing the prereq pain of PrCs, and PrCs scale up in value as non-Core options are introduced.

You're right that the splat-feats introduce power-creep, but they're not the only power creep which being Human can enable.

[Jack_Simth]

Not as many as you want. Any does not mean every.

Ah, but someonenoone11 said "dip".

If I have 1 or 2 levels each in six classes, and ten levels in one class as a human... I'm not taking any XP penalty (the level 10 class doesn't count, and all the others are within one level of each other). If I do the same as a dwarf, that level 10 class needs to be "fighter" for that to apply.

[P.F.]

In my experience people, given their druthers, will exclude the multiclass penalties. It's a softened holdover from a 2nd edition rule people had been routinely ignoring anyway.

In that ruleset, humans were easily the best race in the game, except that level-limits were such obvious bull**** that no one wanted to enforce them. Games were played at levels below the limits, neatly sidestepping the issue, or the rule was thrown out, either case-by case (elves can't be ninjas because they would be too good? Wtfever, you can play your drow ninja) or entirely (yeah we're not doing that, just make the character you want to play). Without level limits, humans were easily the worst race in the game.

Flash forward to 3.x, humans are considered the best race in the game, and people ignore the race/class restrictions for the opposite reason: humans obviously don't need the help. The bonus feat is worth every bit of any other race's racial abilities, why should other races be penalized for novel class constructions?

Hence why paffinder chose to abandon this rule entirely--hardly anyone was using it anyway.

[Jack_Simth]

Hence why paffinder chose to abandon this rule entirely--hardly anyone was using it anyway.

It morphed into a bonus when taking your favored class... and you get to pick your own favored class irrespective of race (although sometimes there's extra bonus).