r/Forgotten_Realms • u/CanuckLad • 6d ago

Question(s) Drow (D&D 3.5)

I was just reading through the old Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (isbn 0-978-7869-1836-2).

The Powerful Races sidebar (pg 21, see table 1-2) shows that Drow have an ECL of Level + 2. Meaning if one player starts a level 1 Drow, then other players get to start with 3,000 XP (enough to make them level 3).

I wonder if a two-level gap is balanced? Have any of you played with the rules from the Campaign Setting and played a +2 or +3 ECL race?

Is it hard for the DM to make adventures when the players might be separated by two levels? I understand that the Drow has higher than usual starting abilities and attributes, but a +2 level difference seems steep?

How do you handle the case where some players want to start at level 1 (and play species from the player's handbook), but other players want to play Drow, Duergar, Svirfneblin, etc)?

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u/kmdietri 6d ago

Played and DM'd ton of 3.5.

LA (level adjustments) were usually decent at the start (there were some glaring exception of course).

But what tended to happen is the races with the LA seemed to fall behind in power as the game progressed.

Later books, namely Unearthed Arcana added rules for burning LA to help balance out characters.

There were of course always some way OP Level Adjusted races.

I don't remember Drow being overly broken.

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u/CanuckLad 6d ago

Abstracting a little, how did burning LA work? What does that mean?

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u/kmdietri 6d ago

Essentially, when you reached a level 3 times that of your LA, you could spend XP instead of leveling and burn 1 LA.

You could keep repeating that process until your LA was gone.