NPC Levels Instead of LA (3.5e Variant Rule)
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NPC Levels Instead of LA[edit]
I won't get into why the LA system sucks. There's plenty of people that have gone into much more detail that I care to. With the assumption the LA system needs help, this fix tries to make a minimal impact on the base rules and balance out LA (at least make it a bit better). It offers a bit of flexibility so that characters can still have HD that suit their build, but don't have as good class features as LA +0 races, which offsets their superior racial features.
How It Works[edit]
For each point of Level Adjustment a race would have, the player instead gets to pick an NPC class instead. Generally, this means they will pick Adept for some utility spellcasting, Expert for skills, or Warrior for BAB.
The only caveat is that the player sheouldn't be allowed to pick non-SRD skills with the expert class (no truenaming and iaijutsu focus, namely) and maybe have a restriction on Use Magic Device. It really depends on how powerful you want your game to be, but these skills may make the expert outclass the other two NPC classes.
In higher-powered games, it may be fine to offer a lowered-powered base class in place of LA, instead of just NPC classes. For example, a Very High powered game might offer High powered classes in place of LA. A drow might pick 2 levels of Rogue in this case before his "real" levels in Wizard.
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