Effective character level

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I keep hearing this term, but I really don't know what it does...I do see it in my record screen sometimes, but is it real importent??

Can someone plz explain this term to me?
Thanks!

 

Drow have a level adjustment (LA) of 2. Therefore a 1st level Drow Fighter has an effective character level (ECL) of 3.

What this means in the IWD2 game is that you need to get more experience to go up a level. A 1st level Human needs to get to 1000XP to get to 2nd level. A 1st level Drow needs to get to 6000XP to get to 2nd level. Everything else in the game (feats, skill points, ability score increases) are based on your characters actual level. So regardless of the amount of XP a character has, a 5th level Human fighter has the same amount of feats and stuff as a 5th level Drow fighter (even though the Drow has an ECL of 7).

The LA that some races have represents how much more innately powerful they are over the 'normal' races. The Drow is a good example. Compare a Drow to a normal Elf and you will see that the Drow gets all the advantages and disadvantages that a regular Elf gets, plus it gets the Faerie Fire spell like ability, the +2 bonus to both INT and CHR, and darkvision instead of low-light vision. A non-leveled Drow would kick a non-leveled Elf's butt. The LA of the Drow (2) essentially says that a non-leveled Drow is just as powerful as a 2nd level whatever Elf.

I hope that this helps and that I was not too confusing.

MrGrouch

 

It is a way to give a handicap to characters that have too many innate advantages, in order to avoid people choosing only these advantageous characters exclusively. In IWD2, this means that an Aasimar or Tiefling, will always be 1 level lower than a normal character. A Drow will be 2 levels lower, and a Svirfneblin will be 3 levels lower.

In other words, if you start a human or other non-ECL Cleric (or other class) at the same time as a Drow Cleric, at any time in the game the Drow Cleric will be 2 levels lower than the other, and hence will have less spells, but he has his innate capabilites to compensate for that. Some of those capabilites are really good, while others may not be that interesting for the class you want.

 

I believe the ECL also applies to the average level of your party. What this means is that if you started a party with all special classes that they would get less experience points for kills. This is especially true for smaller parties and soloing.
IaaA

 

I believe that there is a mistake by Mr Grouch about exp points needed to reach 1 higher level with an ECL character.
Because I started a drow wizard and the exp points was like as follows:
Exp points : 5000
Exp points needed to reach next level : 6000

While a svirfneblin's is as follows:
Exp points : 5000
Exp points needed to reach next level : 10000

And this is for Aasimar and Tiefling:
Exp points : 2000
Exp points needed to reach next level : 3000

Normal Exp points for levels for normal races are as follows:
Level 1: 1000
Level 2: 3000
Level 3: 6000
Level 4: 10000

[ December 23, 2002, 08:03: Message edited by: ANAKHA the ALMIGHTY ]

 

Yes, you are right, I failed to take into account that the game starts you 1000XP away from gaining 2nd level regardless of what race you are. So let me amend my example a little bit.

Say you have two characters: a Human and a Drow fighter who have just achieved 2nd level. The Human now has 1000XP, and needs to get to 3000XP (thats 2000 more) to get his 3rd level of fighter. The Drow now has 6000XP, and needs to get to 10000XP (4000 more) to get to 3rd level. Assuming that both characters gain XP at an equal rate (which we know is next to impossible), the Drow will level up slower than the Human. When they both gain 2000 more XP (Human = 3000, Drow = 8000) the Human will now be 4th level, but the Drow remains a 3rd.

Once again, if I confused you more than you already were Roekemoes (or anyone else for that matter), I apologize.

MrGrouch