I know how it's supposed to work, officially, but I'm looking for an alternative for Pathfinder. There are no level adjustments in Pathfinder, but there are. It's confusing. They have examples where if you're using a regular party, and what you're supposed to do if you add in a CR creature of the same or higher level, and what you're technically supposed to do if you use races that have more Racial Points than the base core races of 10 pts or less (eg. driders are 35 RP, therefore +3 LA).
In the Advanced Races Guide, we see a lot of creatures are that extra level. Thankfully Pathfinder Society have allowed tieflings and aasimars to go without theirs now, as opposed to the "start at negative XP equal to half of what it takes to reach 2nd." Others, however, such as the drow, driders, and practically all plant races that are coming out, all seem to be fairly expensive. Even the newly released books are starting to show how they cost for what they do. It's really quite interesting.
However, I don't like the idea of "Oh, just send higher CR at them every five levels until all of their adjustments are bought off." That seems a bit much. Basically, if you're +2 LA, then CR 2-3 are constantly sent after you until you're 5 HD. Then CR 6 are sent after you until you're 10 HD. Then it's as per normal. The "buy-off" is that your abilities just don't matter as you level up. You just had high level grinding to worry about until then. From that point on, everything's normal.
What I'm looking for is an alternate system. There are three XP groups that you can use: Slow, Medium, and Fast. Medium is what they use for Adventure Paths so that'll be what we can use as a base.
So, if I went to a slower progression, what would be the appropriate number of HD levels a PC would have to go up to buy off the adjustments? Right now the XP looks to up by half for each level (eg. to hit level 2, it's 2000 XP for Medium and is 3000 XP for Slow, while level 3 is 5000 for Medium and 7500 for Slow).
Right now I've got an entire party of PCs that have powerful races that are about 2-3 LA higher than the module, and we're taking the slow progression. Just wondering how long I should keep them on that route. My thought was for every 3 HD levels of slow progression, it'd eat up 1 level adjustment.
Does that seem fair, or should I be doing something different that might be more proper. I just don't want to be cheating my players out of XP. However, at the same time, I don't want the fights to be a cake walk either.
