Multiclass and power swap feats

[AndrewDB]

The power swap feats all specify: "Prerequisites: Any class-specific multiclass feat". So when you retrain one MC feat to another, you're still meeting the prerequisite.

You seem to reach that conclusion by ignoring or overlooking the class-specific qualifier. The qualifier is there to prevent that conclusion.

Read "any class-specific multiclass feat" as "any multiclass feat specific to the class you are swaping powers with."

[webrunner]

Originally Posted by AndrewDB

You seem to reach that conclusion by ignoring or overlooking the class-specific qualifier. The qualifier is there to prevent that conclusion.

Read "any class-specific multiclass feat" as "any multiclass feat specific to the class you are swaping powers with."

There are Class-Specific Multiclass feats, such as "Defender of the Wild", and there are non-class-specific multiclass feats, like the Net/Bola/Whip ones from Dragon.

[AndrewDB]

There are class-specific multiclass feats, such as "Defender of the Wild", and there are non-class-specific multiclass feats, like the Net/Bola/Whip ones from Dragon.

You're so right. I assigned meaning to class-specific that I shouldn't have, and my explanation was wrong. When I read multiclassing for the first time, there were no non-class-specific multiclass feats. My thought process at that time needed to justify the class-specific qualifier in the absence of non-class-specific multiclass feats. That's why I defined it the way I did. I followed that definition erroneously, even after I learned about non-class-specific multiclass feats. Thanks for redirecting me on that definition.

However, I would continue to stand by the conclusion for other reasons. You shouldn't retrain a class-specific multiclass feat and retain a power obtained from the Novice, Acolyte or Adept power swap feats. All three state that you can replace an existing power with another power from "the class you multiclassed in." That wording seems to tie the new powers to the specific multiclass. No longer having that multiclass creates a conflict.

Unfortunately, it's not clearly defined that way. I don't think you can definitively extrapolate the intent of the rule without going to WotC.

Strictly addressing the OP, I don't think the retraining rules were intended to address players who want to re-multiclass into a previously unavailable class. I would echo Gargoyle's comment, but then let the player retcon into the previously unavailable multiclass.

The intent of the retraining rules is to allow you to change feats, powers and skills, once per level, so that you can change a feat, power, or skill that you're not using or doesn't fit into your concept like you thought it would. The idea is that you can fix a bad choice, but you can only change a little bit at a time to preserve campaign continuity. It would be jarring if players were forgetting lots of old abilities and learning lots of new ones at once.

[Tony Vargas]

Retraining lets a player change his mind about past character creation/development decisions, without overly impacting the continuity of the character. It allows flexibility while retaining some verisimilitude.

OTOH, When you introduce new feats or new classes wholesale to the game world, with the rationale that they've always been there, it would make sense to let players do complete and equally retroactive re-builds of thier characters to conform to the new way the world has always been.

[AndrewDB]

Unfortunately, it's not clearly defined that way (that multiclass power-swap feats are tied to the original class-specific multiclass feat). I don't think you can definitively extrapolate the intent of the rule without going to WotC.

Speaking of extrapolations, from prior readings, discussions and designer interviews, I always believed you couldn't change a multiclass class. It never occurred to me that you could retrain a class-specific multiclass feat before reading this thread. The concept opened a whole new realm of possibilities to me. I started to get excited.

Then I went home and re-read the multiclass feats section. To the point, "once you take a multiclass feat, you can't take a class-specific feat for a different class." That seems to encompass retraining.

Unfortunately, the retraining section doesn't explicitly excluded class-specific multiclasss feats. In spite of that, keeping a swapped power after retraining the associated class-specific multiclass feat, or class-specific multiclass retraining in general, doesn't seem possible.

Again, strictly addressing the OP, simply let the player retcon into the previously unavailable multiclass.