D&D 5E Multiclassing in Next

The problem is that, in 3E, the XP paid for that level were much higher than if (for example) it has been acquired as a F1, or a F5.

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The XP cost is essentially immaterial- the REAL cost of multiclassing into a new class is the lack of access to higher level abilities within your original base class.

IOW, whether your fighter PC takes Wiz1 at 2nd level or 19th, the most important cost isnt the XP cost, it is the opportunity cost of losing the list of benefits gained as a level 20 fighter. (And as Dandu might point out, this is more obvious if it's a Wizard dipping for Ftr1...)

Kamikaze Midget said:

The risk is also that the same fighter who takes Level 16 of Cleric only gets first level magic that's useless against the 16th-level undead he's fighting.

(...)

The problem can be partially solved like this: you have a character level that measures your overall vertical power. Your assortment of class levels measures your overall horizontal power.

(...)

The above illustrates one of the more critical problems with this: you loose one of your main motivators for gaining levels.

(...)

So there needs to be some refinement of that idea.

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I think this post was very good!

For me the idea that a 15th level Fighter taking a level of Wizard should get a 16th level Wizard ability goes against my suspension of disbelief big time, and it's very much a dealbreaker (just for using multiclassing in the game, not for 5e as a whole!).

It's the old example of "pianist surgeon" IRL. There is nothing in the world that prevents an experienced surgeon to pick up piano lessons, or a professional pianist to enroll to a medical school.

But the 15th level surgeon just can't pretend to suddenly play piano at the same level of the professional pianist, even if all the surgeon can play is ONE song. And the professional pianist just cannot be able to suddenly perform a surgery at professional level, even if it's just one specific surgery. They both can try something but their results just cannot be quickly brought up to a professional level, by a large margin.

So rather than sacrificing reason and believability for "balance", let's go back to your first sentence (highlighted) and see that what the 5e designers really need to do, is make that 1st level magic still useful at 16th level.

The problem is really only with damaging spell, but if gamers keep reasoning only with "damage output" in mind, this is going nowhere. A Fighter should not be entitled to suddenly pick up a 100-dmg spell because it's plain ridiculous. But if the same Fighter picks up Burning Hands, this has only a very minor impact against a 16th-level monster. So what? It just means that this choice is a bad strategic choice for a Fighter, and what is wrong with having some bad strategic choices in the game? Why does every conceivable strategic choice always be as good as others? Trying to be a professional surgeon and a professional pianist is not normally a good life strategy (tho there have been rare people successful at both, but not starting their second career after 20 years in the first) why should it be so in D&D?

But OTOH is said Fighter picks other spells that by their nature are not damage-dealers but useful for other circumstances, there are actually dozens of valid options. Or he can even indeed pick up Burning Hands, and use it against minions only (which we know will still be a threat at high levels in 5e, so it's not a moot point...).

Edit: I think I meant to quote some other part of Li Shenron's post above. I may come back and fix that later!

Li Shenron said:

But OTOH is said Fighter picks other spells that by their nature are not damage-dealers but useful for other circumstances, there are actually dozens of valid options. Or he can even indeed pick up Burning Hands, and use it against minions only (which we know will still be a threat at high levels in 5e, so it's not a moot point...).

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There might be something we can steal from 4E's race designs here.

4E's racial powers were generally designed to be moderately useful, but to scale inherently.

There are a variety of abilities in D&D that affect the game in ways that aren't affected by the maths scaling of to-hits and hit points. These abilities can be as useful to a 20th level character as they were at 1st level.

These kinds of abilities:

1) Getting re-rolls in specific circumstances. D&D Next already has a generic mechanic advantage/disadvantage for this. A class feature that grants advantage or forces disadvantage is useful at any level.

2) Extra actions. Class abilities that allow you to combaine or add actions scale well because you can always pick your best actions.

3) Conditional bonuses. A +1 or +2 is nearly always welcome, and in the bounded accuracy system is a big deal. However, this is where some abuses of 3E's system have crept in - it doesn't work where all the classes simply add differing amounts to the same things. The bonuses involved need to be relatively unique to class-specific effects, and where classes overlap, they cannot be front-loaded into level 1 multiclassing.

4) Special forms of movement.

5) . . . er, help me out, I'm sure there are tons, but I need to stop for now

. . . if classes each have some of these abilities, and multi-class options picked them out and favoured them, this would go some way to making multi-class dipping relevant at any level.

Some of the stuff mentions that it may take a few levels to get signature abilities. I believe somewhere else said that a level of Wizard may only get the ability to use wands. Which could mean only 1st level spells after 2 levels, or only combat superiority or sneak attack after 3 levels. Though I am not sure how this could mean that the higher level you enter a class the more powerful that one level is.

I suspect there will be 2 tables of multiclass advancement, one based on number of levels in the class, and the other based on character level.

Li Shenron said:

So rather than sacrificing reason and believability for "balance", let's go back to your first sentence (highlighted) and see that what the 5e designers really need to do, is make that 1st level magic still useful at 16th level.

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NO

GOD

NO

NO

NO

This philosophy is what got us quadratic wizards in 3E. It's what got us into this mess in the first place. "Glitterdust is always useful! Grease is always useful!" Well by the time the wizard hits level 16, he has like 30 useful spells! He's not a limited caster, he's the goddamn Batman!

If spell slots are just as useful at level 16 as they are at level 1, Wizards better get them reeaaaaalllll slowly (like, starting with 4 at first level and moving to 8 at 20th, with no spell being higher than level 3).

If conceivably 1 level of Wizard did give access to 1st level spells (which may not necessarily be the case), it could be at later level "you get a first level spells that you can prepare as a higher level spell". If there's one thing we haven't seen in the system yet, is preparing lower level spells as higher level that they've mentioned. So it's possible that a fighter who took a few wizard levels might do 10d6 damage with Burning Hands (which would probably be less than what they can do with Combat Superiority Deadly Strike to a single target), even though I'd feel they'd be better off using their prepared spells on something else like Expeditious Retreat, Jump or Shield.

It should be up to the Wizard's player to make his low-level spells useful later on in his life, not something hard-coded into the spell.

And a Fighter with 3 levels of Wizard should not be getting more OOMPF out of a spell than a 3rd level Wizard, if for no other reason than it makes "Level" a meaningless term. Why should levels of Fighter make his Burning Hands better? My years of bowling don't make me a better lawyer, after all.

So, if a 10th level fighter / 3rd level wizard can't cast any better than a 3rd level wizard, can they fight better than a 10th level fighter?

How about a 10th level fighter / 3rd level rogue compared to a 10th level fighter (or 3rd level rogue, whatever)?

Fighter/Barbarian?

That's a heck of a double standard... and more and more reason not to use 3rd edition's multiclass model by default, to dodge it

Anyone can learn to fight, not everyone can bend reality to their will with a few words and gestures.

The models presented for XP buy-in so far look like disasters waiting to make land-fall. With those models eventually the math plays out so that it becomes empirically superior to dump 10,000 XP into a handful of multi-class levels instead of a fraction of a single higher level - even if it is just for the sake of hit dice and attack bonuses.

No, if multi-classing even vaguely resembles what the articles have already described then it is going to be a hard level-for-level trade. The only way to make it work is to have the worth of multi-classing escalate based on two variables: 1.) Total number of levels in [Multi-Class Class XYZ] and 2.) Total character level - IE F10/(MC)MU2 = Level 12.

Basically having 1 level of Multi-Class Magic-User means something when you are F1/(MC)MU1 (Level 2) and something different 4 levels later when you make F5/(MC)MU1 (Level 6). F4/(MC)MU2 should be demonstrably different from F5/(MC)MU2 as well, but completely comparable in power level due to both being 6-level builds.

I can't see any reliable scaling math that holds up over time free-range. I think they'll at least need to be a constraint that you can't have more Multi-Class levels than your primary class levels. That might at least make things manageable. Even then, though, to make sure things scale relevantly with level trades you'd need multiple tables: one for each level of Multi-Class (Whatever Class), with an relationship of character level vs. benefits.

For example:
<table> <caption>Multi-Class Cleric Level 1</caption> <thead> <tr> <th>Character Level</th> <th>Benefit</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>Channel Divinity 1d8/day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>Channel Divinity 1d8/day, 1 Minor Spell</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>Channel Divinity 1d8/day, 1 Minor Spell, 1 First Level Spell /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>Channel Divinity 1d8/day, 1 Minor Spell, 2 First Level Spell /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day, 2 Minor Spells, 2 First Level Spells /day</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

Etc. Ad Nauseam up to Character Level 19.

Then you'd need another table like this:

<table> <caption>Multi-Class Cleric Level 2</caption> <thead> <tr> <th>Character Level</th> <th>Benefit</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day, 2 Minor Spells, 2 First Level Spells /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day; 2 Minor Spells; 3 First Level, 1 Second Level Spells /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day; 2 Minor Spells; 3 First Level, 2 Second Level Spells /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day; 2 Minor Spells; 3 First Level, 3 Second Level Spells /day</td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td>Channel Divinity 2d8/day; 2 Minor Spells; 3 First Level, 3 Second Level, 1 Third Level Spells /day</td> </tr> </tbody></table>

All the way up to Level 18. Then you need a Multi-Class Cleric Level 3 table that runs from levels 6 - 17, a Multi-Class Cleric Level 4 table from 8 - 16 ... up to a Multi-Class Cleric Leve 10 entry that's only one row: Character level 20: Benefits comparable to losing levels 11-20 of your primary class.

Like I said, metrics that don't create obvious scenarios where Multi-Classing is categorically better or worse than playing a class straight are going to be ridiculously tightly controlled data-point by data-point, not some willy-nilly combination scale like 1st Ed or 3rd Ed used.

1E scale was weak sauce except for level caps: two CL3/MU3 in a party were nowhere near as powerful as one CL6 and one MU6 (yes, I know I have the XP by class scale over-simplified).

3E scale was broken except that dedicated casters were Quadratic and thusly head-and-shoulders better than any non-casting multi-classer while multi-classing was terrible for casters.

Let's face it, Dungeons and Dragons has never had a balanced, elegant, or effective multi-classing system. The most popular variants were only held together by existing rules defects that nobody wants to see come back. Doing it right is going to be ridiculously difficult and detail-oriented work.

- Marty Lund