D&D 3E/3.5 Powers Multiclassing: Putting a little 3e in our 4e powers

Here's an idea I just thought of to try and allow a player to blend their power selection more with their multiclass.

Whenever a player gains a level, they can choose to gain a level in their main class or their multiclass. You can still only have 1 level of a multiclass. When taking the 1st level of a multiclass, they can choose 1 encounter or 1 daily. From then on, they gain powers depending on their current class levels. You can never have more levels in your multiclass than you do in your primary class.

For example, a 1st level fighter has decided to multiclass into rogue when he hits 2nd level. He is now a Fighter 1/Rogue 1. He doesn't gain the class abilities of the rogue or anything. However, he decides to pick up one of the rogue's 1st level daily powers. However, he does NOT get the fighter's 2nd level utility.

At 3rd level, our Fighter 1/Rogue 1 has to take another level of fighter, so he is now a Fighter 2/Rogue 1. A 2nd level fighter gains 1 utility power, so he goes ahead and selects that. However, he does not get the 3rd level encounter power he would normally get at 3rd level.

At 4th level the fighter takes another level of Fighter, and is now Fighter 3/Rogue 1. He can now pick up his Fighter 3 encounter power. At 5th level he takes another level of Rogue, now a Fighter 3/Rogue 2, and picks up a 2nd level utility power from the rogue.


So in general, the multiclass is getting powers a little more often than the normal class, but is not getting access to the highest level powers. This was how it worked in 3e, and in general it was way underpowered with regards to spellcasters. But there are several concepts in 4e that may help to make it work.

1) Powers scale much better than they did in 3e. A 1st level power can still be useful even at level 30. Since your to hit roll is not based on the level of the power, they can still be effective.
2) More powers is actually a decent benefit. In 3e, multi class casters often got a tons of spells, which did nothing because combats were a few rounds. In 4e, combats last longer. So even if a multiclass character doesn't have the really nice encounter powers of the main class, he has more, which means he doesn't have to resolve to his at-wills quite as fast. That's a solid tradeoff.

I think this could be a good way to create more blending concepts than the standard multiclass system. I don't think it would be underpowered, the question is would certain power combinations by overpowered?

Could you still take a feat to gain access to the dumbed down ability of your multiclass class? It would be silly to spend feats to switch out powers, since you just get the powers anyway, but class features is one of the more important things to me when it comes to wanting to multiclass; the features, for me, are really what define the class.

Then again, I think this system would support a feat structure that I also think could work under current multiclassing rules; several different feats for each class, allowing you to spend more than one feat to get more dumbed-down class features (instead of just being stuck with the one the developers chose).

Anyway, though, I like what you have here. I'd be interested to see how it actually plays out. I'm inclined to think that the more powers one might have would screw up the 4E system not necessarily in terms of balance, but rather in terms of how many non-at-will powers you're supposed to be using in a given encounter. The reason character's don't gain a lot of per-encounter powers is to encourage good resource management skills and uses of at-wills. The more encounter powers available, the fewer important decisions the player needs to make (of course this final point could be easily up for debate).

~ fissionessence

I think you will unbalance the character. The 3.x multiclassing is a concept that really does not work well(imho). It is time for you to stay with 3.x or embrace the new 4e system and play it as written for a while.