D&D 2E 2e Multiclassing Play Balance without Level Limits

[TwoSix]

The demihuman level limits are there to enforce AD&D's human-centric genre of sword & sorcery fantasy. AD&D assumes lots of self-interested adventurers running around the fantasy world, the most successful of whom will eventually become the region's local lords, patriarchs, wizards, and other rulers. (It also assumes that a given player might by running any number of characters, so having your non-human PCs suddenly hit a ceiling is no big deal — when that happens, you just keep on running your human characters for the high-level, dominion-ruling or planes-hopping adventures, only brining a demihuman out of semi-retirement when the evening's adventure is a low- or mid-level caper in need of that demihuman's unique talents.)

OSE's solution is probably the simplest and best one, humans simply get racial bonuses as well.

 

[Jer]

As a balancing mechanism I never saw level limits actually work mechanically. Most AD&D campaigns IME didn't get to a level where a level cap would actually matter - any balancing that happened was in the imagination of the players who were wistfully thinking that this time they'd actually get to level 10 instead of having the game break apart by level 6.

If I were trying to think of a way to balance out removing level caps from demihumans, I'd probably make it a rule that the bonus XP from high ability scores only applies to humans and also open up multiclassing to humans rather than enforcing dual classing on humans.

(The high level campaigns I was a part of/ran were always BECMI games - which only had a level cap on demihumans in the very technical sense that once they hit their level cap their XP went towards improving their "attack rank" which clearly is not the same as a level because look it uses letters instead of numbers! In BECMI the problem of people only wanting to play demihumans was resolved by restricting demihumans to specific classes, but even as that loosened up in later BECMI with additions of things like Dwarf-Clerics, Elves without magic etc. it still didn't seem to lead to everyone wanting to be a demihuman IME)

 

[dmhelp]

I was going to have tiers of ability changes to balance the races:
Dwarves -1 dex, gnomes -1 con, halflings -1 str
Elves no ability mods
Half-elves +1 dex
Humans + 1 to three ability scores

I was going to only allow PHB multiclass options (F/M, F/C, F/D, F/T, F/M/T, F/M/C, M/C, M/T, C/R, C/T).

Baldur's Gate EE and Icewind Dale EE are an example of an environment with unlimitted multiclass advancement. A lot of times recommended classes end up being F/M, F/M/T, F/M/C, or M/C if you exclude the dual classing recommendations. But they also end up giving multi class fighters weapon specialization.

So if you have weapon specialization, wizard specialist, custom single class thief bonuses, and perhaps something for single classed priests....
And you were only going to allow F/M, F/C, F/D, F/T, F/M/T, F/M/C, M/C, M/T, C/R, and C/T....
Should some of those options be removed to achieve class balance?

 

[James Gasik]

The demihuman level limits are there to enforce AD&D's human-centric genre of sword & sorcery fantasy. AD&D assumes lots of self-interested adventurers running around the fantasy world, the most successful of whom will eventually become the region's local lords, patriarchs, wizards, and other rulers. (It also assumes that a given player might by running any number of characters, so having your non-human PCs suddenly hit a ceiling is no big deal — when that happens, you just keep on running your human characters for the high-level, dominion-ruling or planes-hopping adventures, only brining a demihuman out of semi-retirement when the evening's adventure is a low- or mid-level caper in need of that demihuman's unique talents.)

But if you take away the level limits and class restrictions, humans have no advantages at all, and so the players will always play demihumans — which in turn means that the game-world will eventually be ruled by high-level demihumans, lording it over the human masses. It raises the question, why weren't the demihumans already in charge before PCs started running around and getting powerful?

(And the idea that it doesn't matter if the makeup of the PC party doesn't reflect the population of the game world, because the PCs are already outliers by virtue of being adventurers? That idea makes no sense in the context of an AD&D campaign, where it's built into the very foundations of the leveling system that gaining experience also advances you through the ranks in your character's society. Adventurers in AD&D are emphatically not outliers and fringe elements.)

That's the underlying logic, at any rate. So, to the question at hand: (1) are the multiclass combinations too good to allow unrestricted? and (2) what can we do for humans if we give their best two advantages to everybody?

It's easier for me to answer (2) first, as the 2e DMG already offers a great suggestion. If you're going to let demihumans pick any class and rise to any level, they have to pay for their other advantages somehow, and it has to be heavy enough that humans are worth considering (but not so heavy that demihumans aren't worth considering). The 2e DMG suggests making nonhuman PCs in such a campaign earn double the normal amount of XP to level up, and this works well enough given that the XP tables are exponential until 8th or 9th. A single-classed demihuman will be one level behind a single-classed human (at least until name level, when they begin to fall further behind). A double- or triple-classed demihuman will advance quite slowly, and it'll hurt a bit, but it won't feel untenably glacial until after name level.



2e, at least, is explicit about that being illegal. 1e didn't really need to point it out, because the sub-classes were examples of their class group. If an illusionist is a magic-user, and a magic-user/magic-user is patently absurd on the face of it, there should be no need to explain to players why a magic-user/illusionist multiclass is nonsense.

(2e also helpfully slots monks neatly into the priest group and bards into the rogue group, so you know where all the classes go. There are only ever five groups — warrior, wizard, priest, rogue, and psionicist — which handily limits the multiclassing and dual-classing possibilities.)

There is an instance where you can multiclass within the same group- the Complete Bard's Handbook allows for Multiclassed Bard/Thieves.

 

[Zardnaar]

I removed level limits and buffed humans. +1 ability score of their choice, +1 WP/NWP.

If you removed class restrictions I would add another +1 to one or two ability scores.