D&D General Do We Really Need Multiclassing?

[ECMO3]

Sure, you don't see it. I do. Different tables and different experiences and all that. The players I have played with for over 40 years are min/maxers, and all about the power. If they can multiclass to boost slots to, say, Smite, or stack up Ability Score bonuses for whatever, or to do wonky combos with familiars, darkness, devilsight while combining that with a rogue's sneak attack, etc., its pure gamism (in my opinion, your experience may vary, etc.).

Yeah, I see that too. But my point is those guys are still less powerful than a single class Wizard, so I don't see the big deal with it.

Sure you can build a better Paladin getting more slots to smite and a familiar to give you advantage and a couple fighter levels to action surge .... and you are still less powerful than a Wizard and TBH even less powerful in melee than a Wizard that is optimized for melee.

Like in your example about your getting lost in the jungle. So, the only way the game could progress is for your character to all of a sudden be able to become a ranger, complete with "favored terrain: jungle" (how convenient!). I mean, great that that worked for your table, but that is jarring, and shouldn't be necessary. Why are hired guides so bad at "guiding"? Is everything left to the whims of the dice rolls vs ability checks? Why can't the environment, or the guides, actually do what they're supposed to be able to do without constantly getting lost?

I would not have been necessary if we bothered to get a player with a good wisdom and proficiency in Survival.

This can depend on the kind of table you are at. Some tables people get together and choose what to play in "session 0" based on roles and on such a table it would not have been a problem. We would have had a player with good Wisdom and proficiency in Survival .... or maybe even a Ranger at level 1.

This wasn't one of those tables though. This was more of a come as you are game, everyone show up with your character and no "party planning" before we headed off into the dungeon. I think in session 1 we had my Rogue, two Wizards and a Cleric. Multiclassing let us get the skills we needed as part of the story.

I'd be annoyed at "having" to dip to make the campaign actually work. But I'm glad you made lemonade.

For me personally, I would rather let the game drive where my character goes than have a role defined ahead of time - "you're the healer" or "you're the tank". I actually prefer games like that. That is not to say I don';t have an idea of what my role is when I start, but it often is not set in stone.

The TOA example was admitedly extreme, but I am doing that sort of thing regularly.

In the game I DM'd, session zero was about a FR campaign set in 900 DR, in the Moonshaes, with a very dark ages/celtic/mystery/low magic type setting, with less murderhobo, more RP, total sandbox, etc. All agreed upon by the players, and then two of the four go about multiclassing into some kind of spellcaster, except for the arcane archer, and fighter. So we had Sorcerer into Twilight Cleric, Rogue into Warlock for familiar stuff, etc. Completely against theme, completely at odds with session zero agreement, etc. All for the perceived ability to want to "win" DND by a couple of players at the table. I also realize that can happen in any version of DnD as well. But 5e makes is easier, again, in my experience.

I am guessing this game was point buy or standard array right? The best way to curtail this IME is to have people roll abilities and then have it so those rolls are fixed to an ability (you roll strength, what you get is your strength you can't move it to Wisdom, you roll dex, what you get is your dex .....). That does not hard limit your classes at all (although it can make it more difficult) but it severely limits your multiclass options.

Anyone who wants to win 5E really, really should play a Wizard. Trying to "win DND" without a Wizard is like trying to win the Indy 500 with a go cart. I don't care what multiclass combos you come up with an optimized Wizard is still going to take them to the woodshed.

And the single class advantage is only really a thing when you're playing up into the teens and close to 20th level, where the lost levels to MC might matter. Most games I've been in or run cap out after years around level 12ish or less. So the MC "penalty" isn't really one at all considering the additional benefits you can just bake in.

It is not a single-class advantage. It is a single-class Wizard advantage specifically.

Regardless, this is not really true IMO. In a 1-12 Adventure, multiclassing a character before 5th level will typically make 5th level itself much worse due to the substantial power increase that occurs there. The only exception to this is a multiclass Warlock that relies on Eldritch Blast. Just about every other character combo will be better with a single class 5th level character. Also 4th and 8th level will generally be worse for a multiclass character as compared to a single class and 6th, 10th and 12th level will sometimes be worse depending on what classes you are talking about. That is half of your 1-12 adventure.

And yes going from level 2 to level 12, I would put an optimized single-class Wizard up against anything at all at almost every possible multiclass combo at every single level in there. I always multiclass, but I can't think of a single build from 2-12 where I would be better as a multiclass character than as an optimized single-class Wizard.

 

[MGibster]

I personally dislike perfectly functional, non-exploitative options being banned outright. The only things I dislike more are fudging and pretending you allow everything while functionally banning things outright. So, if someone up-front says multiclassing is banned, that's a red flag for me.

The only time I ever banned anything in D&D was when I ran Ravenloft and restricted the player's choice of race (we didn't call them species back then) to what was available in the Player's Handbook. I've pretty much always allowed any species or class that was published in an official D&D book.

 

[ECMO3]

Others are imperfect but serviceable, e.g. most of the ways to be a "swordmage" are either "SWORDmage" or "swordMAGE," failing to truly integrate the parts into something harmonious and more-or-less equal. And others still are just crap, e.g. if you want to play a Warlord in 5e, your options are Battle Master (not actually a Warlord...), PDK (garbage), Mastermind (really not very good and not actually a Warlord), or something magical (emphatically not a Warlord.) With a lot of multiclassing, you can kludge together something vaguely Warlord-like, but if you're forced to stick to just subclasses and feats, you're SOL.

I would disagree with a couple things here.

You can build a Bladesinger to be an effective "swordmage" as long as by that you mean seamlessly interweaving spells and martial combat being great at niether but decent at both. You can also build a Bladesinger to be a SWORDmage or a swordMAGE by selecting different spells, feats and ASIs.

What you can't do with a Bladesinger is use your weapon as a focus or throw it and make a fireball but you can design your character to be a GISH and the mechanics of the platform supports that very well with a wide variety of playstyles. I have actually even seen a Heavy Armored Bladesinger that did that very well. Other Gish I would agree are more spell or magic focused based and mechanics don't support deviating from this.

I would also disagree that the PDK is garbage. It is a weak subclass for sure, but it has everything a normal fighter gets and that is not nothing. Then it brings the exact sort of thematics the Warlord had, albeit on a limited use basis. I am not suggesting it is awesome or powerful, but it is viable and thematic and more powerful than some of the Barbarian and Monk offerings.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's a valid point. How many classes does D&D need in your opinion?

You didn't ask me, but if I had my druthers, we would add somewhere between three and six additional classes. In preference order:

Warlord: I don't think I need to explain this one to you. You've been around long enough to know.
Avenger: One of the best new ideas to come out of 4e. Calling a subtype of paladin "avengers" was a slap in the face.
Shaman: One of the best reworks of an old idea to come out of 4e.
Swordmage: We're already at something like six different "fully a SWORD with a side of mage"/"fully a MAGE with a side of sword" options...I think the demand for something that actually integrates the two is strong enough to justify it.
Psion: Not really something I want, per se, but it's clear enough people in general do.
Summoner: I just really love summon/pet classes, and have in fact been working on my own homebrew version based on the 5e Warlock. ("Evolutions" for your otherworldly buddy take the place of Invocations.)

I think those cover most of the relatively large/chunky archetypes that remain not-covered. There is no such thing as being perfectly comprehensive, it is always possible to find more space to squeeze something in. I find that the first three of the above list would be enough to fill the gaps I consider egregious, and the last three are archetypes that either I want filled or that folks in general seem to want filled.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You can build a Bladesinger to be an effective "swordmage" as long as by that you mean seamlessly interweaving spells and martial combat

That is not what being a "swordmage" means to me.

What you can't do with a Bladesinger is use your weapon as a focus or throw it and make a fireball

That is closer to what being a "swordmage" means to me, but is not quite there either. I want the sword-ing to be part and parcel of the mage-ing, and I want the mage-ing to be part and parcel of the sword-ing. A single, harmonious whole.

Like...it's the difference between a blended smoothie and Neapolitan ice cream. Neapolitan ice cream is not bad (I quite like it, though my mother despises it.) But if what you actually want is a chocolate strawberry milkshake, Neapolitan ice cream will always fall short. I hope that this analogy communicates what I am thinking when I say "a harmonious whole" as opposed to disparate parts simply layered sequentially.

I would also disagree that the PDK is garbage. It is a weak subclass for sure, but it has everything a normal fighter gets and that is not nothing. Then it brings the exact sort of thematics the Warlord had, albeit on a limited use basis. I am not suggesting it is awesome or powerful, but it is viable and thematic and more powerful than some of the Barbarian and Monk offerings.

1: We will probably have to end up agreeing to disagree, then.
2: I was not judging the Fighter. I was judging PDK alone, and what it is alone is bad.
3: That the uses are so horribly limited is, in fact, part of why it is bad.
4: That it is better than some of the worst options in the game is not a selling point. The only way to damn it with fainter praise would be to say that it is better than day-one Beast Master.

 

[DammitVictor]

My very first D&D character ever, in AD&D First Edition in 1993, was a single-classed (and very illegal) Elf Monk.

I have not played a single-class character since, and I don't intend to ever start.

The Third Edition "pick a class every level" style of multiclassing was always bad; to Wizards' credit, they figured it out very early in Third Edition's lifespan and spent all of 3.5's life cycle slapping bandaids on it. It degraded class design to accommodate it, leading to defining class features being delayed until later levels and an accumulation of pointless ribbon features to avoid "dead levels".

Finally, for Fourth Edition, Wizards abandoned this system in favor of feat-based multiclassing and the hybrid system in PHB3.

The fundamental premise isn't any better in Fifth Edition than it was in Third, and in several ways, the implementation in Fifth Edition is considerably worse.

Multiclassing was clunky and weird in AD&D, but it got the job done. Both of the multiclassing systems in 4e are... less than ideal, but they work well enough. Later Pathfinder (1e; I don't know 2e well) supplements, both official and third-party, included much more viable alternatives to the default Third Edition rules. (I wasted countless hours trying to come up with my own.) Even B/X, via a couple of different Gazetteers, had viable proto-multiclassing rules.

Multiclassing is an important part of the game. Don't throw the baby out just because some people keep trying to drink the bathwater.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Player since 1977. Multiclasser/Dual classer since 1978.

Is multiclassing necessary? No. But I find it quite appealing in that it lets me realize characters that would normally not be possible or would be very poor versions of what I had in mind absent DM houseruling. Power isn’t the driving force; using the rules to model my PC concept is.

Result: in my decades of playing D&D*, at least the simple majority of my PCs are multiclassed in some way.

How good I feel a particular edition of D&D handled multiclassing generally** doesn’t matter to me. I wasn’t a big fan of 4Ed’s version, but the only 4Ed PC I got to play was multiclassed. So are almost all the other 4Ed PCs I’ve designed.

It’s not a dealbreaker for me if a DM decides not to allow multiclassing, but it will definitely alter the way I interact with the campaign.







* haven’t played any 5Ed at all, for reasons.

** FWIW, 3.X was my favorite version of multiclassing in general.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Right, the problem I'm saying is that Echo Knight is a customization you add to your Fighter. It's a fighting style, not your archetype with its own choices to make your Echo Knight special relative to every other Echo Knight.

But your echo knight does have choices relative to every other echo knight because of the other inherent fighter choices. Maybe not enough, and certainly not beyond level 3, but they are there.

The thing is, this gets presented as a nightmare in the context of level-buy multiclassing. If that weren't the case and you couldn't mix and match features across them (maybe classes come with feats for "snag flavorful 1st level ability" if you want to do a little splashing) after making the big chunky, "which of these 100 classes is inspiring?" choice, you're not going to be overwhelmed by the material.

Yes you are. When asked to pick between a hundred of anything, often with strange names that don't immediately tell you what they do it's intimidating. In terms of accessibility the One D&D choice to make you only make your subclass choice at level 3 is absolutely right.

You'll probably want some shared sub-systems to make initial class design less unwieldy (i.e. combat maneuvers, spells grouped by thematic school, etc), but you can make the player choice pretty manageable. You'd need a solid standard of design so that DM-side system trust can be maintained and so you don't feel a need to read every single class before it appears and just ask your players "what can you do?", but...you know, that's just a thing we should be able to have, in general.

And as a DM who sometimes teaches newbies I've frequently not been the one asking my players "what can you do" so much as the one telling them.

 

[Corinnguard]

That is closer to what being a "swordmage" means to me, but is not quite there either. I want the sword-ing to be part and parcel of the mage-ing, and I want the mage-ing to be part and parcel of the sword-ing. A single, harmonious whole.

To me, it sounds like you want it where a swordmage can perform magical combat maneuvers. The swordmage makes an attack with their sword, and something magical happens at the same time.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

If multiclassing got outright removed I'd want more classes. Hell I already want more classes due to feeling like certain archetypes are not filled well.

But multiclassing at least offers a (bad and unsatisfying) solution to character archetypes which aren't properly filled by the limited pool of classes which we currently have.