Editorial: Multiple Character Disorder (PHB3 Tidbit)

[Fallen Seraph]

Dragon Editorial: Dragon #374

The editorial discusses different ways of playing multiple characters if you're overflowing with different character ideas. What sticks out to me is this:

If all else fails, you can always get your multiple character fix by building a hybrid character. Using the playtest article for Player's Handbook 3 that comes out next Monday, you can wrap the best of two classes in the body of one adventurer.

 

[Lanefan]

::shrug:: The bit you quoted still leaves me with only one character, thus nothing to do when (not if) it dies.

Lan-"master of armies"-efan

 

[proto128]

I'm hoping this turns out to be gestalt rules that are usable in regular play. Gestalt in 3.x was fun times and eliminated a lot of the problems I had at the time with multiclassing, but it was balanced (if at all) around the assumption that everyone at the table was gestalting or not at all.

 

[Akaiku]

I too would welcome an official core book having rules for gestalting. Oh, and it is always more powerful then someone who isn't, thus I would suggest avoiding such discrepancies by forcing everyone to be that way.

 

[Henry]

My first thought: AAAH! That disgusting Gestalting again!

My second thought: Maybe it will be something interesting and useful to me this time around. I hate the core concept of gestalting (which I feel destroys archetypes, which is a core element of D&D to me), and on various forums it seemed for a while like that's all people wanted to talk about. It'll be interesting to see what they have in mind.

 

[ki11erDM]

My first thought: AAAH! That disgusting Gestalting again!

/agree

It migth be fun... bit it is not (my) D&D. But if someone else wants it by all means publish it.

 

[Pbartender]

/agree

It migth be fun... bit it is not (my) D&D. But if someone else wants it by all means publish it.

Yeah, it's fun to play around with now and again, just to make super-powered characters... We tried using it for a campaign once, and the PCs were ridiculously over-powered toward the end of it. The characters got rather boring, because there was nothing they couldn't do easily ten different ways.


I like the Superfriends method myself... I've used something similar to that in the past.

 

[Lanefan]

Glancing at the editorial, I notice it specifically avoids the most obvious solution: running more than one character at a time in a party.

That said, I've run and been in games that ended up as a combination of the "Geographic Swap" and "Superfriends" methods, and loved 'em all. As DM, however, the time management required in order to keep everyone roughly in the same month - or even year - becomes a serious biznitch: you have been warned!

Lanefan

 

[Dice4Hire]

In my experience, I have found gestalting far superior to running multiple characters.