Dave Noonan's ruminations on the "gish" (see Glyfair's thread on the WotC blogs for an excerpt) got me thinking about Tome of Battle, which introduced a new paradigm for multi-classing. All of the ToB classes have combat abilities that are, in many ways, the analog of spells - each had a level, etc, and you could only use a limited number, etc. The interesting thing was that, if you multi-classed into one of the ToB classes, your "initiator level" (equivalent of caster level) started out at (1/2 your character level + level in ToB classes). This meant that, if you were 8th level, and then picked up a level of swordsage, you could take 5th level maneuvers immediately.
To keep things in balance, each maneuver had (in addition to a level), a set of prerequisites (like, "three other Tiger Claw maneuvers") so that you couldn't just take ALL high-level maneuvers.
From my reading (I haven't used it in play), I liked the idea of making multi-classing more viable, and I liked how it encouraged you to "pick a path" to get prerequisites for the more powerful abilities (in contrast to a single-classed swordsage, who knew lots of maneuvers so would have more flexibility than fighter who dipped into swordsage). But it was more bookkeeping - in addition to the pre-requisites that were necessary to keep the whole thing balanced, it also meant that the order in which you chose your class levels was incredibly important - an 8th level druid who took a level of warblade looked very different from a 1st level warblade who then switched into druid. For some reason, the loss of symmetry annoyed me.
I haven't seen any discussion of how this worked in practice - does anybody have experience? Does it seem like a system that would make the fighter/wizard more viable overall?
To keep things in balance, each maneuver had (in addition to a level), a set of prerequisites (like, "three other Tiger Claw maneuvers") so that you couldn't just take ALL high-level maneuvers.
From my reading (I haven't used it in play), I liked the idea of making multi-classing more viable, and I liked how it encouraged you to "pick a path" to get prerequisites for the more powerful abilities (in contrast to a single-classed swordsage, who knew lots of maneuvers so would have more flexibility than fighter who dipped into swordsage). But it was more bookkeeping - in addition to the pre-requisites that were necessary to keep the whole thing balanced, it also meant that the order in which you chose your class levels was incredibly important - an 8th level druid who took a level of warblade looked very different from a 1st level warblade who then switched into druid. For some reason, the loss of symmetry annoyed me.
I haven't seen any discussion of how this worked in practice - does anybody have experience? Does it seem like a system that would make the fighter/wizard more viable overall?
