And as HM 'said', a cleric ranger with a decent str and wisdom will work better at fighting and finding traps than a cleric with high dex and the vagabond trait.
Well, sure! A Ranger is better than a Cleric at fighting by default... but she could still go ranged-combat specialized with low strength and high Dex.
For maximized casting, you cannot multiclass any way.
HM alluded to the fact that the modules top out at 16th. That gives 13 levels of cleric to get a 7th-level slot (which gives Rez, but by then the adventure will largely be over) with 3 to play with, or 11 cleric levels to get a 6th-level slot with 5 to play with.
If [MENTION=2469]rangerjohn[/MENTION] still wants to multi, it's more advantageous to take the higher skill-point class as his first level and bump his Int up, which the Elf +2 Int does. Even if he takes a 10 Int, the +2 will give him an extra 4 skill points which could then go into his Disable Device added on to whatever his starting class would be.
Here's why I design characters the way I do:
- most games I play top out somewhere between 5th-10th level.
- the sessions tend to be spaced far apart
- I strongly dislike first level
- in PbP's, this time is stretched even further
So, I tend to stack the low levels as tightly as possible to get the character I want to play NOW, knowing that looking forward to something further down the line may never come to pass.
My play style has also evolved to High Dex/Low armor type characters. Even my fighters tend to be Dex-based or multi-classed with a Dex-connected theme.