E6: Retraining levels?

[Altamont Ravenard]

Hello everyone,

E6 looks very interesting to me. I was wondering if anyone has let characters retrain levels? Say a character ends up being Ftr3/Wiz3 but would prefer concentrate on his magical abilities instead of his fighting technique later in his career. Has anyone ever let their players do this?

I'd envision instead of gaining a new feat at a new level, you can retrain one class level into another.

If we take the example above, next level our character could become Ftr2/Wiz4, then Ftr1/Wiz5, then Wiz6.

Thanks again for any input on the matter

AR

 

[Zelc]

I've been messing around with the system, and was thinking of giving each class some bonus abilities as their 11th, 21st, and 31st "epic" (past lvl 6) feats. I haven't pinned down exactly what these would be, but I was thinking fro single-classed characters, they could cover some parts (but definitely not all) of the stuff they get from levels 7, 8, and 9 respectively. Rogues would get their sneak attack progression, full BAB classes might eventually get up to +8 BAB, and full casters might be able to know a very limited number of 4th level spells and be able to cast them a very limited number of times per day.

For multi-classed characters, I was actually thinking of letting them gestalt in these feat slots. A Wiz3/Ftr3 could take one of these feats to overlap a level of Wizard with one of the Fighters levels under the gestalt rules. In this case, they'd get +1/6 Will Save and the full spellcasting and familiar abilities of a Wiz 4.

I don't see why class retraining is too bad, although the accounting might be messy. Giving up a feat would probably deter people from doing it too much. I might be worried that a player might accidentally do it too much and become much weaker than his friends. Maybe just use the PHB2 retraining rules and let them retrain a class every X "epic" feats gained.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Sounds reasonable to me.

 

[Gilladian]

I think the "payment" of a feat is a good price for retraining a level. Yes, there's the chance that a player who is in the midst of retraining several levels may be slightly weaker for a while (I can see that a multiclass fighter/wizard 3/3 is not as strong as a pure wizard, for example), the overall level limits mean that you're never getting the HUGE disparity between casters and non-casters that occurs at high levels in regular dnd.

Has anyone actually played E6 characters with 10+feats? What are they like, in comparison with, say, typical 10th level characters?

 

[Omegaxicor]

I don't like the retraining aspect it feels very metagame, a character has spent 5 years as a fighter/rogue but suddenly forgets all of his Fighter levels, I just don't like the idea

I allow characters to retrain their last level taken as sort of a "I was trained as a Fighter but I started training as a Rogue with Open Lock but before I mastered enough of it, I discovered my Draconic bloodline and decided to explore it" meaning a Ftr 4/Rog 1 becomes a Ftr 4/Sor 1 but that causes some problems with new players who end up Ftr 4/Rog 1/Sor 1 and are concerned about taking Multiclass Xp penalties

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I don't like the retraining aspect it feels very metagame, a character has spent 5 years as a fighter/rogue but suddenly forgets all of his Fighter levels, I just don't like the idea

I'd see it more like "I've been really using only this set of skills lately, so my other skills are getting rusty." Perhaps never be able to retrain the last level of a class, so as to always be at least level 1 of that class you're retraining out of? I could see it being silly to lose Martial weapon and armor usage entirely if someone retrained a Fighter3/Wizard3 to focus on more casting. Perhaps only permit retraining to a Fighter1/Wizard5?