hawkeyefan
Legend
Some folks don't allow leveling up mid-adventure, so that isn't a problem for them.
D&D 5E Why do you multiclass?
- Thread starter BMaC
- Start date
Caffe Nightcap
Villager
Absolutely true...but when they finish with the venture and return to town, what if there isn't a Temple of Mystra for the Cleric to level up at? What if the Fighter isn't accepted by or accepting of the Militia in town? Can he just train anywhere? What if the Mage Guild in the good aligned town is for Illusionists? Is the Necromancer really going to find gainful study and new spells there? Does the Druid need to seek out a Circle of Druids to level up? If there aren't any near?
I'm not trying to play obtuse devil's advocate...I merely trying to point out that there has to be a certain level of suspension of disbelief, if it is truly Dungeons and Dragons and not just true storytelling with people gathered around a table, as there are "rules" and there are powers granted that substantially change a character even within a single class type, and if it is feasible to suspend disbelief, or to include a story/plot development of such, then there really shouldn't be that much more required to accept a character gaining those new powers from a different class. This is assuming of course that the combination makes sense and that an effort and desire has been made by the player to show such growth or story line inclusion. A Mage could be Captain of the Militia. A Halfling Rogue could be a Cleric of Brandobaris.
I understand the fear of multiclassing...but this isn't Pathfinder with horridly abusive options available. 5e balanced on the side of single classes being stronger. In the end, I play how the GM wants...but as much as I would leave a group where the GM lets any go...with no constraints on something being believable, I would also jump ship on a GM who couldn't explain to me why my Sorcerer couldn't worship Mystra in a way that allows her to act as a Cleric other than "Because I don't like it...".
I'm not trying to play obtuse devil's advocate...I merely trying to point out that there has to be a certain level of suspension of disbelief, if it is truly Dungeons and Dragons and not just true storytelling with people gathered around a table, as there are "rules" and there are powers granted that substantially change a character even within a single class type, and if it is feasible to suspend disbelief, or to include a story/plot development of such, then there really shouldn't be that much more required to accept a character gaining those new powers from a different class. This is assuming of course that the combination makes sense and that an effort and desire has been made by the player to show such growth or story line inclusion. A Mage could be Captain of the Militia. A Halfling Rogue could be a Cleric of Brandobaris.
I understand the fear of multiclassing...but this isn't Pathfinder with horridly abusive options available. 5e balanced on the side of single classes being stronger. In the end, I play how the GM wants...but as much as I would leave a group where the GM lets any go...with no constraints on something being believable, I would also jump ship on a GM who couldn't explain to me why my Sorcerer couldn't worship Mystra in a way that allows her to act as a Cleric other than "Because I don't like it...".
hawkeyefan
Legend
Sure, I agree with you entirely. I allow multi-classing when I DM and I often music lass when I play. I've played several fighter/rogues over the years. I actually have one that has spanned 3 editions.
That being said, I tend not to let players level up in the middle of an adventure. It requires a little downtime. Not necessarily to train with someone or anything like that. I know others require training, but I never bother with that.
For me it's purely a decision based on mechanics. I don't want them to suddenly be tougher just in time for the final fight I have planned. But we actually long ago threw away the XP system in favor of a more milestone type of system, so this is never really a problem for my group.
I have no problem with multi classing either from a game or story perspective. I just can understand those who do.
That being said, I tend not to let players level up in the middle of an adventure. It requires a little downtime. Not necessarily to train with someone or anything like that. I know others require training, but I never bother with that.
For me it's purely a decision based on mechanics. I don't want them to suddenly be tougher just in time for the final fight I have planned. But we actually long ago threw away the XP system in favor of a more milestone type of system, so this is never really a problem for my group.
I have no problem with multi classing either from a game or story perspective. I just can understand those who do.
TheLoneRanger1979
First Post
I'm not one of those that would restrict MC (or any kind of "creative" rule interpretation for that matter), but strictly on the subject how to explain leveling...... here are my 5 cents.....well, maybe more then 5....
Most editions (4E being the exception) seam to presume that lvl1 (the starting entry in adventuring) is not really heroic and the character would at best be considered novice at the given profession/class. I.E. a fighter could be a member of local village militia, possibly a squire and only rarely a true veteran of a military campaign. Do note that some backgrounds in 5E don't match with this, but then again i would never build a lvl 1 character with them to begin with. In my eyes novice doesn't mean without skills or training though. It just means without experience. So the potential is there, but is yet to be unlocked.
As the character gains experience they begin to find new uses for their base training and skills and find new ways to creatively act outside the box. It is this outside the box thinking that i interpret as new features. Sometimes though a character if given enough time and opportunity can be exposed to new ideas and modes of operation. These would be considered MC opportunities. And finally, again if given enough time a person could effectively learn new skills or languages, or find a way how to exploit latent abilities.
This is of course only my way of looking at things, and yes, it doesn't work very well for mages in 5E. In 2E and 3E IIRC, when you leveled a mage the casting slot would be there, but the spell wouldn't. You still had to find a scroll or have someone teach it to you. You can alternatively hand wave this by assuming the wizard knew all the spells in advance (he/she had enough time to learn them during all the years at the university), but as the character levels up he/she is now capable of actually utilizing them
Shendorion
First Post
How do you explain having a breakthrough in the middle of an adventure, and knowing how to do something new? I could see it explained a few different ways.
For instance, Pikel always fancied himself a druid. He affected druidic ways, did druidy things, and one day, right in the middle of a crisis, they just . . . started working. Who knows if he had it in him all along, or if the crisis brought it out in him, or if some nature spirit took notice of him, or if the gods saw fit to make the game unfolding on the surface of the world more interesting? All we know is that he kept saying "shee la la," and one day his cudgel started glowing.
People learn in different ways. Some people only experience personal growth in a crisis. You see it all over the place in popular media: the hero is pressed on all sides, things look grim, and they reach down a little deeper into the reserves and pull out something new. This game is primarily about epic storytelling, so using time-honored story tropes doesn't strike me as untoward.
Arcane magic as written isn't all about rote recitation; it's a little more like a combination of higher mathematics and poetry. How many mathematicians have epiphanies while they're away from their desks, taking showers, falling off the toilet, observing something out in the world that triggers some sort of minor shift in thinking that reveals the solution? Arcane magic can be like that too.
A good player will keep an eye a level or two down the line, and start seeding the narrative with the background they need to pull this off. A thief interested in dipping cleric might spend downtime arguing philosophy or theology with a divinely ordained companion. The fighter who wants to grab an arcane casting feat can be taking lessons from the members of his party, or sneaking peeks at the spellbooks on his shift at the watch, or might even have bought one way back when, and snuck it out for independent study when nobody was watching. Everybody's got dreams and hobbies, even mercenary hobos.
It doesn't take much work to explain away the emergence of new abilities outside the usual sphere of ability; all it requires is a flexible DM and imaginative players.
For instance, Pikel always fancied himself a druid. He affected druidic ways, did druidy things, and one day, right in the middle of a crisis, they just . . . started working. Who knows if he had it in him all along, or if the crisis brought it out in him, or if some nature spirit took notice of him, or if the gods saw fit to make the game unfolding on the surface of the world more interesting? All we know is that he kept saying "shee la la," and one day his cudgel started glowing.
People learn in different ways. Some people only experience personal growth in a crisis. You see it all over the place in popular media: the hero is pressed on all sides, things look grim, and they reach down a little deeper into the reserves and pull out something new. This game is primarily about epic storytelling, so using time-honored story tropes doesn't strike me as untoward.
Arcane magic as written isn't all about rote recitation; it's a little more like a combination of higher mathematics and poetry. How many mathematicians have epiphanies while they're away from their desks, taking showers, falling off the toilet, observing something out in the world that triggers some sort of minor shift in thinking that reveals the solution? Arcane magic can be like that too.
A good player will keep an eye a level or two down the line, and start seeding the narrative with the background they need to pull this off. A thief interested in dipping cleric might spend downtime arguing philosophy or theology with a divinely ordained companion. The fighter who wants to grab an arcane casting feat can be taking lessons from the members of his party, or sneaking peeks at the spellbooks on his shift at the watch, or might even have bought one way back when, and snuck it out for independent study when nobody was watching. Everybody's got dreams and hobbies, even mercenary hobos.
It doesn't take much work to explain away the emergence of new abilities outside the usual sphere of ability; all it requires is a flexible DM and imaginative players.
Eltab
Lord of the Hidden Layer
I multiclass to achieve a concept, or to fill in a glaring weakness in an existing character. I also multiclass to achieve a mechanical result.
Examples:
4e Warlock / Warlord so I can get my friends over here when I get in trouble
3e Bard / Wizard, unsuccessful attempt to make Merlin from movie Excalibur
5e Monk/Rogue1 for Expertise (favorite skill) and a little boost via Sneak Attack to the 'death of 1000 cuts' that is Martial Arts.
Examples:
4e Warlock / Warlord so I can get my friends over here when I get in trouble
3e Bard / Wizard, unsuccessful attempt to make Merlin from movie Excalibur
5e Monk/Rogue1 for Expertise (favorite skill) and a little boost via Sneak Attack to the 'death of 1000 cuts' that is Martial Arts.
Li Shenron
Legend
In retrospective, this was a simple and yet great poll, in fact it sparked many threads on multiclassing. See the current results:
- To maximize overall build (damage, combinations of abilities, etc.) 65 27.08%
- For RP reasons. 74 30.83%
- I generally don't multiclass. 101 42.08%
I voted that I generally don't multiclass. This is the largest group, however the clear majority does multiclass.
There's some difference as to why, but let's say that more or less there is no truly dominant motivation, about half of the people multiclass for RP reasons and the other half multiclass for 'gamist' reasons (of course many people also multiclass for both).
Now I want to draw some conclusions on the status of multiclassing in 5e, for my own reference
1 > I do not expect people who multiclass for RP reasons to have major complaints about multiclassing in 5e, unless for some reason they ended up with a particularly bad combination (which might make you feel taxed by the rules for just wanting to play a certain character concept). I am not even aware if such bad combinations exist in 5e, but at least so far I haven't seen widespread complaints like in 3e (where multiclass spellcasters were widely considered weak).
IMHO people who multiclass for RP reasons don't go too far with the number of classes, because more classes in your combo dilute the character concept; some may disagree and say that the more classes you combine, the more specific character concept you can create, but IMXP this is the result of overestimating multiclassing as a RP aid + underestimating everything else you can use (crunch of fluff) to represent your character concept. Heavy multiclassing is generally less common IMXP among people who multiclass for RP reasons, so I'd expect also to see less mechanical problems from their PCs.
These make me suppose that people in this category don't generally have much complaints about multiclassing in 5e.
2 > People which multiclass for gamist reasons can actually still have different reasons... there's the powergamer-type who is looking for 'optimization' or 'maximization', and there's just the curious gamer who simply wants to 'explore' creative combinations, and is happy enough if they work on par with single-classes. Actually, the explorer-type might be happy even when it doesn't work, if the fun is more in the exploration process itself!
Gamist multiclassers presumably don't stop at few classes, if they can spot some reasons to add even more. Potentially (but not necessarily) more mechanical problems might spring up from the combinations, either something a bit too good or a bit too bad. Still, I haven't actually heard about anything major so far...
...what I have heard however, is many complaints already. The usual 'I am lagging behind this ability' or 'the single-class X is better than this combo X+Y' and so on. Most of the time, they are still stuck at comparing damage-per-round outputs, ignoring the rest of the game (which is like 99% of it). But again, nothing major really, nothing that stands out as much as it happened back in 3e.
Clearly the complaints must come mostly from the powergamer-types, while the explorer-types just move on when they find something they don't like, and explore something else.
So now considering the motivations also expressed in this thread behind powergaming... if all the fun is in finding the 'best' combinations, why do you really have to complain against 5e when you stumble upon a 'bad' combination? Shouldn't you complain against yourself for failing to find the better ones? I am not judging the motivation at all, just the complaining!
If your motivation is to really maximize that damage-per-round, and you find that your Barbarian 5/Paladin 5/Fighter 5/Ranger 5 is worse than a Fighter 20, why don't you just play a Fighter 20?
I can understand a certain underlying desire for 'every combination in the game to be equally good', but assuming a system that really achieves this equality, wouldn't this actually end all the motivations behind powergaming? Because then there would be no 'best combo' to find anymore...
- To maximize overall build (damage, combinations of abilities, etc.) 65 27.08%
- For RP reasons. 74 30.83%
- I generally don't multiclass. 101 42.08%
I voted that I generally don't multiclass. This is the largest group, however the clear majority does multiclass.
There's some difference as to why, but let's say that more or less there is no truly dominant motivation, about half of the people multiclass for RP reasons and the other half multiclass for 'gamist' reasons (of course many people also multiclass for both).
Now I want to draw some conclusions on the status of multiclassing in 5e, for my own reference
1 > I do not expect people who multiclass for RP reasons to have major complaints about multiclassing in 5e, unless for some reason they ended up with a particularly bad combination (which might make you feel taxed by the rules for just wanting to play a certain character concept). I am not even aware if such bad combinations exist in 5e, but at least so far I haven't seen widespread complaints like in 3e (where multiclass spellcasters were widely considered weak).
IMHO people who multiclass for RP reasons don't go too far with the number of classes, because more classes in your combo dilute the character concept; some may disagree and say that the more classes you combine, the more specific character concept you can create, but IMXP this is the result of overestimating multiclassing as a RP aid + underestimating everything else you can use (crunch of fluff) to represent your character concept. Heavy multiclassing is generally less common IMXP among people who multiclass for RP reasons, so I'd expect also to see less mechanical problems from their PCs.
These make me suppose that people in this category don't generally have much complaints about multiclassing in 5e.
2 > People which multiclass for gamist reasons can actually still have different reasons... there's the powergamer-type who is looking for 'optimization' or 'maximization', and there's just the curious gamer who simply wants to 'explore' creative combinations, and is happy enough if they work on par with single-classes. Actually, the explorer-type might be happy even when it doesn't work, if the fun is more in the exploration process itself!
Gamist multiclassers presumably don't stop at few classes, if they can spot some reasons to add even more. Potentially (but not necessarily) more mechanical problems might spring up from the combinations, either something a bit too good or a bit too bad. Still, I haven't actually heard about anything major so far...
...what I have heard however, is many complaints already. The usual 'I am lagging behind this ability' or 'the single-class X is better than this combo X+Y' and so on. Most of the time, they are still stuck at comparing damage-per-round outputs, ignoring the rest of the game (which is like 99% of it). But again, nothing major really, nothing that stands out as much as it happened back in 3e.
Clearly the complaints must come mostly from the powergamer-types, while the explorer-types just move on when they find something they don't like, and explore something else.
So now considering the motivations also expressed in this thread behind powergaming... if all the fun is in finding the 'best' combinations, why do you really have to complain against 5e when you stumble upon a 'bad' combination? Shouldn't you complain against yourself for failing to find the better ones? I am not judging the motivation at all, just the complaining!
If your motivation is to really maximize that damage-per-round, and you find that your Barbarian 5/Paladin 5/Fighter 5/Ranger 5 is worse than a Fighter 20, why don't you just play a Fighter 20?
I can understand a certain underlying desire for 'every combination in the game to be equally good', but assuming a system that really achieves this equality, wouldn't this actually end all the motivations behind powergaming? Because then there would be no 'best combo' to find anymore...
(I think the thread has also shown that many of us chose not to vote because the OP did not consider the possibilities between "RP" and "maximizing", which (for me at least) can still centre around "fun", however conceived.)
TheLoneRanger1979
First Post
Count me among the ones that don't think the system is broken. Not on its own at least. Also, the reason why no more then 1 or 2 extra classes are needed for a "conceptual" PC, in my opinion, lies with the fact that most of the classes are pretty broad by them selves. Thus the few flavors we lack when making our custom concepts, can easily be found in just one or two extra classes (often no more then several levels in them).
Shendorion
First Post
I wanted a very similar concept, but I went at it from the other direction. I started with a rogue with an outlander background, and at lv. 2 I'll start taking fighter levels. It follows the arc of the storytelling, as he leaves the more peaceful life of a scout and survivalist behind and becomes a member of a fighting company. Living alone, he hunted and fought relying mainly on stealth and mobility; as a member of this new company that training will serve him well, but most of his personal growth will be in negotiations with other people and (more frequently) fighting alongside allies who can't just hit the targets and disappear.
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