D&D 1E How about a little love for AD&D 1E

[James Gasik]

3e's additive multiclassing (and 4e's and 5e's, for all that) is one of its worst elements. 2e, where a character's classes could and did advance independent of each other, is far more flexible and ends up with non-borked characters.

I don't know if they're our own invention or whether they were inspired by a Dragon article or somehting, but for ages we've had rules and procedures in place for if-when a character wants to (and is otherwise able to) pick up a second class; meanign the decision can be made during the character's played career.

Good point, bad example: a deity could bestow the Cleric class on that character on the spot if it wanted to!

But even then, partly by 1e RAW and partly by fiat covering rules that simply don't exist, it's doable without divine intervention.

The part that doesn't exist in the RAW anywhere (and as far as I know, in any edition!) is ways and means of dropping or renouncing a class or classes other than losing all your levels to a level-drainer - and somehow surviving this process! - and then declining restoration. So the DM would have to handwave this part somehow; for my own game I invented a high-level Clerical spell Renouncement, for just this purpose.

But after that, RAW comes to the rescue. In the PH, when determining a character's age there's a modifier - you add a number of years based on the character's class: 3 years for Cleric, 8 years for MU, etc. Thus, we now know how long it takes to train in order to become a raw 0-xp 1st-level in said class; which means that in this case, three in-game years from now you could be a brand new 1st-level Cleric. The only sticky one is Fighter which adds 0 years to rolled age, but as all classes get some combat training anyway I'm cool with it only taking a few months for any adventurer to become a raw-1st Fighter.

Well yeah, obviously, the DM can allow for this by stepping outside of the rules! It's like how many 3e DM's were allowing for retraining before there were official rules (and those rules were ignored because they were too convoluted and messy). Sure, just abandoning abilities you've had and "magically" replacing them with new ones might seem strange, but it's not like the game didn't already have these sorts of headaches with level draining or (shudder) reincarnation!

OTOH, I'd rather my hypothetical Fighter/Thief didn't have to suffer from amnesia to gain his Cleric powers. I do remember the Complete Book of Elves discusses the possibility of allowing Elves to dual class instead of multiclass in 2e, but, well, there's a lot of issues with that book and, well, I can count the number of actual dual-classed PC's I've seen...

Ok actually I don't even need a hand. The number is three, and one didn't play for very long afterwards.

 

[Lanefan]

Well yeah, obviously, the DM can allow for this by stepping outside of the rules!

Filling in rules that simply don't exist doesn't, to me, count as stepping outside of them.

It's like how many 3e DM's were allowing for retraining before there were official rules (and those rules were ignored because they were too convoluted and messy). Sure, just abandoning abilities you've had and "magically" replacing them with new ones might seem strange, but it's not like the game didn't already have these sorts of headaches with level draining or (shudder) reincarnation!

Level draining works. Reincarnation works. Changing class without use of either doesn't work.

OTOH, I'd rather my hypothetical Fighter/Thief didn't have to suffer from amnesia to gain his Cleric powers.

Ah - I thought you meant the F-T wanted to drop both classes and take up Clericism instead. I DMed a character once who tried to do just this: he was first an Assassin, then quickly had a change of heart and became a Thief (an easy switch); then met the love of his life - a Cleric PC run by another player - and at their wedding vowed to give up Thief and train as a Cleric to her deity. It was this sequence, in fact, that caused me to invent the Renouncement spell, as there was no mechanical way for him otherwise to drop the Thief class.

I have a hard ban on any character having more than two classes, explainable in the fiction by it being impossible to maintain the upkeep (e.g. study if a Mage, workouts if a Fighter, etc.) of more than two at once. That said, the rules for multiclassing in my game are the same for all species provided the species can be the class at all (a few species-class combinations don't exist).

I do remember the Complete Book of Elves discusses the possibility of allowing Elves to dual class instead of multiclass in 2e, but, well, there's a lot of issues with that book and, well, I can count the number of actual dual-classed PC's I've seen...

Ok actually I don't even need a hand. The number is three, and one didn't play for very long afterwards.

Same here. Dual-classing as written was awful; long ago DMed one (maybe two?) characters who did it, then scrapped it entirely and let Humans multi like everyone else.

 

[Dioltach]

I dual-classed once: 7th- or 8th-level Thief into Fighter. Boy, that sucked! Yay, I've gone up a level. Oh, right, no benefits. Again.

HP stayed the same, saves throws stayed pretty much the same, THAC0 barely improved. And I couldn't use any of my thieving skills. It left me a long way behind the rest of the party. I was playing a low-level Fighter with a Thief's HP.

I never made it past my original Thief level so I could gain the benefits of both classes.

 

[James Gasik]

I dual-classed once: 7th- or 8th-level Thief into Fighter. Boy, that sucked! Yay, I've gone up a level. Oh, right, no benefits. Again.

HP stayed the same, saves throws stayed pretty much the same, THAC0 barely improved. And I couldn't use any of my thieving skills. It left me a long way behind the rest of the party. I was playing a low-level Fighter with a Thief's HP.

I never made it past my original Thief level so I could gain the benefits of both classes.

I always wanted to try and make a 1e Bard, but realized it would take me forever, and none of my DM's ever figured out if Half-Elf Fighter/Thief would actually work for Bard entry or not.

 

[Voadam]

I always wanted to try and make a 1e Bard, but realized it would take me forever, and none of my DM's ever figured out if Half-Elf Fighter/Thief would actually work for Bard entry or not.

The rules are quite a mess with multiple points of ambiguity (is it actually switching classes or its own thing or a modification of switching classes? When do you use bard weapon and armor restrictions and allowed weapons? How does the half-elf thing factor in?).

If I was to try to be faithful to the rules as written I think I would say you need to be the proper race and stats for a bard from the class entry and you are a bard from level 1 but you progress through pseudo fighter and thief levels a bit as if you were switching classes, but you must switch at some point within the specified level ranges as opposed to a human switching classes who has different ability requirements and choices for switching.

I am a fan of the original Strategic Review OD&D straight forward bard class which seems mechanically like a variant cleric with more weapons, less armor, magic-user spells, and bard specific powers instead of turning. When I ran a Pathfinder 1e group through a fey world thing and they all turned into 1e AD&D characters in the more primal but very arcane rules run reality of the 1e AD&D First World, that was what we used for the party bard and it worked great.

 

[Emrico]

I always wanted to try and make a 1e Bard, but realized it would take me forever, and none of my DM's ever figured out if Half-Elf Fighter/Thief would actually work for Bard entry or not.

Though not strictly btb, I have always allowed Half-Elves to do Fighter/Thief multi-class and when levels are appropriate they can switch to Bard. It makes more sense to me to do it that way rather than have being a Bard be the only time a non-human can be dual-classed. I also allow the Bard class from Dragon 56 if the player would rather go that route.

 

[Celebrim]

I dual-classed once: 7th- or 8th-level Thief into Fighter. Boy, that sucked! Yay, I've gone up a level. Oh, right, no benefits. Again.

HP stayed the same, saves throws stayed pretty much the same, THAC0 barely improved. And I couldn't use any of my thieving skills. It left me a long way behind the rest of the party. I was playing a low-level Fighter with a Thief's HP.

I never made it past my original Thief level so I could gain the benefits of both classes.

Dual classing requires strategy, and you did it wrong. Never start out in thief. Always start out with a fighter class and then dual class into something that doesn't require much XP like thief or cleric.

Dual class into thief only after you've gotten your fighter up to the point where you are happy with your combat skills - usually when you've hit some amount of attacks per round you were aiming for. Then you are playing a low-level thief with an insane amount of hit points and who will level up much faster than the rest of the party. You can actually go to level n in about the same time as the rest of the party goes to level n+1. Eventually you turn into a thief or cleric with the combat skills of a fighter, which isn't too shabby.

 

[Dioltach]

Dual classing requires strategy, and you did it wrong. Never start out in thief. Always start out with a fighter class and then dual class into something that doesn't require much XP like thief or cleric.

Great tip. Except I'd spent years playing a Thief when someone joined our group with a Kender. After I realised that my character was now useless, I thought I'd find a new role in the group.

 

[James Gasik]

It's unfortunate that Dual-Classing does require so much preparation. I watched a player Dual-Class a Fighter into a Wizard at an absurdly low level (I think it was like 2 or 3) to get a hit point buffer and weapon specialization in a staff. The result was sadly kind of lackluster, and they died fairly quickly.

I would hear Grognards go on at length about their 1e games when I was a lad about how they all Dual-Classed into Monks at high levels; I have no idea how effective this strategy would be, but I was pretty dubious even at the time.

The only truly successful Dual-Classed character I ever encountered was Jack. Jack (a riff on "Jack of All Trades") was a Dual-Classed Specialty Priest of Coyote (from Legends and Lore). Coyote gives his Priests all the abilities of Thieves up to level 10. At this point, Jack Dual-Classed into a Thief (!), and upon reaching level 11, successfully convinced the DM that all of his points spent on Thieving abilities should combine with his existing abilities (mostly academic because by this point he would have 95% in everything anyways...or so we thought).

He then produced the rules for wearing non-Thief armor in the Complete Guide to Thieves and astounded us all by wearing Full Plate and retaining stupidly high Thieving Abilities! Then, as if that wasn't enough, the DM put us on an older 1e adventure, and Jack came out of it with a Hat of Difference that he could use to become a Fighter!

At one point, Jack died and was reincarnated as an Elf, at which point he asked the DM if that meant he could now multiclass (the DM evaded this question by constantly saying "he was thinking about it"), and before his player left the game, he was seeking out an artifact from the Complete Book of Artifacts (I think it's called The Black Heart) which, when possessed, grants you all the abilities of a Necromancer, or, barring that, another Hat of Difference.

Jack was also a master of disguise (I think he owned a Robe of Blending as well) so he would constantly join (or rejoin, after his shenanigans got him punted out) adventuring parties claiming to be a completely different character! I mean, we all figured it was Jack, but "proving" that fact was an amusing pastime in of itself. The most epic time was when we found a Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity and he put it on for the lulz, allowing him/her to take on an entirely new persona!

Total rules mess of a character, to be sure; somewhere in that mess I think Jack had a Kit, but I'll be danged if I know what it was.

 

[Celebrim]

The only truly successful Dual-Classed character I ever encountered was Jack.

Sounds like he was abusing some 2e rules to do proto 3e front-loading.