D&D 5E Gestalt multiclassing, how's the balance of this proposal

In the vein of this thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-dirty-concurrent-multiclassing-gestalt-rules I'd like to get opinions on the power of a gestalt multiclassing system I'm considering.

Likely immediate reaction: "That's too powerful."

Now, let's get into the actual analysis and see if it actually is too powerful or not.

A few considerations to keep in mind. (See Final Consideration at the bottom.)

A) 5e rates vertical power increases that push against the soft cap as being extremely powerful, while it rates flexibility rather cheaply. This is why they give you rerolls of 1s rather than simple pluses to damage when you are already on the high end, but let you pick up entirely different skill sets, like spellcasting or lock-picking for a feat. I had a better explanation of this, but the internet swallowed my post and I don't want to retype that all.
B) Forget anything you think is imbalanced about the core 5e game. This includes Great Weapon Master, Warlock multiclassing, etc. I want to consider the balance of this system without those complications.
C) More or less ignore the balance of this system before level 3 (actually level 2/2), because it isn't balanced there, but can easily be made so in a number of ways.

So without further adieu, here is the system:
1) Pick two classes and gain the best HD, all the weapon, armor, tool/language/musical instrument proficiencies, the best number of skills chosen from the combined list, and the saves from whichever class you prefer.
2) You don't level at the same rate as other characters. Specifically, you skip 2nd level and 13th level. This means that when other characters are 3rd level, you are 2nd level, and when other characters are 14th level, you are 12th level. This is your real level, including HD, proficiency bonus, cantrip scaling, etc.
3) You gain all the class features of each class, except that you don't gain the same feature twice--you gain the better version of the feature. Specifically, you don't gain ASI's more than once per level, you gain spell slots from your best spellcasting class (though you do gain spells known or prepared separately for each class), and anything else with the same name is likewise limited.
4) You can't use the at-will damage scaling features of both classes on the same turn. There will be a list, but this means that you could either use a fighter's Extra Attack feature (with potentially 3 attacks), or a paladin's Extra Attack (with no more than 2 attacks) *and* his Improved Divine Smite, or a rogue's Sneak Attack, etc, but you could not combine those features from both classes on the same turn. (This should prevent vertical issues while allowing flexibility.)

My sample character was a Fighter (Eldritch Knight) / Wizard. His hit points were in-between that of a single class fighter and a single class wizard. He was one or two levels behind in spellcasting (so he loses both higher level spells, and number of spell slots), but he ends up knowing a lot of spells and cantrips.

Final Consideration In 3e they had a philosophy on feat balance, that if a feat was so good that almost everyone (to whom it would be relevant) takes it, it is too strong, and if almost nobody takes it, it is too weak. I like to apply a similar philosophy to character concept support. Any particular mechanical option is designed to express a certain non-mechanical concept. If almost everyone who wants to play that concept takes that mechanical option, and almost no one who wants to play a merely similar concept takes it, then it is probably balanced. So if most players who want to play a character who is a more or less evenly split warrior mage want to play a gestalt fighter/wizard, and almost no one who wants to play a fighter with a bit of magic (ie, Eldritch Knight) or a wizard who can shake it up in melee (ie, Bladesinger) wants to play a gestalt fighter/wizard, it is probably fairly balanced. If more than a few people who want to play an Eldritch Knight or Bladesinger concept end up playing a gestalt fighter/wizard instead of the subclass designed for their concept because they think it is mechanically just that much better, then it probably is not balanced.

Balanced, or too powerful?

I would either allow gestal if all PCs are gestalt or no one.

Giving this Level Adjustments penalty can be a can of worms.

I think you do need to address warlock gestalting, because as is, a Warlock has a different spell progression than the other classes. Would a warlock get their 2/short rest +the other spellslots or just one or the other?

Also this would apply to warlock invocations. For example, if I was a fighter/warlock and I pickup lifedrinker, is that counted as an at will damage feature and disabled if I use multiattack from fighter? Because its not an automatic bonus, you have to actually take the invocation (and by extension omit an alternative).

Other edge cases might be the case with the spell Magic Weapon/elemental weapon, as a fighter I get to swing it more than any pure caster could. But since you have spell levels like a pure caster, it can be at a higher bonus.

Honestly I think number 4 on your list is going to turn out to be so complicated that it makes the whole process very difficult. Do you count colossus slayer/hoard breaker, if you do, what about if I choose beast master instead? What about swift quiver which is a way for rangers to emulate the 4 attacks of fighters (by using their action and bonus action and concentration) if I am a fighter/ranger can I attack x3 and still swift quiver x2. What if I am a fighter/bard and magical secrets myself swift quiver?

I think you will find that there are some super obvious 1/turn damage bumps various classes get, but some classes have their bonus spread out over multiple abilities. And it is going to make the devil in the details that was kinda glossed over to start with.

I think that with these rules, you wouldn't see many single class characters, and no conventional multiclass characters.

I agree that the warlock needs to be addressed.

Also the "at will" restriction is clunky. If it were me, I'd add a "Gestalt action" to the game that you can use once per turn. Then specify certain abilities (fighter's 3rd attack, paladin's improved smite, etc) require your Gestalt action to use (along with whatever normal action type they require.)

In trying to recreate the flavor of D&D where an elf was an elf (basically a fighter/magic-user) I offered one player the option, instead of being an EK she could be a fighter/magic-user.

The biggest issue for me was getting the XP to my liking. I settled on 2.5x XP. HP were either going to be d8 or d10 (leaning to d10). Saves were one primary, player's choice, and one secondary, player's choice. That is, CON or WIS and STR or INT.

Otherwise, the PC got all the class options for both classes at every level except for not being allowed to get two ASIs at once.

She ended up dropping it at level three as there was far too much to keep track of for her so, unfortunately, I have no great insight. All I can say is that even though there are lots of things the PC can do, reality is that the PC is still limited by the action economy and the fact that she would be behind the other PCs in levels at all times except at level one. She was 3/3 and had a pile of class features but all the other PCs had an ASI.

I don't think it's balanced against itself. One of my criteria is how easy is it to make a sub-optimal character. Taking two classes with a lot of overlap - similar HD size, armor & weapon profs, skills, etc. can lead to getting a lot less then those with more divergent benefits. The most telling place to see this is casting. Two non-caster classes or two full-caster classes will be weaker then a full caster and a non-caster.

Partial casters may be weaker or more powerful depending on the class. For instance you'll be getting spells known of higher levels much quicker, but for some classes that's not a big deal because the full casters have better spells.

That said, if you are just playing for your own table and talk to them about their choices to make sure they don't make poor choices, you can make that work.

I'm with [MENTION=6801299]Horwath[/MENTION] - when Gestalt was invented for 3.5 rules (I actually used it once), it was specifically designed to help groups with a small number of players (e.g. 2-3), who would rather play one "super-PC" than two "regulars". It was never designed to allow one player to be Gestalt, while the rest are not; that's far too hard to try and balance, and it also totally runs against the basic premise of D&D:
you need a variety of classes / players, to give a good variety and balance i.e. no single person dominates the table through being able to "do everything".

p.s. even if you do run "all Gestalt", in my experience it's sub-optimal, as only 2-3 PC's can be quite dicey in terms of one PC falls down and suddenly the group is in trouble... then if you have 4+ Gestalt PC's, what's the point?

hastur_nz said:

I'm with [MENTION=6801299]Horwath[/MENTION] - when Gestalt was invented for 3.5 rules (I actually used it once), it was specifically designed to help groups with a small number of players (e.g. 2-3), who would rather play one "super-PC" than two "regulars". It was never designed to allow one player to be Gestalt, while the rest are not; that's far too hard to try and balance, and it also totally runs against the basic premise of D&D:
you need a variety of classes / players, to give a good variety and balance i.e. no single person dominates the table through being able to "do everything".

p.s. even if you do run "all Gestalt", in my experience it's sub-optimal, as only 2-3 PC's can be quite dicey in terms of one PC falls down and suddenly the group is in trouble... then if you have 4+ Gestalt PC's, what's the point?

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I see good point in gestalt that all players can play what ever they want without hurting party cohesion.
Then you just take your secondary class to fill up holes in party roles.

If all players want to be wizards, now they can.

You can then get; wizard/fighter, wizard/rogue, wizard/cleric, wizard/sorcerer, etc...

Thanks for the responses so far. Some thoughts.

thethain said:

I think you do need to address warlock gestalting,

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Sure, but not at this point. I'm working on proof of concept. If I got it to work with everything else and had to disallow warlocks, that'd probably still count as a success.

Honestly I think number 4 on your list is going to turn out to be so complicated that it makes the whole process very difficult. Do you count colossus slayer/hoard breaker, if you do, what about if I choose beast master instead? What about swift quiver which is a way for rangers to emulate the 4 attacks of fighters (by using their action and bonus action and concentration) if I am a fighter/ranger can I attack x3 and still swift quiver x2. What if I am a fighter/bard and magical secrets myself swift quiver?

I think you will find that there are some super obvious 1/turn damage bumps various classes get, but some classes have their bonus spread out over multiple abilities. And it is going to make the devil in the details that was kinda glossed over to start with.

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Good points. It will take some effort, but I think it is doable. I'm not overly concerned with limited use bursts. The game has paladin smites by default.

jaelis said:

I think that with these rules, you wouldn't see many single class characters, and no conventional multiclass characters.

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So I take that as a clear "this is overpowered" statement. Could you provide examples of when you want to play a concept that a standard class is designed to model, but you'd choose to play one of these instead because it models the concept close enough and is clearly more powerful?

Also the "at will" restriction is clunky. If it were me, I'd add a "Gestalt action" to the game that you can use once per turn. Then specify certain abilities (fighter's 3rd attack, paladin's improved smite, etc) require your Gestalt action to use (along with whatever normal action type they require.)

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I don't see that as too terribly different than what I was saying, but I do need to be careful to make it as simple and effective as possible. I'm not too concerned about that part though, since I've looked through and eyeballed the main elements and most seemed fairly obvious (barbarian was probably the hardest).

Blue said:

I don't think it's balanced against itself. One of my criteria is how easy is it to make a sub-optimal character. Taking two classes with a lot of overlap - similar HD size, armor & weapon profs, skills, etc. can lead to getting a lot less then those with more divergent benefits. The most telling place to see this is casting. Two non-caster classes or two full-caster classes will be weaker then a full caster and a non-caster.

Partial casters may be weaker or more powerful depending on the class. For instance you'll be getting spells known of higher levels much quicker, but for some classes that's not a big deal because the full casters have better spells.

That said, if you are just playing for your own table and talk to them about their choices to make sure they don't make poor choices, you can make that work.

Click to expand...

I agree with you somewhat for standard balance purposes, but for these purposes I actually want some options to be better than others. Or rather, I don't want people playing two d10 classes or sorcerer/wizards. While it would be nice if the system were refined enough to well support any combination, it is intended primarily to allow old school combinations like elven fighter/magic-user, dwarf fighter/cleric and fighter/thief, gnome illusionist/thief, and a few others. I will probably say that this form of multiclassing represents racial traditions and is restricted similar to how battlerager and bladesinger are. So there might only be six or eight known combinations that exist in my world, and each them would involve no more than one warrior (fighter, paladin, ranger, barbarian), priest (cleric, druid), "rogue" (rogue, bard), or mage (wizard, sorcerer). So if those combinations are the more powerful ones, as long as they aren't overpowered compared to a single class character, I have a working system.

Horwath said:

I would either allow gestal if all PCs are gestalt or no one.

Giving this Level Adjustments penalty can be a can of worms.

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hastur_nz said:

I'm with [MENTION=6801299]Horwath[/MENTION] - when Gestalt was invented for 3.5 rules (I actually used it once), it was specifically designed to help groups with a small number of players (e.g. 2-3), who would rather play one "super-PC" than two "regulars". It was never designed to allow one player to be Gestalt, while the rest are not; that's far too hard to try and balance, and it also totally runs against the basic premise of D&D:
you need a variety of classes / players, to give a good variety and balance i.e. no single person dominates the table through being able to "do everything".

p.s. even if you do run "all Gestalt", in my experience it's sub-optimal, as only 2-3 PC's can be quite dicey in terms of one PC falls down and suddenly the group is in trouble... then if you have 4+ Gestalt PC's, what's the point?

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Yes, that was the 3e plan. A gestalt game was it's own weird thing. But the system was inspired by AD&D multiclassing which was intended to be used right alongside standard single classed characters, and that is what I'm attempting to express with this system. (As an aside, the 3e designers said they thought that a 3e gestalt character would be balanced against a standard character by giving it a +1 Level adjustment. Their main argument was that action economy limits what you can do, but I still think that was too low of a LA to balance it.)

In 3.5e gestalt CR was +1.

That is gestalt party counted as 1 level higher for monster encounter building, or CR +2 against mosters with specific hard save-or-die saving throws(medusa, gorgon, vampire, etc...)

handing out +1 LA might be unfair to "regular" classes, handing out +2 could be unfair to "gestalt" classes until very late in carrier.

My suggestion is, realy go with all gestalt:

Point buy array, and give ALL from both classes.

As you said, they are still limited by; 1 Action, 1 Bonus action, 1 Reaction per round.

You can't extra attack and throw fireball in same round(OK, you can as sorcerer ).


Then all you need is to beef up number of creatures against the party.

Oh, and BAN any aditional multiclassing(or prestige classing , if they ever show up), just starting two classes.