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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 2791863" data-attributes="member: 12460">I don't have much of a problem with this philosophy. A "paladin" after all is defined in the American Heritage dictionary as "[a] paragon of chivalry; a heroic champion." That says nothing that implies a necessity for wearing armor, fighting with swords, or even being an adventurer.While it doesn't bother me much if a player is creative and is multi-classing specifically to achieve a certain type of pre-meditated character concept, it does bother me when class levels are chosen independent of that character's behavior. For example, I have had 2 or 3 players of Fighters in my campaigns who, upon reaching an even level of fighter, proceed to take a Barbarian level afterwards. In one of these cases, I was running an urban campaign and none of the characters had ever even left the city for an extended period of time! How does one pick up wilderness skills this way? This sort of decision has nothing to do with a character concept and is based purely on an attempt to make the character more powerful. Any explanation for why the character did so is an afterthought and a justification, not the result of an attempt to creative a cohesive character concept.The reason multi-class characters are penalized (and rightly so I might add) is because it makes sense from a realistic perspective. And before I hear the ages-old argument that D&D is a fantasy game that isn't supposed to simulate reality, let me say that I understand D&D is a fantasy game, but that doesn't mean in D&D we throw laws of nature out the window. If I release a ball from my hand, the ball doesn't hang in mid-air just because I live in a fantasy world. There might be a magical explanation for why the ball hangs in mid-air, for instance, I cast a spell that manipulates the air molecules surrounding the ball or eliminates the gravitational effect on the ball, but there is still an explanation. <a href="http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/GiantITP/ootscript?SK=126" target="_blank">A bard who slays a monster</a> doesn't just "magically" don a wizard hat and become a wizard. There really ought to be some reasonable explanation for such things. If a player points out to me how his character concept requires the meshing of bard and wizard and simply doesn't work without it, I'll allow it, since he has likely already thought of ways the character incorporates the two into his training and development of skills. In theory, if this were always the case, I may not have a problem with it. In theory communism works.</blockquote>

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