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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7389964" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Fascinating... 3.5/5e style multiclassing is the single feature that I like best about these systems. What you see as an incoherent form of point-buy, I see as a perfect middle ground between the endless choices of point-buy and the derth of choices in a single-class system.When building character in a point-buy system, every option is competing with every other option, all at the same time. Choices abound, but there are no discrete choices--making a character that best matches a player's priorities (regardless of what those priorities are) is a multi-dimensional optimization problem. On the plus side, with enough effort the resulting character can often closely match the players' priorities.By contrast, in a single-class system, there are a fixed, limited number of mechnical choices that can be made to make a character match the players' priorities. I find that uninteresting--there simply aren't enough decision points to make designing a character an enjoyable process. Also, unless the player was prioritizing playing a concept embodied by one of the fixed options, the resulting character is not likely to match those priorities.The 3.5/5e multiclassing system sits between the two extremes. It has many more decision points than a single-class system, but those choices tend to be a series of well-defined tradeoffs between distinct options, rather than the undirected chaos of point-buy. And while one can't match a character to the player's priorities as well as one can in point-buy, it's possible to get a much closer match than it is in single-class.Admittedly, I'd probably like single-class systems more if I had any interest in playing characters that adhere to strong archetypes. But I tend to prefer more-eclectic concepts that are best represented mechanically by mixing and matching classes. That bias shows up at the table: I've not yet played a single-class character in 5e, and at each of the 5e tables I've run, multiclass characters have significantly outnumbered single-class characters.</blockquote>

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