Uneven Levels: If any two of your multiclass character’s classes
are two or more levels apart, the strain of developing and
maintaining different skills at different levels takes its toll. Your
multiclass character suffers a –20% penalty to XP for each class that
is not within one level of his or her highest-level class. These
penalties apply from the moment the character adds a class or raises
a class’s level too high. For instance, a 4th-level wizard/3rd-level
rogue gets no penalty, but if that character raises his wizard level to
5th, then he takes the –20% penalty from that point on until his
levels were nearly even again.
Races and Multiclass XP: A favored class (see the individual
race entries in Chapter 2: Races) does not count against the char-
acter for purposes of the –20% penalty to XP. In such cases, calculate
the XP penalty as if the character did not have that class. For
instance, Bergwin is an 11th-level gnome character (a 9th-level
rogue/2nd-level bard). He takes no penalty to his XP because he has
only one nonfavored class. (Bard is favored for gnomes.) Suppose he
then attains 12th level and adds 1st level as fighter to his classes,
becoming a 9th-level rogue/2nd-level illusionist/1st-level fighter.
He then takes a –20% XP penalty on future XP he earns because his
fighter level is so much lower than his rogue level. Were he awarded
1,200 XP for an adventure, he would receive only 80% of that
amount, or 960 XP. If he thereafter rose to 13th level and picked up
a fourth class (by adding 1st-level cleric, for example), he would take
a –40% XP penalty from then on.
As a second example, consider a dwarf 7th-level fighter/2nd-level
cleric. This character takes no penalty because his fighter class is
favored for dwarves and thus not counted when determining
whether his classes are even. Nor does he take any penalty for
adding 1st-level rogue to the mix, since his cleric and rogue classes
are only one level apart. In this case, cleric counts as the character’s
highest class.
A human’s or half-elf’s highest-level class is always considered his
or her favored class.