gestalt characters

[Torm]

I'm not sure how well gestalting would work when done in a single body, but I'm doing something similar to round out a game I'm running for my wife and two kids - the difference is, I'm putting the second class of features into an awakened animal companion for one of them. Since the animal companion counts as a class feature of another character, it is sort of gestalting, but the fact that it is a separate body keeps the saves/BAB/etc from becoming wonky.

Probably, if I were running a game with just two players, I'd probably want them to be some mix of Druid/Wizard/Ranger/Sorceror, or possibly Paladin (go ahead and give a 3.0 version of Special Mount), for the same reason - two animals to work with.

(For some reason, when I saw the name of this thread, I was thinking you meant more like several characters that merged to become a bigger character, ala Devastator, but this makes much more sense. )

 

[focallength]

"I'll form the body!"!

 

[Crimson_Manticore]

I’ve played in a 3-player gestalt game for about a year, and it has worked out really well. It gives players more freedom to play a class that they want to play without leaving any gaping holes in the group dynamic. For example, I almost always play a cleric in my group, mostly because no one else will ever play one. In a gestalt game, I can still fill the role of the cleric, but I can also pick another class that I want to try at the same time.

I agree that gestalt characters are not really more powerful than standard ones, they just have more options and flexibility. Yes, I understand that more flexibility equals more power in D&D, but the amount of things you can do in a single round is still limited. Yes your sorcerer/wizard may be able to cast 6 fireballs per day instead of 3 or 4, but all that means is that he can remain effective in more battles per day – it doesn’t make him much more effective in any single encounter.

As was already mentioned, gestalt allows for more unusual multi-class character concepts while negating the usual sub-optimal character problems. You have to be careful with prestige classes though, especially those that are specifically designed to fill in the gap for normally sub-optimal multi-classing choices (ala Mystic Theurge and many PrCs in Complete Adventurer). Often it is best to disallow these.

Gestalt characters can also very easily loose focus if a lot of multiclassing is going on. One idea that we used is to force the players to stick with the same two classes for the first 20 levels. Of course you can do variations on this, like making the PC stick with the same two classes for 10 levels or 5 levels at a time or something, or making them keep one class through all levels while the second class can change. For an interesting twist you could even say that one of the classes must always be the race’s favored class.