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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manabarbs" data-source="post: 6213438" data-attributes="member: 6717251">There's no formal multiclassing rules at this point, but there is a passage on essentially swapping features between classes with DM permission. While different classes have different structures, all classes begin with three talents, and you can generally swap talents between classes without causing any real issues. There's no inbuilt way to give a barbarian arcane prowess (in the form of actual spellcasting), but the structurally similar ranger has talents that give you access to a little bit of clerical or sorcerous magic, and as a DM I think it'd be totally fair to let a Barbarian take one of those. The primary impediments to a spellcaster being competent at melee is that putting points into Strength to use melee weapons spreads a character's stats out a little more that they'd otherwise be spread out. (And that there's little mechanical incentive to fight with a weapon when you're more effective with spells.) Sorcerers are actually vaguely adequate with weapons to begin with - they take no penalty to fighting with light or medium weapons - but there's little incentive to do so by default. What sorcerers do have is a really cool talent called "Spell Fist" that does encourage them to get up close and personal, and while the default fluff doesn't involve using a weapon, there's nothing stopping you. It's more about spellcasting in melee than about actually making basic melee attacks, though.Generally, swapping features for other features as the book suggests doesn't cause any real problems. Sure, it can be used for powergamey purposes (choosing your favorites from among 60 talents is obviously going to be better than choosing your favorites from among seven talents), but most swaps are pretty benign.EDIT: Another cool thing for the barbarian with a little bit of arcane knowledge is that you can use whatever you want as your background for a character, and that gives you a bonus to skill checks where that background would be relevant. So if you want your barbarian to know all kinds of arcane-y stuff, you can just pick something from his backstory that justifies that knowledge as one of your backgrounds, and then add the bonus to relevant ability checks. (The game doesn't have a set skill list.) So for example, your barbarian could spend four of his or her background points (you get eight total) on "Rageguard of the Order of the Inner Pentafex" or "Almost didn't flunk out of the Arcane Academy" of "Raised by sweet wizards" or "Thaumaturgic intuition" or "Ate like five wizard brains and absorbed their knowledge, I'm pretty sure" or basically anything else you can think of, and then whenever you make a skill check where the background you picked is relevant, you can add 4 to it.</blockquote>

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