D&D 4E Love It or Leave It: 4E Multiclassing

[Celebrim]

For those who have problems with the whole "only 2" thing...

I think it is always a mistake to try to justify 4e through a simulationist type argument. I think you need to approach 4e on its own terms.

The reason why you are limited to two is the class specific feats are extremely powerful and useful. I would imagine with the additional feats in 4e that pretty much everyone is going to be tempted to take one. You get an additional trained skill (potentially worth a feat on its own), a very useful additional encounter power (likely worth a feat on its own), and access to an entire new feat tree. It's a good deal, and to keep it somewhat balanced it has to be limited to just one per character.

The power swap feats have much less utility as far as I can tell. You are giving up a feat for a no net gain (lose a power to gain one). You'd only do this to gain access to something which you very much needed but which your base class had no access to. The only thing that comes immediately to mind from what I've seen so far is if you've already multiclassed into a controller class which has the same prime ability as one of the big three abilities of your class, say Warlord multiclassing into Wizard, then you might (and I do mean might) give up a power to gain a potent area of effect attack. Other than that, this will only see alot of use if WotC prints something brokenly good.

 

[AllisterH]

Hmm...First though, I need to see how deep and how much of a hit one takes via Multiclassing. I don't think one could call it dabbling....

Assuming you get 1 feat every other level, how many feats, at-will, encounter, dailies and utility powers does say any character have at 10th level?

From the Tiers article,

10th level character (6 feats, 2 at-will, 3 encounter, 3 daily and 3 utility).
Using up all your available feats on multiclassing, wouldn't you end up with
2nd level - Use feat for say Student of the Sword
4th level - Use a feat to swap 1 encounter power with another
6th level - Use a feat to swap 1 encounter power with another
8th level - Use a feat to swap 1 utility power with another
10th level - Use a feat to swap 1 daily power with another.

Fully invested multiclass character (2 at-will, 1 encounter power from their own class, 1 encounter power that was at-will for a fighter, 2 fighter encounter powers, 2 utility, 1 utility power from the fighter class, 2 daily and 1 utility power from the fighter class)

Basically, Single-class/Fully invested - (2/0, 3/2, 3/1, 3/1).

So you're basically at the 1/3 level, however, all of your powers are at the same strength level as the single class character. So you're encounter power ISN"T nerfed as it would be if you were a 3/6 Fighter/Mage

Maybe I'm missing something but it does seem to work pretty well for all character types...

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

I didn't want a rogue who could dabble in magic. I wanted a rogue with rudimentary magical skills who used magical daggers to assassinate people. (rogue/wiz/daggerspell mage/assassin).

I wanted to be a religious character that worked in the shadows for his religion ferreting out the nefarious members of the faith - Cleric-rogue-shadowbane stalker.

...You realize that neither of your examples is usable in the slightest without a "PLEASE MAKE THIS WORK" fix of a PrC from a splatbook? It's kind of a shoddy approach to discussing problems with the core multi-classing mechanic given that a 4e Rogue with Arcane Initiate seems to be approximately a bajillion times closer to your character concept than a 3.5 Rogue/Wizard that pokes at people with a flimsy dagger held by his weak girly arms. Seriously, your BAB is typically going to be the same as a Wizard, or potentially worse. (Hooray for Rogue 1/Wizard 1!) Even if you could hit something, your sneak attack stays as unimpressive as your caster level, which puts your damage output at "miserable," improving to "unremarkable" in ideal circumstances. Your HP is going to be halfway between "paper sack" and "wet paper sack."

But at least you've got Trap Sense and Summon Familiar, right?

The characters you describe are catastrophes in the 3E core rulesets. Are they fantastic in the 4e one? Maybe not. But they appear to be workable.

 

[Wormwood]

Its very different from 3e multiclassing. But its a better solution.

I'm *this* close to giving up and changing my .sig to "what Cadfan said".

 

[Blue Monk]

I am not sure if any multiclassing system makes sense in a realist way. The mechanics seem interesting enough. I am excited to play around with it to see how it works. Is it the best system? Only time will tell.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I really like it.

I would just like a "more" option as well.

 

[Simplicity]

Am I not understanding how the wizard training skill works? You get a wizard encounter-level power for one feat? Why wouldn't EVERYBODY dabble in wizard? Screw Dodge. I'm going to get Stoneskin (or the like) for my fighter...

That can't be right.

 

[AllisterH]

Looking at the pre-4E HB, it doesn't seem like the feats are the defining part of a character. Those come from your CLASS and not specifically the FEAT system.

None of the feats seem to be "that's incredibly useful/broken, I'm looking at you Natural Spell" but none seem to be as bad as "Toughness, haha, you picked THAT feat, Noob".

They basically improve what you already have whereas powers actually determine what you can do in a round....

I can see why you gave up a feat since I don't think a feat will actually give you a power you dont already have.

 

[malraux]

I suppose what would make me happy is a form of gestalt class creation, even if it appears in a suppliment/arcana unearthed book. Gestalt, in 3e, handled the two equal levels of classes reasonably well, at least as far as I could tell. The 4e version seems better to handle the occasional dabble.

 

[Simon Marks]

I'm generally positive, because it is...well, let me explain.

I started with BECMI, where being an Dwarf defined almost everything you were.
AD&D's multiclassing would have worked so much better if they had ditched Multiclassing and introduced a base class for each of the (limited) options.
AD&D and BECMI have almost no (core) options to customise your character. So, for me 3.x's "Point-buy under another name" multiclassing was an aberration, not the norm.

4 editions system is less restrictive than AD&D and BECMI, and less of a mess that 3.x was.

I guess I prefer it to 3.x because if I wanted a point buy system I'd play HERO. DnD is supposed to be class based.

I'd forgotten that used to be one of it's selling points for me.