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

[Celebrim]

Falling Icicle: I'm all in agreement with your cons and most of your pros.

But not this one.

It doesn't require pre-planning to be effective, unlike 3e multiclassing. Players will be more free to be spontaneous without the risk of ruining their characters.

Because I can foresee a newer players without system mastery taking the power swap feats, and then finding that the multiclass power just isn't really giving thier role the advantage that one of thier own role powers would, resulting in them swapping the multiclass power back out for a class power when they gain a level.

Net effect - one (or more) wasted feat(s) that the player regrets taking because sticking to 'single class' was actually more effective.

It's definately going to take planning to make spending a feat just to swap a power for another power worthwhile. You're going to have to know what you want and what you later plan to swap for when the original power levels out of effectiveness.

 

[katahn]

Falling Icicle: I'm all in agreement with your cons and most of your pros.

But not this one.



Because I can foresee a newer players without system mastery taking the power swap feats, and then finding that the multiclass power just isn't really giving thier role the advantage that one of thier own role powers would, resulting in them swapping the multiclass power back out for a class power when they gain a level.

Net effect - one (or more) wasted feat(s) that the player regrets taking because sticking to 'single class' was actually more effective.

It's definately going to take planning to make spending a feat just to swap a power for another power worthwhile. You're going to have to know what you want and what you later plan to swap for when the original power levels out of effectiveness.

Two Words: Feat Retraining.

If no combination of feats/powers produces the desired effect then one can simply retrain the multiclass feats and drop that part of the concept.

Another reasonable response is the DM works with the (new) player to achieve a desired result or avoiding the worst pitfalls.

Rerolling a brand new character is also a possibility in some cases.

 

[Lacyon]

Because I can foresee a newer players without system mastery taking the power swap feats, and then finding that the multiclass power just isn't really giving thier role the advantage that one of thier own role powers would, resulting in them swapping the multiclass power back out for a class power when they gain a level.

Net effect - one (or more) wasted feat(s) that the player regrets taking because sticking to 'single class' was actually more effective.

Feat retraining makes this a nonissue.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I really don't have a feel for this until I try it. Wanting to do a fighter/magic-user/thief seems right out, but I'm not wedded to "if it's not backwards compatible, it's garbage".

You definitely will have to chose your characters focus.
My attempt to "simulate" this:
Fighter with Wizard multiclass feats, and skill training in Thievery and Stealth. Since you're using the word "thief", I suppose that backstabbing is not so important for your concept.
If it is, you could try to multiclass into Thief and only pick up skill training in Arcana and Ritual Spellcasting.
If you're not really so much into the "defending" part of Fighter/magic-user/thief, and just are interesting in general combat utility, you don't really need anything specific from Fighter, so you could also play Rogue with Wizard multiclass (or vice versa) and pick weapon training or armor feats that fit your needs.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

3.x multiclassing had a lot to recommend it. It also had a lot it handled poorly without a PrC "patch", such as primary spellcasters multiclassing with just about anything.

4e multiclassing is an entirely different beast. It isn't descended from 3.x multiclassing; you can't compare it directly.

<snip>

I think a problem I have is assuming that there are enough classes to encompass a character. If I want to play a fighter who dabbles in magic, I can do it with this. If I want to play a wizard with a sword, I can also do it. But if I want to play something right in the middle, I need to wait for a new core class, maybe the swordmage. To put it another way, classes fill a lot of niches. This widens the niches, reducing the gap between them by allowing dabbling from other classes. But there are still gaps that can't be reached.

I'm not really seeing the difference between 3e and 4E here. 3E needed PrCs to patch the multiclass holes, 4E needs new classes to patch the multiclass holes. Neither is a great system that can survive without patches. Personally I find the 3E system overall more robust and versitile since it allows for other things like class switching (starting one class then switching to another creating a 30% original class 70% new class)

 

[katahn]

I'm not really seeing the difference between 3e and 4E here. 3E needed PrCs to patch the multiclass holes, 4E needs new classes to patch the multiclass holes. Neither is a great system that can survive without patches. Personally I find the 3E system overall more robust and versitile since it allows for other things like class switching (starting one class then switching to another creating a 30% original class 70% new class)

You don't really need a rule to go to your DM and say:

"My character started off as a fighter, and I picked up the cleric multiclassing feat to reflect his religious devotion to Bahumut. However as the campaign has progressed I have come to feel that the evolution of his character is better reflected by a cleric(fighter) multiclass instead. Do I have your permission to rewrite him as that?"

You could also make use of the fact that as a fighter(cleric) you could take the warpriest paragon path and a cleric epic path. You already have full access to cleric-class feats. The substitution of the paragon path is available if recreating a fighter(cleric) as a cleric(fighter) won't cover the concept and the DM won't allow a rewrite or if the retraining rules don't cover this.

Your example spectacularly fails if your first three levels were as a fighter or a rogue and you wanted to "change classes" to become a spellcaster of some kind. Is three levels of "no longer needed melee class" worth losing three caster levels and being a full spell level behind your other "single-class" brethren? I wouldn't say so.

 

[Gargoyle]

The 4e multiclassing rules seem to do what they need to: give players some options for dabbling in other class abilities so that they can realize their concept without creating characters that are too powerful or too weak.

It makes me more curious about how many feats everyone gets...perhaps that has been mentioned somewhere?

I don't love it, but I like it.

 

[Baka no Hentai]

Falling Icicle: I'm all in agreement with your cons and most of your pros.

But not this one.



Because I can foresee a newer players without system mastery taking the power swap feats, and then finding that the multiclass power just isn't really giving thier role the advantage that one of thier own role powers would, resulting in them swapping the multiclass power back out for a class power when they gain a level.

Net effect - one (or more) wasted feat(s) that the player regrets taking because sticking to 'single class' was actually more effective.

It's definately going to take planning to make spending a feat just to swap a power for another power worthwhile. You're going to have to know what you want and what you later plan to swap for when the original power levels out of effectiveness.

On the plus side, though, the feat re-training option will allow said player to pretty painlessly change his mind in the future, when he has the knowledge to determine what would be more effective.

My main argument, however, against the statement that 4E multi-classing requires very little preplanning has to do with attributes. It seems the trend is that the initial class training requires 13 in a given attribute. The problem with this is that so far we have seen very little mention of ways to actually gain base attributes. We know for certain that they dont increase as you level, instead your attribute modifier increases.

So unless there is an alternative way to raise the base score and not the modifier, a Fighter that starts out with an 11 int will be forever denied the ability to take the wizard class training feat.

It almost seems like something they didnt take into account when tying the feats to the attribute scores instead of the attribute modifiers. Theres no way to tell for sure though until we see all the rules.

All in all though I'm very happy with what I've seen of the multi-classing rules thus far.

 

[boerngrim]

I'm right in the middle. But I think the multiclassing is losing more than it's gaining. While 3e multiclassing did not work for some classes, it did work for (pretty much) all non caster based class combos. To me, the better answer would have been to fix the way spell progression worked rather than gimp the whole thing.

That said, 4e multiclassing looks workable in and of itself, I think. My only objection is that it only allows concepts of the "I'm a foo, who dabbles in bar", and rules out concepts of "I'm a foobar."

This sums up my feelings pretty well. I think that having options for people who want to bea say a fighter with a bit of wizard mixed in is good, but I would like to see a way to be a true figher/wizard.

In 3e the mechanic was logical, but the result was weak. In 1e/2e the result of multiclassing was multiclass characters that were more powerful than single class characters of the same experience. The 4e approach is different, but doesn't solve both problems in my opinion.

 

[Shroomy]

The multiclass feats seem to be far better options than other feats, like skill training. I hope this isn't true, as it would make taking a multiclass feat a no-brainer.

The sneak attack 1/ encounter is much, much weaker than the ability to apply hunter's quarry on one enemy per encounter. Which would you take, +2d6 damage on a single attack that requires combat advantage and only works with specific weapons, or +1d6 damage on every attack you make on an enemy for the entire encounter?

Just two quick points. First, regarding the power disparity between the multi-class feat vs. skill-training, I would think that multi-class feats have a steeper pre-requisite (13+ in a stat is nothing to sneeze in the heroic tier, especially if is not one that you class normally focuses on) and are probably less flexible than the standard skill-training feat since your choice of what to apply it to is probably limited.

Second, based on the differences between the application of the sneak attack power and the hunter's quarry class features, I don't think that the hunter's quarry scales in power like sneak attack (if it scales at all). At the lower-end of the spectrum, you're right, it is probably weaker, but what happens when you start to gain levels and the sneak attack damage doubles and triples?