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<blockquote data-quote="caelum" data-source="post: 3722098" data-attributes="member: 51656">Dave Noonan's ruminations on the &quot;gish&quot; (see Glyfair's thread on the WotC blogs for an excerpt) got me thinking about Tome of Battle, which introduced a new paradigm for multi-classing.&nbsp; All of the ToB classes have combat abilities that are, in many ways, the analog of spells - each had a level, etc, and you could only use a limited number, etc.&nbsp; The interesting thing was that, if you multi-classed into one of the ToB classes, your &quot;initiator level&quot; (equivalent of caster level) started out at (1/2 your character level + level in ToB classes).&nbsp; This meant that, if you were 8th level, and then picked up a level of swordsage, you could take 5th level maneuvers immediately.To keep things in balance, each maneuver had (in addition to a level), a set of prerequisites (like, &quot;three other Tiger Claw maneuvers&quot;) so that you couldn't just take ALL high-level maneuvers.From my reading (I haven't used it in play), I liked the idea of making multi-classing more viable, and I liked how it encouraged you to &quot;pick a path&quot; to get prerequisites for the more powerful abilities (in contrast to a single-classed swordsage, who knew lots of maneuvers so would have more flexibility than fighter who dipped into swordsage).&nbsp; But it was more bookkeeping - in addition to the pre-requisites that were necessary to keep the whole thing balanced, it also meant that the order in which you chose your class levels was incredibly important - an 8th level druid who took a level of warblade looked very different from a 1st level warblade who then switched into druid.&nbsp; For some reason, the loss of symmetry annoyed me.I haven't seen any discussion of how this worked in practice - does anybody have experience?&nbsp; Does it seem like a system that would make the fighter/wizard more viable overall?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="caelum, post: 3722098, member: 51656"] Dave Noonan's ruminations on the "gish" (see Glyfair's thread on the WotC blogs for an excerpt) got me thinking about Tome of Battle, which introduced a new paradigm for multi-classing. All of the ToB classes have combat abilities that are, in many ways, the analog of spells - each had a level, etc, and you could only use a limited number, etc. The interesting thing was that, if you multi-classed into one of the ToB classes, your "initiator level" (equivalent of caster level) started out at (1/2 your character level + level in ToB classes). This meant that, if you were 8th level, and then picked up a level of swordsage, you could take 5th level maneuvers immediately. To keep things in balance, each maneuver had (in addition to a level), a set of prerequisites (like, "three other Tiger Claw maneuvers") so that you couldn't just take ALL high-level maneuvers. From my reading (I haven't used it in play), I liked the idea of making multi-classing more viable, and I liked how it encouraged you to "pick a path" to get prerequisites for the more powerful abilities (in contrast to a single-classed swordsage, who knew lots of maneuvers so would have more flexibility than fighter who dipped into swordsage). But it was more bookkeeping - in addition to the pre-requisites that were necessary to keep the whole thing balanced, it also meant that the order in which you chose your class levels was incredibly important - an 8th level druid who took a level of warblade looked very different from a 1st level warblade who then switched into druid. For some reason, the loss of symmetry annoyed me. I haven't seen any discussion of how this worked in practice - does anybody have experience? Does it seem like a system that would make the fighter/wizard more viable overall? [/QUOTE]

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