Multiclassing: "Any combo, any level, always works."

[Delta]

Color me sceptical.

Especially when the news today is that "Mike Mearls mentions that WotC are working on multiclassing, and how they're trying to get a ranger/cleric/wizard to work."

There seems to be a whole lot of "it's great, it's wonderful, we finally fixed everything" running concurrently with "we're working on it, we've got some ideas today, we're starting to playtest it".

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

That's true now, aside from alignment restrictions.

... and multiclass XP penalties and paladin/monk multiclass restrictions. All of which can be dropped without impacting the game IMO.

 

[Driddle]

Maybe every multiclass combination isn't supposed to work.

I know, that's crazy talk. Questioning the underlying assumption and whatnot. Just an idea.

 

[grimslade]

From the latest Playtest:

I eventually settled on making Karhun into a human warlord, and then using our multiclass system to dip into some wizardly bits. I’ve been tanking a lot for the party anyway, so converting to a melee-competent base class seemed pretty reasonable, and multiclassing wizard means that I can get more out of my character’s outstanding Intelligence score. The wizard abilities I gained give Karhun a couple of decent ranged area attacks each encounter, something warlords otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of. That means I’ve got lots of flexibility. ...

...Then Karhun got his turn; I used one of those multiclass abilities I was talking about, and used a wand attack on more of the vampires. We discovered, much to our relief, that we were facing vampire minions—dangerous if they mob you, but otherwise easy prey for some big AoE attacks like the sort we were throwing out.

On my next round I saw several bad guys lined up in a row, so Karhun dashed a few squares over and used another wizard ability—my once-per-day scorch, a powerful fire attack. Karhun blasted two mummies and a hapless vampire minion for a pile of fire damage. After that, we were down to just a couple of monsters left, so Karhun switched over to melee attacks and spent the rest of the fight laying about him with his sword. I rolled pretty badly from that point on and managed to miss for the next three swings. Fortunately, the other players picked me up, and we finished off the mummies without too much trouble.

It looks like multiclassers will have power on par with single class, but not anywhere near the diversity of abilities of a single class. Character level will determine power and class allotment will determine abilities. So for the wizard dip, Karhun got some ranged attack with a wand at will or per encounter and a Burning Hands-like spell 1 per day. We aren't told what he gave up for not taking warlord levels.

The whole balancing of abilities across 30 levels of power is daunting. I'm sure, mathematically it will be balanced, but I am worried that in play AoE abilities will trump single target abilities. Will Warlord be a gimp class because it has few AoE and ranged attacks? Will classes be forced to multiclass to measure up? We will see.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Especially when the news today is that "Mike Mearls mentions that WotC are working on multiclassing, and how they're trying to get a ranger/cleric/wizard to work."

There seems to be a whole lot of "it's great, it's wonderful, we finally fixed everything" running concurrently with "we're working on it, we've got some ideas today, we're starting to playtest it".

I understand the skepticism, but this is multiclassing. In the history of the game's design, it appears that nothing else has produced the headaches that this concept has.

Remember 1E/2E, with the multi-class and dual-class systems, the need for specific 'what race can be what multiclass combinations' (which, once 2E opened things up a bit, weren't always identical with what single-class options were available--why couldn't a 2E elf be a fighter/cleric or mage/cleric?), and the confusion about whether multiclassed wizards could cast in armor?

In 3E, the design hassles have been documented for us. From Thirty Years of Adventure, p. 262

"I've [Peter Adkison] never met a gamer who thought the multi-class rules from previous editions were good. Most gamers I've met along the way feel that a character should have some penalty or restriction on picking up new classes but in general should be able to do so without getting totally messed up. As drafts of 3rd Edition D&D came in, this important topic kept getting "glossed over" with multi-class rules that in my opinion just didn't make much sense. So I wrote some multi-class rules myself based on my house rules and shared them with the team. . . .
By this time Jonathan Tweet was on the team and he took this call to action seriously and made what I think was one of the biggest breakthroughts in 3rd Edition D&D design: multi-class rules.
The idea of designing hit points, to-hit bonuses, and saving throw bonuses in such a way that you simply add these bonuses from all your classes together is brilliant.

Elegant and brilliant, yes . . . but the past seven years have shown us that it carries some serious problems, especially for traditional multi-class concepts such as the fighter-mage.

Thus, I'm not at all surprised that multi-classing rules are taking time to get right, and I'm actually a bit encouraged by this blurb from Mearls--it implies that they're testing them to destruction, or close to it.

 

[pawsplay]

... and multiclass XP penalties and paladin/monk multiclass restrictions. All of which can be dropped without impacting the game IMO.

Until you hit six base classes, you still get XP. Thus, it "works."

 

[Irda Ranger]

We're still too much in a vacuum to really even guess how m/c works. We know that Bo9S is a 'preview', so we can guess about Martial characters having maneuvers, but we don't know how or if they scale with level or anything like that. We have no where near enough information to make intelligent guesses about how they might combine with levels in non-Martial characters.

As it is, the m/c system in 3.x works pretty well for any combination of Ranger, Barbarian, Thief, etc. There's any number of rough ideas I could whiteboard out fix the spellcaster half of the problem too. They'd have to be playtested and mathed out, but that's hardly insurmountable. I'm sure they'll make something that at least as good at 3.x, and I'm betting on pretty good odds it'll be better. They know what to look for now.

 

[F4NBOY]

Maybe all class powers are character level based and not class level based.

Since they said every class gets a new power every level, when you multiclass you trade a power from the class you are now for some new powers from the second class, but the powers you have keep getting better as you become a better character.

So a fighter2/wizard2/paladin1 character has powers from the three classes, but each power is as powerful as the powers from a paladin 5. Both Smite Evils are equaly good for example, but the paladin 5 has lots of paladin powers, the other character is a mess, but a level 5 mess.

The characters' powers are just different and each combination creates a whole kind of character concept and tactical choices.

thoughts?

 

[SSquirrel]

I could see them deciding that if both classes aren't spellcasting classes you get spells at caster class level+1/2 melee class unless caster class is the higher level. So a Fighter 4/Wizard 2 would cast spells as a level 4 Wizard, but if he then leveled to FIghter4/Wizard5, he would be casting those spells as a 9th level caster. You still only have the spell slots of whatever caster class you have, it's a question of level of effect

 

[Vysirez]

One possibility is some form of the Bo9S multiclassing. For those who don't know, your effect level for any martial class was your level in that class, plus 1/2 your levels in all other classes. So a Warblade3/fighter 4/rogue 2 has an effective MA level of 6. A more complicated example would be Warblade 4/Fighter 2/Swordsage 5. This character would have an effective MA level of 7 for Warblade and 8 for Swordsage.

If in 4e they dropped the differenciation between caster level and caster class levels, you could have say a Fighter 4/Wizard 1 with a caster level of 3 for Wizard. And he might have all of the casting ability of a Wizard 3. Not sure how well this would balance, but it would definitely soften the difference between Gish multiclassing and melee character multiclassing.

With that system you wouldnt really need Gish PRCs, though you could have PRCs that give more then 1/2 caster level to other classes, though it starts to get complicated. I guess you could just have PRCs add directly to one classes effective caster level, and in doing so add 1/2 to all your other classes.