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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7946022" data-attributes="member: 8461">The responses to this article serve to illustrate how, while there might be some agreement that 3E multiclassing was less than perfect (to put it mildly), there's no particular agreement on why that was or how to fix it. I see that as a function of the different ideas that people have regarding how the game is supposed to work, both at the mechanical level and in actual play.For my part, I'm of the opinion that 1) options and balance are opposed to each other in what they're trying to accomplish, and 2) there's no practical definition of what "balance" means.To elucidate those a little more, if we presume that "balance" is supposed to include some idea of option parity, then options - which include all feats, spells, each level of each class, etc. - will all need to be restrained in what they offer. That means a lot of them will need to be curtailed, and others will need to be disallowed (or rather, never written/published in the first place) altogether. What you can do is restricted in the name of balance. Of course, that's hard to do for any system that relies on successive option-filled supplements being published. After all, "meaningful" differences tend to be seen as "being able to do something new." It's why most people quickly grew bored of +2/+2 skill-booster feats.More notable is the question of what exactly constitutes "balance" in practical terms. That last party is key: most people just say something along the lines of "every option should be as good as every other option" without getting into how that would work. There's also the question of what snapshot of the game is being examined: are you looking at the breadth of an entire campaign, or at one round's worth of actions.To tie this back to multiclassing, 3E tried to make things more balanced by having everyone use a unified XP table, where you could gain 20 levels (at least before the Epic Level Handbook) and mix and match what class you advanced in at each level. (To be fair, it introduced XP penalties for uneven progression, waiving that with "favored classes" for various races.) This actually made things less "balanced" as people found most of the multiclassing options served to undercut the power-growth of taking successive levels in the same class (especially for spellcasters). It was the same reason that ECL/level adjustments for powerful monster PCs didn't work very well.Maybe it's because communication wasn't as good back then, but I don't recall hearing this be nearly such a huge complaint with AD&D multiclassing (for demihumans) and dual-classing (for humans).</blockquote>

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