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D&D 5E New legends and lore.....multiclassing sneak peak

Just make it balanced. If you balance it then there's no significant gain in power from multiclassing vs. playing a class through to level 20 then it doesn't matter if someone patches together frankenstein's monster because he still can't spotlight steal from anyone else's play style.

Yes, this does exclude the "I want my character to be better than yours" style of player. Inclusion isn't an objective virtue. Broad appeal is, and trying to cater to mutually exclusive desires (A > B AND B not less than A) fails to do so. There are games that cater to either end, heck, look at Ars Magica on the whole Fighter vs. Wizard paradigm.

- Marty Lund
 

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Focus instead on the desires of the roleplayers. Start by adding cantrips or single armor or weapon proficiency to the existing Backgrounds, as appropriate: cleric cantrips for priest, mage cantrips to sage, longsword or chainmail to Soldier, and so on. Then, give everyone a first-level feat that can only be spent on a restricted feat list: the Disciple feats for those that want to dabble in casting, a suite of similarly-powered feats for dabbling in non-caster classes, and a small collection of low-power generic-but-universally-useful feats (improved initiative and such) for those who don't want to dabble.

Why not have both, or all three? Add the things you said above about the Backgrounds as one modular option; have 3e-style multiclassing as another modular option; and have "everyone gets a (restricted-list) 1st-level feat" as a third modular option.

Styles for everybody.
 

Just make it balanced. If you balance it then there's no significant gain in power from multiclassing vs. playing a class through to level 20 then it doesn't matter if someone patches together frankenstein's monster because he still can't spotlight steal from anyone else's play style.

Yes, this does exclude the "I want my character to be better than yours" style of player. Inclusion isn't an objective virtue. Broad appeal is, and trying to cater to mutually exclusive desires (A > B AND B not less than A) fails to do so. There are games that cater to either end, heck, look at Ars Magica on the whole Fighter vs. Wizard paradigm.

- Marty Lund

Yep ... if its balanced a lot of these issues do not appear
 

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