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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6199485" data-attributes="member: 4937">This was indeed the big hole in 3e style multi-classing, and I've never seen a perfect solution.  1e used the 'gestalt' approach but also had this idea called 'dual classing' that was mostly similar to 3e style.   But as implemented neither were very balanced.   Multi-classing was limited by the fact that demihumans couldn't obtain very high level and so were never OP in the long run, but in the short run they tended to be better than humans by virtue of being 'gestalt classed' and there was never a game reason for not running a demihuman was a X/thief and much reason to do so.  Dual classing was flat out broken.3e multiclassing worked well except for spellcasters.   The solution that 3e tried to adopt was prestige classes, but the problem with the prestige class approach is that you then needed a carefully balanced prestige class for every combination of X and Y that was halfway between the two and supported partial advancement in the two classes simultaneously.   That meant literally dozens of PrC's, some of which were probably never created.  And in general, they always felt bland and limiting.   I hated PrC's from the start, but resisted banning PrC's initially because I thought I needed things like Arcane Trickster to support some archetypes.My solution has been to grant support to multi-classing through a simple generic feat tree that boosts your caster ability.  This works really well, except that it probably over rewards dipping and over encourages multi-classing.   There probably isn't really a lot of reason not to play a Wiz16/Ftr4 or a Rog16/Sor4 under my rules if you are strictly power-gaming.   But for the most part it hasn't been a problem.  It's an attractive and abusable feat tree by design, but so far no one has really created anything fundamentally broken using it, and at high level none of my characters are nearly as busted as the ones in 3.X dipping 3-5 PrC's to grab front-end abilities. If someone can find a way to make say Brb10/Wiz10 look interesting and balanced with Wizard 20 or Barbarian 20, that's great.</blockquote>

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