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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4198048" data-attributes="member: 40961">There are a lot of different things we could try calling a "fighter/mage."1. A character who mostly fights in melee, but occasionally throws a fireball, could be a fighter/mage.  4e seems to do this better than 3e.2. A character who mostly casts spells, but has a weapon trick or two for when things get close quarters, could be a fighter/mage.  4e seems to do this better than 3e as well.3. A character who always fights in melee, but uses magic to buff himself to fight in melee more effectively, could be a fighter/mage.  3e agonized over this for years, with multiple prestige classes and eventually several base classes.  4e is using the Swordmage for this role.4. A character who always fights in melee, but who uses ritual magic outside of combat, could be a fighter/mage.  We don't know if 4e will permit this, but it might.  If it does, we don't know how good it will be- if one feat opens up all ritual magic, it will be awesome.  If it lets you pick up a suite of rituals (all divination for which you meet prereqs), it will probably be awesome.  If one feat lets you choose one ritual, well, who knows.  Probably will end up being awesome for some rituals, and crappy for others.5. A character who spends half his time casting offensive spells and the other half of his time fighting in melee, could be a fighter/mage.  In 4e, this requires spending a bunch of feats and maybe a paragon path to pick up abilities from your second class.  I don't know if 4e will do this well.  Probably, it won't, because its such an anti-synergetic combination that it seems like you should almost be given extra powers to make up for your craptastic ability score allocation and the fact that you have twice as much ground to cover when using feats to boost your basic abilities.  For what its worth, I can't think of any other edition (or game) that handles this problem well.  This sort of choice might work well for a Fighter/Warlord, or other similar combinations, but I doubt it will work well for Fighter/Mages.Basically, the multiclass rules have to be balanced based on the assumption that players will pick powerful things when they multiclass.  This leaves you in a situation where if, for thematic reasons, you want something that isn't powerful, you're paying feats for the opportunity to suck.  See 3e Fighters using Weapon Finesse for reference.Obviously I'd love a system where obtaining powers that are synergetic with your current class and which help make you a more powerful character are appropriately costed (maybe a feat as they cost now) while powers that are anti-synergetic and require weakening your character to use are free, or even come with a reward for choosing them.  But I cannot think of any possible way to accomplish that other than using paragon paths and new base classes to widen the character options, and to present prepackaged, properly balanced nuggets of abilities.</blockquote>

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