Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 2830512" data-attributes="member: 6779">This is what I was getting at by referring to the weird penalty of core classes. Forgetting the specifics of this particular character, I've discovered over time that the relative freedom of being able to take a wide variety of prestige classes without worrying about how it will muck up your favored/nonfavored progression leads to a reluctance to use core classes any more than necessary. As I said in my initial post, I found myself resenting those levels in Rogue, not because I was unlikely to use Sneak Attack and half of the class skills, but because I was railroaded into having to continue with Rogue later whether I wanted to or not -- my character's progression as a Ranger is "held hostage" by the multiclass penalty.Compare this to Star Wars or d20 Modern, where all races can multiclass freely. In those games, the humans' advantage of "extra feat + skill levels" is plenty, and the idea of favored classes just seems odd. It may be that the nonhuman races in those games are less powerful than the nonhuman races in D&D, I haven't broken them down. But it seems there's something slightly wonky about a system where it's more advantageous to do the "cherry picking" that's so reviled in order to avoid penalties than it would be to just take the classes that suit your character.In this particular case, when I got home I worked up a writeup of the character that traded the entire Favored Enemy tree to gain Evasion at 5th instead of 9th and Balance and Tumble as class skills, as "Ranger 6 / Thief-Acrobat 3 / Order of the Bow Initiate 1". He ended up with fewer skills overall, less damage potential (due to the loss of +2d6 Sneak Attack), but with higher BAB, a slightly tougher animal companion, Manyshot, and Precise Shot from OBI. Is that min-maxing? Is it anti-min-maxing? I dunno. I guess the people who don't like class dipping would say it's an improvement, and I'd be certainly glad to be rid of the multiclass penalty ... but it seems pretty arbitrary to me to say that one's better than the other.It also required doctoring the class, which I hate to do because it seems to me that has a lot more room for unbalance and abuse than taking a level of X plus a level of Y in order to make hybrid Z.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

Verification