Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Viktyr Gehrig" data-source="post: 2600446" data-attributes="member: 9249">Personally, I think it's awesome.Because of limited feats, most characters end up with a "primary" class and a "secondary" class-- the primary being the one they focus their feats and gear on, the secondary being the one that simply provides them extra tricks. It's hard to build a Gestalt character that really blends the two sides of their nature-- which I like using as a story tool.Gestalt probably needs some House Rules to make it fit better into the rules-- treat it as its own class system, instead of simply a modification to the class system. A lot of the really abusive builds go away when you treat each Gestalt combination as a seperate "class".In my games, I just disallow the Psychic Warrior-- it's like a base class version of the Illithid Slayer anyway. Take the PsW power list and make it a discipline; you can get the same effect by combining Fighter and Psion. If you want to go all-out (and avoid nerfing the Githzerai and Thri-Kreen) you can also let Psions choose whether they manifest based on Intelligence or based on Wisdom.I haven't seen any other combinations that are just ugly without specific tricks-- Rogue/Warlock is fine if you disallow the improved invisibility-like invocation.So far, I haven't seen too many abusive combinations that Gestalt creates-- it just makes old abusive combinations more powerful. VoP Monk gets a lot more vicious in combination with either Druid or Psychic Warrior, for instance, and Scout/Dervish builds work better when you don't have to interrupt your Scout progression.Most of the really bad stuff I've seen has involved not following the rules in the Gestalt variant itself-- no Mystic Theurge or Arcane Trickster, no combining two Prestige Classes, and no using Gestalt to offset a massive LA. (Level Adjustment applies to character level, not class level. A lot of LAs should be lowered accordingly, but you still don't get to ignore them.)It's not bad if you allow monster HD to be Gestalted-- monster HD are, for all intents and purposes, just class levels of really crappy classes. (Except Dragon and Outsider-- I'm still working out how to make those work.) I'd recommend only allowing monsters to combine one class with all of their racial HD, and in my own games, I force that choice-- Thri-Kreen are Scouts, Illithids are Psions, Ogres are Barbarians.Losing HD is part of the penalty of LA-- and allowing characters to offset that with single-class levels doesn't work. Which is more reasonable for a 10th level Gestalt game, a Half-Celestial Paladin/Favored Soul 6 or a Half-Celestial Favored Soul 6/Paladin 10?</blockquote>

Verification