Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5995387" data-attributes="member: 32536">That's actually a rather difficult question. To be honest, I'm not sure. Multi-classing is something that is very hard to do properly, and I'm not sure it is really feasible within the typical assumptions of D&D.I mean, some of my favorite forms of multi-classing come from videogames like the Final Fantasy series (5, 11, and Tactics in particular) or Dragon Quest IX. In such games, you level up in one class and can keep your skills from older classes when you change to a new one. You only ever have a single main class, but can ready and use certain skills you learned from previous classes. The problem with that, though, is that those games achieve that by allowing characters to freely change classes, and use very different concepts of levels and class growth than how they function in D&D.The only form of multi-classing in a D&D product that I rather like is 3E's gestalt rules, because it was elegant and avoided almost all of the pitfalls of other forms of multi-classing. It was, however, impossible to reconcile with normal characters, so you could never have a gestalt Bard/Druid in the same party as a normal Bard or Druid without issues. 4E's hybrid rules attempt to fix this, but their implementation is rather cumbersome and rather ineffective, I think. An interesting related approach I recently heard about is going to appear in the upcoming Iron Kingdoms RPG, where each character picks two classes by default, so everyone always plays a gestalt character.Of course, 3E multi-classing is one of the worst systems, for all kinds of reasons. Taken to its logical conclusion, like it was with d20 Modern, it becomes a strange equivalent to a point-buy character creation system, and loses almost all of the strengths of a proper class system (ease of use, strong flavor, consistent mechanics, and so on). Such a system becomes a trap for game mastery which leads to countless situations where using the multi-classing rules is extremely likely to lead to a mechanically worthless character who fails to even embody the desired concept. Thus, it leads to both prestige classes built explicitly to patch the flaws in the system (like the Mystic Theurge) and classes whose existence prove the flaws of the system (like how the Duskblade exists because Fighter/Wizards aren't viable).Overall, I think pursuing multi-classing too extensively is both unnecessary, and leads to problems. Multi-classing works if the system assumes every character will multi-class and is thus the rules are built to accommodate that, but that is not D&D's approach. The heart of D&D is the single-class character, and it plays much more to the game's strengths to just assume everyone has a single class, and to instead build new classes to fill the roles that might otherwise be filled with multi-classing. Thus, we should see Duskblades and Swordmages rather than a multi-class Fighter/Wizard. The end result is more fun that way.</blockquote>

Verification