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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5434451" data-attributes="member: 4937">Hmmm...Irony.More irony.Hmmm... so, about that telling people how they shouldn't say how there is only one right way to play D&D again.  Would you care to reflect on that claim, and in particular find as much evidence that I've directly told you you should play your way as I've just presented on you?That may have been me, and I'm glad you asked.  Honest questions get honest answers, even when they are probably intended to be rhetorical.First of all, I don't hard cap the number of classes you take.  I'm not sure what the practical cap actually is, and I've never worked out what the most classes you could reasonably expect to take actually is.  I do however have a soft cap which makes it increasingly hard to take more clases than about 3, especially while maximizing a single attribute.  I have several reasons for this.1) Front Loading: It's to the benefit of a class design that from first level, you can already be a full-fledged member of the class with enough abilities to feel like you are well-rounded, capable, heroic, and mechanically capable in some way of meeting your concept.  This means that most classes are slightly front loaded with extra goodies in the first 1-3 levels.  This is one of the reasons that so many optimized builds in 3.X involve dipping a couple of levels into many classes.  So long as you dip into either a full BAB class or a full spellcaster progression PrC, it's usually pure win.  Even things like saving throws involve a certain amount of front loading.  I don't want to get rid of frontloading a class because its good for low level characters, but I also want to avoid it being abused.   Now sure, there are other ways of addressing this problem - backloading classes to encourage going the full 20, using fractional accounting for saving throws, and so forth - but those have their problems too and they aren't necessarily more conducive to allowing for multiclassing.2) Discouraging pure mechanical dips:  Sometimes you see characters take a level in a class not because it really fits the character concept and experience, but purely for the mechanical advantage.  One of the things I try to do is to always give tradeoffs, so that things aren't necessarily full win.  Softcapping multiclassing helps with that, and particularly helps with limiting you from multiclassing with something wildly different than your concept for no other reason than to get some tiny mechanical advantage.  With my particular softcap, its alot easier to multiclass into conceptually similar classes than conceptually different ones unless your character concept allowed for that logically from the start.   3) Ties class to attributes for purposes of some magical items, curses, special events, etc.: I've got deep 1e roots.  One thing that I missed from 1e in 3e was a direct mechanical connection to what ability most obviously served the class.  My prerequisite system is in no small part inspired by 1e's 'prime requisite'.  It let's me write something simple that changes how a single magic item behaves depending on who wields it.  I could just enumerate things I suppose, but this way I just have to do it once.4) Multiclassing beyond the soft cap is probably inadvisable or undesireable anyway:  Even in RAW, many of the classes are in fact back loaded as well as front loaded.  Certainly base spellcasting classes are.  To compensate, I've made alot of the martial classes go non-linear in power increase at higher levels as well.  Most even optimized builds in 3.5 rarely go beyond 4 or 5 classes because of this backloading, and most builds involving 8 or 10 classes are probably so far from optimized as to be in the other direction.  And conceptually, I find such a mixture to be unnecessary as well as undesirable.  I mean sure, perhaps there is some character out there which fits a Fighter/Hunter/Explorer/Akashic/Fanatic/Rogue/Shaman/Wizard, but by the time you've done that the impact of each class is so dillute that its hard to see it as essential to the concept.  It's rendered each class down to little more than small contribution in BAB and skill points in the greater whole.  Like soup base stretched with too much water.  Now of course, if we had six or eight slightly different variations on the very same class, that might not be true, but then we'd have six or eight slightly different variations on the same class.I hope that answers your question.</blockquote>

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