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<blockquote data-quote="Ridley's Cohort" data-source="post: 3652320" data-attributes="member: 545">You fundamentally misunderstood WotC's reasoning.Too Ugly To Die was cut specifically because it made what was a penalty inherently required by the logic of the mechanics, in this case a low Cha score, into a benefit.&nbsp; Ever more peculiarly, this benefit is explicitly unavailable to someone with a higher Cha score.Practiced Spellcaster is a feat that reduces a certain mechanical cost of a kind of build at the price of a feat.&nbsp; The moral equivalent of the example you cite would be a feat that gave a Fighter1/Wiz9 a caster level of Wiz11 that would be unavailable to a Wiz10.The open question is whether the &quot;penalty&quot; of a lower caster level is a logical necessity of multiclassing.&nbsp; One could attempt to make such an argument, but the evidence seems rather thin and the counterarguments are very strong IMO.A small peek into Complete Adventurer demonstrates the designers themselves see that many multiclass combinations effectively require a feat to &quot;repair&quot; problems in the multiclass mechanics.The Practiced Spellcaster feat is not fundamentally different than the ~dozen multiclass feats in CV.Now some have argued that Practiced Spellcaster is too potent in the hands of some monsters with many HD and modest spellcastig abilities.&nbsp; Perhaps.&nbsp; But that would be a corner case.&nbsp; And it is really a problem with how spellcaster levels are used in calculating CR, not an intrisic problem with the potency of Practiced Spellcaster itself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ridley's Cohort, post: 3652320, member: 545"] You fundamentally misunderstood WotC's reasoning. Too Ugly To Die was cut specifically because it made what was a penalty inherently required by the logic of the mechanics, in this case a low Cha score, into a benefit. Ever more peculiarly, this benefit is explicitly unavailable to someone with a higher Cha score. Practiced Spellcaster is a feat that reduces a certain mechanical cost of a kind of build at the price of a feat. The moral equivalent of the example you cite would be a feat that gave a Fighter1/Wiz9 a caster level of Wiz11 that would be unavailable to a Wiz10. The open question is whether the "penalty" of a lower caster level is a logical necessity of multiclassing. One could attempt to make such an argument, but the evidence seems rather thin and the counterarguments are very strong IMO. A small peek into Complete Adventurer demonstrates the designers themselves see that many multiclass combinations effectively require a feat to "repair" problems in the multiclass mechanics. The Practiced Spellcaster feat is not fundamentally different than the ~dozen multiclass feats in CV. Now some have argued that Practiced Spellcaster is too potent in the hands of some monsters with many HD and modest spellcastig abilities. Perhaps. But that would be a corner case. And it is really a problem with how spellcaster levels are used in calculating CR, not an intrisic problem with the potency of Practiced Spellcaster itself. [/QUOTE]

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