Your Experiences with Gestalt Characters?

[jaywolfenstien]

Wow, I was going to write out a lengthier post about the game mechanics side of Gestalt, but StreamoftheSky pretty much nailed all the points I'd of brought up (and more.) Good post.

 

[wolfen fenrison]

The last gestalt game I was in I was a player. The group consisted of a Human Monk/Paladin (my character, I also took VoP), a Grey Elf Archivist/Wizard, a Spellscale Healer/Warmage, a Wood Elf Fighter/Rogue.

My character dominated combat as long as the opponent was evil, the "book mage" mainly dealt with buff spell and battle field control (summons, walls, and the like), and the "red mage" well blasted the crap out of everything (sometimes even us) and then healed and/or raised us after the battle, now the fighter rogue wasn't very good at any of the stuff rouges usually do (the only time she pulled stealth off was when invisibility was cast on her) but could do crap loads of damage with her longbow that she specialized in and by setting up an attack where she could use rapid shot/multishot/sneak attack she could do more damage than me or the blaster.
The archvillian that we faced was a Half-Iron Golem Paladin of Slaughter/Warlock that somehow duel-wielded twin adamantine fullblades, he was more than a little scary.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Wow, I was going to write out a lengthier post about the game mechanics side of Gestalt, but StreamoftheSky pretty much nailed all the points I'd of brought up (and more.) Good post.

The post took so long to write, that I actually had other things to bring up, but by the time I was halfway through, had already forgotten them.

Maybe I'll recall later...

 

[Rleonardh]

If you run point buy system it's harder to run higher level campaign.

However last one I ran had a party of.
Fighter/Cleric
Sorcerer/Bard
Druid/Ranger
Rouge/Wizard

None of them had conflicted stats and every 4 core roles where filled.

 

[DammitVictor]

Now, that's a necro and StreamsoftheSky said most of what needed to be said twelve years ago.

Of course... Pathfinder 1e is a very different game than it was when this thread was first committed to hard drives.

The main mechanical points haven't changed: Gestalt makes ECL/MAD hurt even more, Gestalt amplifies the importance of the action economy. I agree fundamentally with StreamsoftheSky that dual class progression needs to be paired with some restriction on class selection, especially in regard to +X/10 spellcasting progression PrCs.

Late PF1 did introduce some new wrinkles with archetypes and hybrid classes, and third-party concepts like talented classes and prestige progressions-- none of these more powerful than their predecessors normally, but allowing a Gestalt character to stretch even further across party roles, hide the drawbacks of one class archetype behind the abilities of the other class, and generally do everything people complained about Gestalt characters doing fifteen years ago... but better.

Over the past fifteen years, I have played around quite a bit with turning optional Gestalt-- with various penalties-- into a viable substitute for the D&D 3.5/PF1 multiclassing system. I came very close, thanks to a neat bit of third-party content-- look up Overhauling Multiclassing by Tipsy Tabby Publishing-- but I never quite stuck the landing.

Standard Gestalt-- imagine some kind of restricted progression-- is very good at representing multiclass archetypes or kits from AD&D, but it has some trouble with characters (or players) who want their character to be more straightforward: the single-class Human Fighter, no items, Final Destination. This was a major problem with my 2005-2007 (or so) D&D groups.

 

[glass]

Ironically, I was running a gestalt Age of Worms campaign at around the time this thread was originally active - long since finished now of course, but it went pretty well. We though we were going to have a shortage of players, but in the end we didn't....

_
glass.

 

[LongTimeLurker]

From a players perspective it was awesome. I've never had a character i enjoyed playing as much. But our group is decent at optimizing PCs and the DM had no idea on how to challenge our party. We demolished every adventure or scenario with a minimum of effort. The DM quit in frustration 4 adventures into that campaign. He might have even cried a bit.

Also, make sure you know the rules, i.e no letting PCs take prestige classes on both sides at the same level.

 

[Alzrius]

Over the past fifteen years, I have played around quite a bit with turning optional Gestalt-- with various penalties-- into a viable substitute for the D&D 3.5/PF1 multiclassing system.

Have you seen Owen K. C. Stephens' recent blog post that touches on this subject? He describes various ways to do "power fantasy" in Pathfinder 1E, and one of them is "amalgam characters." They're basically gestalt characters, with the difference that "[a]ll of the abilities of both classes are considered to be native to the amalgam class. This can be important for rule interactions. For example, an amalgam magus/wizard treats all their wizard spells as being magus spells when determining if they can cast spells without suffering from arcane spell failure."

I came very close, thanks to a neat bit of third-party content-- look up Overhauling Multiclassing by Tipsy Tabby Publishing-- but I never quite stuck the landing.

In my experience, a lot of smaller third-party publishers come up with great products that all too often don't get the attention they deserve. Kudos to you for bringing this up here.