OgreBattle wrote:Read on here that you can go from lvl 1 to 20 in the in-world time of less than a year.
Drizzt is still slicing up orc mooks even after battling big demons and big liches, so maybe this wonky multiclassing can work if we acknowledge that 'level appropriate challenge' is not how the game is expected to be played.
It's definitely the case that the game isn't expected to be "all even-CR challenges all the time, speedrun to 20th in 66.5 days" at all. That idea is based on a misunderstanding of the explanation of the math in the DMG, where people read this:
DMG, Behind the Curtain: Experience Points p.41 wrote:The experience point award for encounters is based on the concept that 13.33 encounters of an EL equal to the player characters’ level allow them to gain a level.
...and fail to read the next bit:
Thirteen or fourteen encounters can seem to go by very quickly. This is particularly true at low levels, where most of the encounters that characters take part in are appropriate for their levels. At higher levels, the PCs face a varied range of Encounter Levels (more lower than higher, if they’re to survive) and thus gain levels somewhat more slowly. Higher-level characters also tend to spend more and more time interacting with each other and with NPCs, which results in fewer XP over time.
(That last bit fits Drizzt perfectly and explains his stall in leveling--in addition to the fact that a level 16 PC, as he is officially statted to be, no longer gets any XP for killing any number of below-CR-9 critters like the standard horde of orcs, and so he can go entire novels without gaining a single point of XP.)
It's just like how a lot of people view Wealth by Level as some sort of ironclad rule for how much treasure PCs are "supposed" to have at each level, when it's just a rule of thumb for making new characters based on average treasure rolls and expected consumables usage.
Can a Balor still be taken out by a wizard10/something 10? The non-casters don't get anything after lvl10 as a monoclass so might as well multiclass yeah? If so that doesn't sound too bad.
The problem with multiclassing like that is the way monster abilities and PC spells come online at roughly the same levels. Incorporeality comes online as an ability of even-CR monsters at around the same level the party casters get
magic weapon, petrification comes online around when they get
break enchantment, death attacks and negative levels become noticeably more common around when they get
death ward and
raise dead, and so on. Numerically, a party of [caster] 10/[noncaster] 10s can probably take on a balor, but they lack the utility and defensive magic to actually engage with it and recovery magic to deal with the aftermath.
If you wanted to encourage that kind of multiclassing-for-breadth, you'd have to make it explicit upfront to the players that you're going to err on the side of lower-CR encounters so they feel they can lose caster levels and dabble around without getting totally screwed, and then peg boss monsters to CR = 4/5 × [average party ECL] (or whatever's appropriate for the party in question) instead of CR = [average party ECL] + N at high levels. Which is totally doable, just not something that I think would ever arise organically for any party with sufficient 3e experience.
Blicero wrote:The only major lacuna in his analysis, I think, is how he fails to grapple with 3e's guidelines for magic-marts and the like. Once you have enough glo-stick cure and AoE wands to not have to worry about exhausting your resources, it's more difficult to find large numbers of under-CR'd encounters fun.
I don't think that's really a big issue. Partly because of the "I have 99 cure potions but I'm saving them all for the final boss just in case oh wait the game's over now and I never drank any" effect that makes a lot of players reluctant to lean heavily on consumables, partly because the standard for healsticks is the
wand of cure light wounds (which is very efficient for out-of-combat healing but bad at in-combat healing, so combat is still tense, it's just easier to get patched up afterward) and if they go for a cure moderate/serious/critical wand that gets expensive fast.
In fact, if I were to run a campaign where the encounters leaned lower-CR so the party started stocking up on lots of wands and scrolls and potions to deal with it, I'd consider that a good thing! More consumables means less hoarding of magic items and more of a need for cash flow for constant restocking, which means more incentive for adventuring and looting; more spells coming from items means less of a need for half the party to be casters, which means players can experiment more with party composition and try out weaker classes and builds.