Which Multiclassing Power Paradigm is Best? ToB? 4E? Else?

[Lago PARANOIA]

As far as level equality goes, the first three levels of each tier (ESPECIALLY levels 1-3) need to be nearly equal because that's where most campaigns start and end.

It's not strictly necessary nor desirable to set it up so that, at least by structure, every class has equal power parity with each other. Granted, it is a bad idea for one class to have too long of a dry spell in upgrades, but it's also a good idea that although classes gain power at different rates they're still balanced in aggregate. To me, a good rule of thumb is that every 1/4-1/5th point of the game the classes should converge to about the same level.

[Username17]

Also, should classes be engineered to be equal at every level, or would it be acceptable to have some classes be more powerful at a certain level, weighed against them having a higher point cost? Having a working system where one level of Bard doesn't cost the same as one level of Rogue can allow for a lot of interesting possibilities. If you can make it work, which could be a big if.

If you where going to make a new edition of D&D would it be better to make every level of every class equal or would it be OK to make some classes mature in power at different rates and price accordingly?

There is basically no reason to do that. If you can figure out a fair level cost ratio between one power set and another, you can set your levels so that they happen to be at even cost values. If one level of mage king is worth two levels of swashbuckler, you can just combine those swashbuckler levels or split the mage king levels. And of course, if you can't figure out a fair level cost ratio, then the only thing assigning different costs to different classes gets you is more player confusion and a more difficult playtest phase.

If classes lock you into railroads, then you can have "capstones" and other easter eggs, where specific classes have weaker levels and stronger levels than average such that there are "payoffs". This is very dangerous, since of course there is no guaranty that the game will not start once the payoff has been reached or end before the payoff is achieved. And it's basically incompatible with retraining, as it gets thoroughly nut kicked by players retraining from a linear warrior to a quadratic wizard after payoff level is reached. If you were going to do something like that, I would strenuously avoid having either very large payoffs or very long dry periods - much better would be to have things like the level before you get Skeleton Mastery be "kind of a dud" rather than the stark rampups so frequent in AD&D.

But in any case, having level power disparities is difficult to pull off successfully if players are locked into class advancement rails. If they can mix and match levels like a 3e character, it is just straight fucking impossible. You're stuck trying to get all the levels of all the classes to be equally valuable. Which itself is nigh impossible unless abilities individually scale with level pretty severely.

-Username17

[Username17]

I understand the triple-classing complaints and I agree that there's really nothing you can do about it.

Having a main/sub class account for 85% of your character and choosing from a 'free' bank for the rest of it would do pretty much the same thing. I still hold a white-knuckled fear over that because I can easily see people doing things like making Power or Class Feature X mandatory for certain builds or combos.

Feat Taxes are annoying and insulting, but the alternative isn't "every class combination works together like magic and we all sing happy songs" it's "a bunch of combos simply are not playable". A feat tax exists because a combo or build doesn't work and so you introduce a selectable ability that fixes it somehow. If you find yourself introducing feat taxes to fix basic shit like "attacking high level monsters with weapons" then it probably means that you suck as a designer. But if there is a popular sounding combination that for whatever reason doesn't work, then not putting out a feat tax hot-fix is just you being a stubborn jerk.

In FFXI, casters and fighters do not mix (with a few weird exceptions like Black Mage/Ninja). They don't mix because the way they deal with hate is completely different, the stat buffs they want are completely different, the equipment they use is completely different and so on. The things that Red Mage brings to the table as a subclass are simply not helpful if what you want to do is to draw hate and survive in melee. Now that's a solvable problem: you could design your game such that melee classes worked with caster subclasses and vice versa. But you're still going to have some problem that is kind of like that.

Maybe it's that Archer doesn't mix with Berserker because all those range combat attacks are severely counter synergistic with abilities to ramp up damage in melee. Or that Monk doesn't work with Knight because of a severe lack of equipment synergy. Or that Artificer doesn't work with Assassin because steam powered shit makes it almost impossible for you to submarine long enough to get the cool Assassin moves off. Whatever the anti-synergies are, they are going to exist. And you can either sit around and smugly tell players not to make those combinations or offer feat tax hot-fixes to make those archetypes usable somehow. Like "Feral Hunter" that swaps your Berserker smell of blood bonuses to ramp up with repeated ranged attacks so that you can make the Archer/Berserker work. Or "Shield of Patience" that swaps your monkish armored in life to add to the shield of virtue so that your Knight/Monk can tank properly. Or whatever.

Saying "Feat Taxes are annoying, so we're going to make it so that we can't make them" is simply letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Worse, your proposal won't actually eliminate feat taxes, it's just going to end up with weird classes that are written to be taken as tertiary classes in order to hotfix unworking combinations. So when it becomes generally understood that Berserker mixes with Archer like sand in a rash, someone is going to make an entire class called Seeker or Guide or something, whose primary real purpose is that the tertiary class offerings happen to try to bridge those class features into something.

And with an ongoing edition, it's going to get really bad. Remember how many different attempts there were to fix metamagics? Yeah, it's going to be like that. If Necromancer and Conjurer don't work together because of some action economy thingy, you're going to end up with a whole fucktonne of classes named things like Scholar and Theurge whose only real purpose is to bridge that gap, and then the class list is going to get really cluttered.

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

Aren't feat taxes going to exist anyway, even if they're giving you new options? Like in Tome, pretty much anyone who uses melee attack will likely take that special style for the +2 attack/damage thing, or a ranged character Sniper, or even whole hordebreaker for "Cleave" effect. Unless I'm being too general, just seems like no matter what, there's going to be "required" abilities by players when you want to play a certain character archtype. Just as Frank said, just none of that RNG crap, like 4th edition did with Weapon Expertise/Focus, or items like Iron Armbands of Power (feel weaker without, but basically losing a slot forever to it). So I guess know there are certain abilities/feats players are going to take for concepts in the game, so have that foresight to ensure they give options and impact to the character, rather than just bigger values to continue playing the same game effectively.

As for Class Clutter, don't most people like a bunch of classes anyway? Probably preferring to have their "Assassin", "Swashbuckler", and "ninja/monk" opposed to just a Rogue class that has all three options in one? I've wondered if in a level game, should just have all classes halved or more to size. Such as Base classes being at most, 10 levels, Prestige: 3-5, for a game meant to go to 20th. Since like Lago has mentioned, most games don't last past a few levels, if even that. Around here, holds to be mostly true, lucky to go past 2-3 levels, or even 3 sessions, and these are all just mostly low level games (nobody wants to run a game at least 14th+ sadly...)

[Ancient History]

Theurge classes reached the apex of silliness, I think, when you had the combination sorcerer/wizard theurge class - Ultimate Magus or some shit.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Theurge classes reached the apex of silliness, I think, when you had the combination sorcerer/wizard theurge class - Ultimate Magus or some shit.

I'm still not sure that it's impossible to use that class to progress twice as fast in spellcasting by getting something that lets you spontaneously cast wizard spells or prepare sorcerer spells...

[Seerow]

Theurge classes reached the apex of silliness, I think, when you had the combination sorcerer/wizard theurge class - Ultimate Magus or some shit.

I actually really liked the Ultimate Magus, and think more theurge style classes would have been better to have been designed more like it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Feat Taxes are annoying and insulting, but the alternative isn't "every class combination works together like magic and we all sing happy songs" it's "a bunch of combos simply are not playable". A feat tax exists because a combo or build doesn't work and so you introduce a selectable ability that fixes it somehow. If you find yourself introducing feat taxes to fix basic shit like "attacking high level monsters with weapons" then it probably means that you suck as a designer. But if there is a popular sounding combination that for whatever reason doesn't work, then not putting out a feat tax hot-fix is just you being a stubborn jerk.

I more meant that I had a problem with non-class interactions with the class and level system because the resources people use to interact with it invariably scale asymmetrically. It doesn't take long for people to figure out 'hey, if I multiclass fighter I can take this fighter-specific ability and prone and push everyone in a 3 square close burst 4 squares away' or 'hey, if I multiclass cleric I get access to cleric implements, one of which is a flail and lets me use the Bolo Immobilizing feat to immobilize on all of my wizard attacks!'

Now that said there's no reason to believe why certain class combinations won't produce the same effect, but I prefer them for several reasons.

1.) Class combinations come as a package instead of a line-item veto. A thief might really really want some selectively overpowered ability from the cleric list that you didn't see being abused but since everything else in the package is average or below average it ends up being not that bad. Sometimes you'll have a situation where everything in a normally balanced package combos off s normally balanced class (see: Ranger|Cleric being generally much stronger than Ranger or Cleric despite this rarely being the case for Hybrid Classes) but those are much harder to do.

2.) This is important, but, as weird as it sounds people would seriously rather pay money for some obscure class instead of paying a feat tax. The fact that non-WS barbarians have to purchase Armor Proficiency: Chainmail pisses people off. But publishing a class feature that allows someone to pick a subclass that has feature for a chainmail proficiency has people cheering that WotC is listening to their demands.

People don't use classes like the Runepriest or selective additions like the STR-based cleric goodies as proof that WotC is ripping them off -- people on the message boards cheer and say that WotC is so awesome for fixing STR-based melee attackers. But if you published a feat for free that did that, even if the net effect of the feat was just as powerful people start whining about feat taxes. Seriously, we even have some names for this psychological effect: loss aversion and the endowment effect.

3.) You do want to have some power creep into the game. Power creep sells books. On the other hand, too much power creep alienates customers. 4E D&D hit upon a potentially winning strategy for awhile by boosting underpowered options rather than just giving across-the-board power creep. Is the fact that you can't selectively add feat tax hotfixes to solve the problem of barbarian and archer not mixing a problem... or an opportunity? As long as A) this is a specialized rather than a general problem (attack falling behind: general. Cleric having nothing good to use channel divinity on? Specialized.) B) the concept wasn't so underpowered that it offended people on first principles or C) you don't go too long between people squawking about the problem and offering fixes.

Letting people make discrete selections like publishing a feat that lets Warlords interact fine with ranged parties as opposed to just publishing an 'Insightful' Warlord build that does the same thing limits the amount of power creep you can have.

[Username17]

1.) Class combinations come as a package instead of a line-item veto.

That is actually what makes them so dangerous. It gives you a lot of flexibility with ability power levels in that you can have flavor abilities sitting in the queue with money powers and not have people trading out the flavor shit for more bonuses, because they fucking can't. That's nice.

But plugging in complete packages to combos sets the number of "optimal" builds to be a very low number. Consider it like this: in 4e every basic race gives a package bonus to two attributes and every class build requires two attributes to function. While giving every race a bonus to only one stat and allowing the player to select a bonus to one other stat would increase the min/maxing somewhat, the primary effect would be to vastly increase the number of race/class combinations that did not suck.

-Username17

[Ferret]

how about something that divorces your basic stats from your powers?

HP, Skill points, damage bonus, defense score are determined by your stats, NOT your class. Class controls access to where you get powers from.

You pick two (three?) Archetypes. These may be the same Archetype; if different, they are Primary and Secondary (primary/secondary/tertiary).

Your class features are given on a level schedule: Primary abilities every odd level, secondary abilities every Even level. (or Primary 1st, secondary, then tertiary abilities).

Iconic/traditional abilities are distributed such that there are some in each category.

This way, on any given level you're looking at a single classes options, but still recognizably Fighter or Fighter/Mage or Fighter/Mage/Thief.

At game start, you begin play with Primary and Secondary picks (or primary/secondary and Tertiary).

[Caedrus]

I'm surprised no one has given shout outs to the Final Fantasy method of everyone having subclasses: limited selections that can and must come from different lists.

Like AD&D Dual Classing, the actual implementation requires way too much grinding to be acceptable in a table top format, but the idea seems fundamentally sound.

-Username17

I prefer the Guild Wars version of "pretty much everyone has subclasses."