A Demon Haunted World

[OgreBattle]

Pathfinder experimented with the "pay nothing" school of monsters as player characters. The end result is that Minotaurs and Drow Nobles and shit are so obviously more powerful than Dwarves and Grey Elves that Mister Caverns won't let you play them at all. It ends up beinf even more restrictive than 3rd edition's "pay too much" system. At least in 3rd edition you had the option of playing an exotic underpowered character. In Pathfinder it's just hard banned at every table.

Getting the powers of a Half Fiend or a Medusa or a Vampire has to have a cost because it obviously has a benefit. There's a lot you can do with level minimums and expended magic item slots, but a Half Fiend player probably wants to pick up new Fiend powers as they level up while still being a Paladin or Assassin or whatever, and what is that if not a multi-class progression?

Further, on a game design end you're already going to want to design a Giant progression that is less than the Berserker player character class because you have Giants as small-group thug monsters at almost every level. Once you've created what is essentially a character class that outputs something less than a full player character, why wouldn't you let people staple some additional class-themed abilities onto it and call it a player character progression?

-Username17

Could you give an example of what a level 10 rogue looks like vs a lvl10 equivalent of Medusa Rogue?

How do you deal with things that don't synergize like a fire giant rogue?

[erik]

How do you deal with things that don't synergize like a fire giant rogue?

I think the idea is that you have classes for certain tiers. If you're stacking something on a Fire Giant Chassis then it better be a higher tier, since there's no sense in sticking a lower tier onto a higher tier character. So it isn't rogue, it's Shadow Dancer or something. You get a Fire Giant who can step through shadows gaining some mobility, stealth, and precision damage, on top of their already impressive physical stats.

[Username17]

Could you give an example of what a level 10 rogue looks like vs a lvl10 equivalent of Medusa Rogue?

How do you deal with things that don't synergize like a fire giant rogue?

Well the Medusa from the Monster Manual is a "Level 5 Lurker" and the Fire Giant from the Monster Manual is a "Level 9 Brute." So there are level minimums in both cases that are 5 and 9. Neither matters for our hypothetical level 10 multiclassed character, who will be a Level 10 Medusa Rogue/Lurker or a Level 10 Fire Giant Rogue/Brute.

Lurker and Brute are monster classes that output creatures that have numbers in the ballpark of player characters but are generally inferior to the expected actual PCs to the point where a group of X Level Y creatures with monster classes is a normal encounter for a group of X Level Y Player Characters with PC classes. Which means that your job as far as making the Lurker and Brute classes cut down enough that it's an acceptable multiclass target is simply done when you get there. The Monster Manual material is already weak enough compared to a regular class that you'd expect to pair it with something before it's ready for primetime.

The problem of course is how one goes about cutting down the Rogue class. Because the Rogue is expected to operate as a total package by which a 10th level Elf Rogue using pretty much just their Rogue progression is able to operate as a 10th level character. To take on a Sphynx (Level 10 Controller) or a Cloud Giant (Level 10 Brute) as a regular encounter. They have to also provide a "watered down" version that staples onto another watered down class (like Lurker or Brute, but presumably also like "Watered Down Multiclass Version of Druid") in order to gestalt into something that is similarly able to operate in a 10th level environment.

One issue is that it's actually a lot easier for me to imagine how to do that with the Fire Giant than it is with the Medusa. The Brute class gives you boosts to strength and hit points and either martial weapon use or rending claws. Those are very useful to Rogues! Fire Giant Strength, a block of extra hitpoints and the ability to use a big sword would be a super effective combination with Move Silently and Backstab even in AD&D. In fact, that was the actual dream when playing a Thief in that edition - get access to Giant Strength and use your attack and damage bonus with your damage multiplier special ability to do massive damage. It almost doesn't matter how the Rogue gets redacted, because whatever it is they don't do as well as a Single Classed Rogue, one could easily imagine having extra hit points and melee damage being a plausible trade for that.

On the flip side, Medusa Lurker powers are a lot more esoteric. Making sure there's some sort of synergy between it and the Multiclass Rogue or the Multiclass Necromancer or whatever is non-trivial.

-Username17

[Prak]

Honestly, being a person who recently read the Ixalan story and thought "I want to play Vraska, now," I think the desire to play, say, a Medusa Assassin, or a Medusa Pirate, or a Medusa Assassin/Pirate, would be filled simply by handing the player with a race that has modest natural armor, maybe something representing whatever flavor of not-hair, and a petrifying gaze. beyond that, everything else is extraneous world-specific stuff.

[Koumei]

and a petrifying gaze

You see that bit there? The bit where you turn to stone just by looking at her, with no action on her part? That's the bit where she doesn't get to be a Swashbuckler and also an Assassin at the same time. The natural armour and biting hair are used to flesh out her levels so that, at the minimum level where petrifying gaze is acceptable, she also has the other basic things you'd want out of that many levels.

There are plenty of monsters that could arguably be reduced to "basic race" whereas D&D has chosen to pile strong abilities and big numbers onto them for the sake of making them high level. But the medusa having a petrifying gaze is older than the British Empire.

[OgreBattle]

How about a player class combination/choice/option where you're 'functionally a medusa' at that level.

Say you're a totemist or blooded sorcerer that just makes you functionally a medusa or fire giant at appropriate levels. That Chakra slot system.

Many D&D monsters that are true breeding species also have origins in real world mythology as cursed humans or other things. Medusa was a human y'know?

[DSMatticus]

I've become increasingly convinced that the solution to D&D classes is standardization and tiering. So level 1-3 is a tier. There's a list of 1st level powers, some predefined class features, and some selectable class features. Level 4-6 is a tier. There's a list of 2nd level powers, more predefined class atures, and some new selectable class features with better options unlocked because you're a higher level. Level 7-9 is a tier, repeat. Level 10-12 is a tier, repeat. Every class works like this, no exceptions. We build everything off of these repeating, 3-level long blocks. If you want your fighter to evolve into a ghost king, then you either set up your game so that players take 6 levels of fighter and then start ghost kinging for 3 levels instead, or they take 7 levels of fighter and at level 7 they chose an archetype that modifies their class on levels 7-9.

There are advantages to both. If ghost king is just its own class, then everyone can be ghost king. If ghost king is just a fighter archetype, then you can build your ghost king class specifically to complement the fighter class. When we're talking about ghost kings that last bit may not sound very important, but then I point out that vampire fighters, vampire rogues, and vampire wizards are all things people might want to be and they all want different things out of their vampirism. It's easier to build monsters into a framework like this, because monsters just replace a bunch of selectable powers and class features with predefined ones. We've given players a currency to spend (powers known, selectable class features), and we can ask the player to spend that currency to buy 'being a monster.' It's basically Pathfinder's approach (see wizard spells/schools, sorcerer spells/bloodlines, alchemist formulae/discoveries, rogue talents, etc, etc), except we've put all the classes on the same schedule and took down the sign saying "no fun allowed, there are only like 4 good choices and you'll take those on all your characters and you'll like it."

Also the fighter class isn't really the fighter class because fuck that. It's something like the champion, and the theme isn't martial badassery, it's heroic legends. They can shoot mountain-cleaving rainbows out of their swords because that's the kind of shit that happens in legends and if someone calls it weeaboo bullshit you call them an uncultured swine.

[nockermensch]

There are advantages to both. If ghost king is just its own class, then everyone can be ghost king. If ghost king is just a fighter archetype, then this edition wastes paper like few others, because even with just 11 base classes in the core book, your advanced classes would be usable for less than 1/10th of these.

I fixed that for you. The advanced classes need to be open for everybody, or at worst be restricted by very loose pre-requisites. You'd want people from several kinds of classes entering them.

One way to do that would be giving these classes a grab-bag of powers from several areas, and letting people pick them as needed. So a ghost king could have as selectable powers "improved invisibility" (good for sneaky ghost kings), "vampiric touch" (good for casters) and "undead resistances" (good for defenders).

[DSMatticus]

Writing an archetype is a fraction of the work of writing an advanced class. It's more like writing abilities for a class. It's no different than writing some new spells or alchemist discoveries - those are only ever going to be used by the classes that can use them, but you still write them.

Yes, the idea of Ghost King specifically as a class-bound archetype is absurd, because it's Ghost King. There is almost no class which could not thematically power-up into Ghost King. Necromancers could because duh. Any kind of caster could, really, because duh. Martial characters could because "the power of my ancestors." Sneaky characters can because ghosts are spooky shadowy things. I chose it because someone referenced it already with Aragorn, and I brought up vampires because it's an example on the other end of the spectrum.

But let's think about it in terms of fire giant instead. Fire giant isn't a whole class, not even a 3-level long one, and if you try to make it one the end result will be dumb, dumb, dumb. Fire giant is going to have to be splashed into other classes. If you wanted to fit it into this paradigm, it would have to be an archetype - it would have a minimum level (maybe), it would cost you some powers/selectable class features, and it would give you a bundle of abilities to replace them, and otherwise you would just be the class you already were.

Vampire is powerful enough to be a whole class to itself, but making it one class that could complement any possible entry point will make it... peculiar. You run the risk of it not feeling particularly cohesive, and turning out more like a build-a-vampire. In theory, that's not an issue, but in practice this is D&D. People do kind of expect the class names they write on their character sheet to do a bit of heavy-lifting.

In the end, you are likely going to want to do both. You're not going to not have prestige classes, and you're not going to not have bundles that slot into characters existing progression. And since even standardized as they are, different classes have different progressions (not every character learns the same number of powers each level, for example), you will have to tailor those bundles to specific classes to some extent. Any clever tricks you can pull to generalize is good, but ultimately having "fire giant" be an ability that characters buy in place of other abilities seems like the best way to solve most PC monsters.

[Username17]

If you want your fighter to evolve into a ghost king, then you either set up your game so that players take 6 levels of fighter and then start ghost kinging for 3 levels instead, or they take 7 levels of fighter and at level 7 they chose an archetype that modifies their class on levels 7-9.

There are advantages to both.

Branched advancement is one of those things people think they want that they actually don't want and it's bad to promise it to people. People think they want a series of left and right forks, but actually that's never a particularly decent choice at any given time, and after you've presented the option nine times you have literally had to write over a thousand fucking options and you've only let the player turn their nose up at nine. It's completely fucked.

Many of the things that are in 4e are defensible as design choices and bad because of poor implementation. But the thing where each class had a reserve list of Paragon classes to feed into was straight unworkable. That was a concept that crashed and burned because it could not possible do anything other than crash and burn.

How many Prestige Class packages are you possibly considering making? You have 15 or more base classes in the PHB, if each Prestige Class comes as a branch from a single base Class, then you have to write fifteen times as many classes as you intend to offer options. Giving someone the choice of six possible name-level futures is actually pretty skinflint, but writing ninety fucking Lord-level advancement options is going to run through most of your thesaurus.

The Prestige Class choice you make at 11th level has to be independent of the base class choice you make at 1st level. It has to be. It's not up for debate, this is fucking settled. The 3e model of content generation where you write prestige classes for Rangers who want to fight in tunnels and you write prestige classes for Rogues who want to grow spider legs and so on and so forth is fucking terrible. You never ever get decent coverage of concepts that way even if you write thousands of pages of content and even a bullshit and inadequate survey rapidly uses up more wordcount than anyone could hope to try to read and comprehend.

And it's actually worse than that, because the entire reason you're making people select high level options in the first place is because you're trying to force people to adopt high level concepts. But if you check out the Paragon classes that people actually made for 4th edition you see real high level concepts for the casters (Angelic Avenger, Divine Oracle, Spellstorm Mage, Doomsayer), while Martial classes get stuff that could honestly be tags on 1st level characters (Dagger Master, Pit Fighter, Pathfinder).

The simple reality is that one of the easiest ways to sabotage the entire plan of forcing people to get high level concepts at high level is to allow people to progress directly in concepts that aren't high level and can't plausibly be made high level. Fighter isn't a high level concept, and so you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking that any variation on "Better Fighter" is going to be a high level concept. But if you make there be Prestige Classes that have come from statements tagged to Fighter, you are committing yourself to making umpteen versions of "Better Fighter." And all of them are going to be insulting trap options no matter how pure your motives are.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Could you give an example of what a level 10 rogue looks like vs a lvl10 equivalent of Medusa Rogue?

How do you deal with things that don't synergize like a fire giant rogue?

The problem of course is how one goes about cutting down the Rogue class. Because the Rogue is expected to operate as a total package by which a 10th level Elf Rogue using pretty much just their Rogue progression is able to operate as a 10th level character

On the flip side, Medusa Lurker powers are a lot more esoteric. Making sure there's some sort of synergy between it and the Multiclass Rogue or the Multiclass Necromancer or whatever is non-trivial.

-Username17

It's "tenth level rogue" where I see the problem arising.

I think you need to make class progressions shorter, split the monsters into fixed monster HD which are the same length as a class progression (which a PC, cohort, familiar, magic mount etc. would always get) and give the default opposition some levels of "Brute" or whatever to get levels totals not at the break point.

So the default fire giant, in order to be level 9, would be a Fire Giant 5 (a special class progression that all fire giants have) / Brute 4. The default Ice Giant would be Ice Giant 5 / Brute 3 instead, but PC Fire Giants and PC Ice Giants would either way be able to join parties starting at level 6.

There wouldn't be any Fire Giant Rogues because a Fire Giant would go straight into a heroic tier (Level 6-10) character class.

Thus your options as a 10th level character would be Rogue 5/Shadowdancer 5 or Fire Giant 5/Shadowdancer 5 but never Fire Giant 5/Rogue 5, because both "Fire Giant" and "Rogue" are considered full adventurer-tier class progressions.

This would necessitate a modest amount of additional arithmetic for monster manual entries, and would make a starting Fire Giant PC (a level 6 Fire Giant 5 / Heroic-tier-class 1) 3 HD smaller than the "default" fire giant, but that's not a bug - it's a feature, because you have fixed break points at different EDIT: THE SAME HD totals and Medusa, Fire Giant and Centaur PCs can all use the same heroic tier classes, and can all join parties at the same time instead of spreading across all fiddly different levels.

[DSMatticus]

That is not Grek, that is DSMatticus.

But more importantly, just like the last time we talked about this, you're not making any sense because you are not making the right comparisons.

Pathfinder does a thing where it has a bunch of predefined swaps in which you lose some class features and gain others in their place - like the vivisectionist swaps your alchemist's bombs for sneak attack, or the hexcrafter lets your magus pick up witch hexes in place of magus arcana. These are called archetypes. Writing fifteen archetypes is not like writing fifteen different prestige classes which are progressions of a specific base class. It simply is not. That is factually not the correct comparison. Most of the base class is left completely intact and unmodified, and the work does not need redone for each archetype. Writing the vivisectionist was exactly as difficult as writing 2-3 alchemist discoveries. Writing the hexcrafter was exactly as difficult as writing 2-3 magus arcana. Players are already expected to make choices off of lists of selectable class features like discoveries and magus arcana, and an archetype is the functional equivalent of a number of such choices bundled together. They are of comparable scope and benefit to content you have already decided to write! They are also supremely goddamn useful, because they are literally just the model for subclasses. They are a mechanism by which players can easily trade parts of 'being a rogue' in exchange for 'being a fire giant' or whatever.

But Paizo's implementation of archetypes leaves much to be desired, because Paizo's class design is a clusterfuck partially inherited from 3.5 and partially of their own making. If you standardize classes to 3-4 level blocks, it becomes much easier to make cross-class content, because the classes are progressing in parallel and have more analogous structures and there's greater potential to just make calls to those structures instead of having to individually describe what it means to be a 'fire giant fighter' and a 'fire giant rogue.'

And yes, writing prestige classes that are just secretly progressions of a single base class is stupid. If Ghost King's only practical entry point is fighter, it shouldn't be a separate class in the first place, that's a complete goddamn waste and 'conjure ghost army' is just something fighter should have access to in their list of abilities/archetypes. Ghost King inherits fighter mechanics and notes only the necessary changes, minimizing redundancy and complexity. And if you want Ghost King to have multiple entry points - and you should, because Ghost King is clearly not a fighter-specific concept - then you make it its own (prestige) class with loose entry requirements and which becomes available at the desired level.

"Having lots of different entry points" is the sane design prerequisite for something to be prestige class instead of an option within a class. 3.5 never quite figured that out. Pathfinder stumbled in that direction by accident, but still didn't understand what they were doing or why it kind of worked. 4E failed horribly at this task on all fronts. 5E evaded the problem entirely by not having any content.

[Username17]

It's "tenth level rogue" where I see the problem arising.

I think you need to make class progressions shorter, split the monsters into fixed monster HD which are the same length as a class progression (which a PC, cohort, familiar, magic mount etc. would always get) and give the default opposition some levels of "Brute" or whatever to get levels totals not at the break point.

So the default fire giant, in order to be level 9, would be a Fire Giant 5 (a special class progression that all fire giants have) / Brute 4. The default Ice Giant would be Ice Giant 5 / Brute 3 instead, but PC Fire Giants and PC Ice Giants would either way be able to join parties starting at level 6.

There wouldn't be any Fire Giant Rogues because a Fire Giant would go straight into a heroic tier (Level 6-10) character class.

Thus your options as a 10th level character would be Rogue 5/Shadowdancer 5 or Fire Giant 5/Shadowdancer 5 but never Fire Giant 5/Rogue 5, because both "Fire Giant" and "Rogue" are considered full adventurer-tier class progressions.

This would necessitate a modest amount of additional arithmetic for monster manual entries, and would make a starting Fire Giant PC (a level 6 Fire Giant 5 / Heroic-tier-class 1) 3 HD smaller than the "default" fire giant, but that's not a bug - it's a feature, because you have fixed break points at different HD totals and Medusa, Fire Giant and Centaur PCs can all use the same heroic tier classes, and can all join parties at the same time instead of spreading across all fiddly different levels.

I flat don't agree with any of this. Adding up class levels sequentially in 3e style multiclassing didn't work. That was a failed experiment. We should dustbin that idea, because it was a bad idea. It's a bad idea for a host of reasons. Here are some of them:

• I can't tell the difference between someone who is 70% Ranger and 30% Berserker and someone who is 60% Ranger and 40% Berserker. Neither can you. Neither can anyone. But sequential multiclassing makes those essentially similar character concepts game mechanically importantly different.
• It is flatly absurd to think that you could playtest all of the variations of taking 1-5 levels of one class and 5-1 levels of the other class as a 6th level character. For 15 classes, that is five hundred and twenty five different 2 class combinations at 6th level. That's insane.
• People who want to be a Ranger/Sorcerer do not generally want to be readily identifiable as a Ranger/Sorcerer six levels from now when the campaign is basically over. They want to be Ranger/Sorcerers right now. And that's reasonable. Whatever level of play you are at, you should be able to play your character concept. Even if it's first level. Especially if it's first level. Obviously, taking levels one at a time can't even deliver that.
• The Multicaster problem was never solved. It's never going to be solved, because it is intractable.
• When you're taking levels in sequence, there's no way to guaranty that a class level will correspond with a particular character level. "Rogue 3" exists in a formless void where it might be your 3rd level, your 9th level, or your 37th level. People have tried to come up with abilities that level scale sufficiently that it doesn't matter whether the ability granted by Rogue 3 is gained at one level or another - but that's a huge ask. Frankly, I do not see that ever working.
• The existence of leveled challenges necessitates the existence of gatekeeper obstacles and gatekey abilities. You can't guaranty that players are going to have abilities that meet the requirements of "you must be this tall to proceed" if it is possible to just take the first level of various classes over and over again.

Yes, 3rd edition's multiclassing was an interesting idea. It was also a failed idea and you cannot seriously go forward making the same fucking mistakes. You gotta acknowledge that was audacious but also catastrophic so that you can learn something and move on to doing something else that at least has different problems.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

• I can't tell the difference between someone who is 70% Ranger and 30% Berserker and someone who is 60% Ranger and 40% Berserker. Neither can you. Neither can anyone. But sequential multiclassing makes those essentially similar character concepts game mechanically importantly different.

So don't do that.

Sequential multiclassing should only happen between tiers. So you sequentially multiclass in an Adventurer-tier class (levels 1-5) and then in an Heroic-tier class (levels 6-10) but you never ever mix and match classes within tiers.

Thus, possible character configurations would be:
Ranger 5 / Demoniac 2
Ranger 5 / Shadowdancer 2
Berserker 5 / Demoniac 2
Berserker 5 / Shadowdancer 2
but never
Ranger 2 / Berserker 3 / Demoniac 1 / Shadowdancer 1 <- IS NOT ALLOWED
or, for that matter:
Fire Giant 5 / Brute 1 / Demoniac <- IS NOT ALLOWED

• It is flatly absurd to think that you could playtest all of the variations of taking 1-5 levels of one class and 5-1 levels of the other class as a 6th level character. For 15 classes, that is five hundred and twenty five different 2 class combinations at 6th level. That's insane.

First off, we're going to let people play Fire Giants, Werejaguars and Medusas. Playtesting is not going to be comprehensive.
Second, it would never be an option to be Rogue-5/Shadowdancer-1 vs Rogue-1/Shadowdancer-5; but you're right, the proposal of letting people mix-and-match classes between tiers which is what I'm advocating here, is going to be a challenge.
Even supposing the lordly tiers only kicked in at 11th level, is a Pyromancer-10/Demon General-1 balanced against a Rogue-10/Witch King-1? You're not going to be exhaustively testing the combos, you're going to have to hope that the content holds together well enough with a few guidelines and then patch it from there.

• People who want to be a Ranger/Sorcerer do not generally want to be readily identifiable as a Ranger/Sorcerer six levels from now when the campaign is basically over. They want to be Ranger/Sorcerers right now. And that's reasonable. Whatever level of play you are at, you should be able to play your character concept. Even if it's first level. Especially if it's first level. Obviously, taking levels one at a time can't even deliver that.

I agree. So you need some Ranger/Sorcerer hybrid class to support that character concept, but those hybrid-classes need to climb into tiers at the same time as the Fighter even though their concept doesn't age out in the same way, as you yourself were arguing earlier.

• The Multicaster problem was never solved. It's never going to be solved, because it is intractable.

Sure it is. At 6th level, you go straight into Demoniac and you get level-appropriate demons. If you go in from Pyromancer you also have lower-level fireballs if you go in from Rogue you have lower-level stabbing.
Again, if you really think this is insolvable, you are criticizing your own proposal of having Fighters turn into Witch Kings at level 11; I'm just saying you should do it at level 6.

• When you're taking levels in sequence, there's no way to guaranty that a class level will correspond with a particular character level. "Rogue 3" exists in a formless void where it might be your 3rd level, your 9th level, or your 37th level. People have tried to come up with abilities that level scale sufficiently that it doesn't matter whether the ability granted by Rogue 3 is gained at one level or another - but that's a huge ask. Frankly, I do not see that ever working.

In case this wasn't clear - I am not advocating open-multiclassing.

[deaddmwalking]

If your 'tiers' mean anything, then a Rogue 2/Beserker 3 should be acceptable, as long as they take a 'heroic tier class' at 6th. Ie, a Rogue 3/Berserker 3 would not have the 'heroic abilities' that they need at 6th level, but you probably should be flexible enough that a 4th level character and a 3rd level character can meaningfully adventure together.

[Username17]

Pathfinder does a thing where it has a bunch of predefined swaps in which you lose some class features and gain others in their place - like the vivisectionist swaps your alchemist's bombs for sneak attack, or the hexcrafter lets your magus pick up witch hexes in place of magus arcana. These are called archetypes.

Yeah, but I don't care about any of that shit, because fucking none of it addresses any of the issues involved in making people become Ghost Kings in the first place. Class feature replacement shenanigans presuppose that you have level appropriate abilities in the first place. By definition that cannot solve the issues of classes being inadequate in concept to deal with the challenges of some level or another.

If the Fighter class doesn't pull its weight in Lord level campaigns, and we all agree that it does not, then Fighter archetypes don't solve the problem. Can't solve the problem. Don't even address the problem. Your class concept is inherently inadequate to have any abilities that would allow you to be relevant against challenges of your level, so there's nothing to trade for because there's nothing to trade with.

Sequential multiclassing should only happen between tiers. So you sequentially multiclass in an Adventurer-tier class (levels 1-5) and then in an Heroic-tier class (levels 6-10) but you never ever mix and match classes within tiers.

I don't think there's much advantage in having a new set of classes pop in at level 6. At level 11, you are building a city and fighting armies and your opponents are generals and dukes. At level 6 you're fighting a Clay Golem instead of a Wood Golem or a Spectre instead of a Wraith. The enemies at level 6 are just palette swaps of the monsters at level 5, so there's no reason that a character concept that is adequate at level 5 could be inadequate at level 6. The monsters have bigger numbers, but your class could just give you bigger numbers and the cheese stands alone. I could be persuaded to have people switch to advanced classes at level 6, but I don't currently see any particular reason for it.

In any case, while I am 100% in favor of additive multiclassing between tiers and forcing people to switch to classes to ones that provide Prestige abilities when you hit Prestige Level, I don't see how that addresses peoples' desire to play monsters or multiclassed characters. Yes, you could imagine someone playing a Fire Giant / Shadowdancer, but what if they wanted to play a Minotaur Shaman or a Necromancer from a Drow Great House? Those seem like pretty reasonable character concepts, but since neither Minotaur nor Fiendish Drow are 5th level monsters, your breakpoints schema doesn't actually work.

First off, we're going to let people play Fire Giants, Werejaguars and Medusas. Playtesting is not going to be comprehensive.

Yes we are. But we only have five monster classes: Brute, Controller, Harrier, Lurker, and Ravager. That's all we need. Fire Giants are Brutes, Medusas are Lurkers, and Werejaguars are Ravagers. A Fire Giant Rogue can be pretty similar to a Hill Giant Rogue who just happens to start at 9th level instead of 6th. There are a few minor changes involving being on fire instead of not, but that's relatively small potatoes considering. The Werejaguar is made from the same monster class as gives you the Ghast. Making hundreds of monster classes is not practical. You make a small number of monster classes and you give them some power selections and you call it a day.

In any case, yes you won't always be able to playtest all the different Lurker packages and maybe Medusa or Drider is super good as a Druid or some shit. Such is life. But there's no reason to introduce extra fiddly bits whose only real purpose is to make playtesting more difficult.

In case this wasn't clear - I am not advocating open-multiclassing.

Sequential multiclassing without open-multiclassing doesn't actually let you do any of the things you'd want to do with multiclassing other than "Here's a new character concept that is level appropriate for where you are now." And since open multiclassing doesn't work, that means that this is literally the only thing that sequential multiclassing is good for. You enter the Lord Tier Levels, and then you have to get a Lord Tier Class and get Lord Tier Abilities. That's it. It doesn't particularly help with answering the question "How do I play a Drider Sorcerer?" Because it just obviously does not help with that.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

It kind of seems that for parallel multiclassing the elegant system would be to do what Legend did and make every character into a triple-classed character. So a [boring race] Paladin has all three aspects of Paladin-ness, while a Fire Giant Paladin lacks one-third of the paladin abilities (player's choice of one of the three tracks) in exchange for having Fire Giant abilities.

Still means multiple resource management schemes on one character though.

This of course has nothing to do with the leveling up into Ghost King topic.

[Hicks]

Well yes. Multiclassing rules are tremendously open to abuse and also create a lot of fail states. While it's trivially easy to avoid many of the specific pitfalls of multiclassing rules of specific previous editions, it's definitely true that you're going to have some kind of synergies and anti-synergies. Like, the thing in AD&D where a Fighter Wizard is exactly the same as a Wizard Fighter except that he has 21 extra hit points and a higher strength modifier is super bullshit, but it's difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which Berserkers get exactly equal benefits from splashing Sorcerer as they do from splashing Ranger.

As such, I think it's virtually inevitable that some multiclass combinations are going to be deprecated

The thing is that while it's true and unfortunate that not all multiclass combinations are going to be well thought of, you aren't actually promising all the possible multiclass combinations when you make the book. You make a Druid class and a Necromancer class and you are promising that both of those are going to be playable. But you aren't specifically promising that a Druid/Necromancer or a Necromancer/Druid is playable. It would be nice if they both were, but you haven't made any specific promises along those lines. That's very different from a choice like "Worships Pelor" which you have committed to making a viable life choice by including it.

-Username17

If you're just going to rewrite the base classes anyway, why not have every class has a Primary and Secondary ability track that each grant a level appropriate ability each level, and mandate that you're locked into each unless you retrain to take the entire secondary track from a different class, or retrain to change your primary class for those people who can't stop changing characters? This'll let the necromancer/necromancer, necromancer/paladin, paladin/necromancer, and paladin/paladin all play differently. Let's say you go crazy and have 15 unique classes, each granting 2 abilities each level accross 20 levels so everybody gets 40 level appropriate things to do (less abilities than 3.x wizards get just by leveling up); that's like 600 abilities, but it's still less than the 700+ spells in the 3e PHB, and those 15 different classes can be multiclassed between those two primary/secondary tracks over 437 quadrillion different ways.

I mean, if you wanted dedicated classes that do iconic stuff those classes often do. Personally, I'm partial to 3.x wizard spells known for getting new abilities, and having 1 mono class that can have skill (including attacking), weapon, and armor proficiencies being freely selectable, but you can only select a limited number of things to get a flat (and sizable) proficiency bonus to use. But one customizable monoclass isn't what you look like you're doing, probably so iconic classes can be role protected to do iconic things and/or have iconic resource management.

[Hicks]

On fire giant rogues, why not have a racial kit with the prerequisite, "must be at least level 10 to be born, polymorphed, or reincarnated as a fire giant," and it makes you large size and immune to fire? Just a package of always-on abilities that won't be game breakingly additive at whatever level you think is appropriate for a baseline fire giant.

[Grek]

Don't attribute DSM's stupid idea to me, thanks.

[DrPraetor]

I don't think there's much advantage in having a new set of classes pop in at level 6. At level 11, you are building a city and fighting armies and your opponents are generals and dukes. At level 6 you're fighting a Clay Golem instead of a Wood Golem or a Spectre instead of a Wraith. The enemies at level 6 are just palette swaps of the monsters at level 5, so there's no reason that a character concept that is adequate at level 5 could be inadequate at level 6.

I say to thee, bollocks.

First, the same is true of levels 10 and 11 - you don't hit a sudden gear shift at any point. But at some point around level 10 you've graduated from fighting golems to overthrowing kingdoms. If anything, level 10 is a bit late given how the game is currently constructed.

At some point around level 6, you've graduated from being a rag-tag group of murder-hobos to being a highly compensated strike force with flunkies:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#leadership
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/charmMonster.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/planarAllyLesser.htm

so it's true that you don't have to govern hexes yet but you do have to supply your band of merry men, and you also start to have time and space adventures around this level, so I think that's a big enough transition to justify giving people the opportunity to grow into new character concepts at that point. As you've previously indicated, you shouldn't have people hop into new class rails independently, so by your own mammal law, it makes sense to hand out the first raft of 2nd tier character concepts at level 6.

It's true that fewer concepts expire at this point compared to the number who expire when you want to rule entire hexes but I really don't think that's a sound argument. It is true that you'll want classes such as "Cavalier" (more fighter) and "Assassin" (more rogue.)

The monsters have bigger numbers, but your class could just give you bigger numbers and the cheese stands alone. I could be persuaded to have people switch to advanced classes at level 6, but I don't currently see any particular reason for it.

LIES. You see perfectly well and are just being contrarian.

I don't see how that addresses peoples' desire to play monsters

The alternative is, if you want to play a Troll, you have to take all 10 levels of Bruiser? Or there is some funky variant-rogue progression that only Trolls take, and at that point why can't I jump on that bandwagon as a 5th level fighter I might legitimately ask?

or multiclassed characters.

It doesn't. For hybrid concepts you would still need hybrid classes, and you'd have people hopping onto them at level 6 instead of level 11 quite often, I'm sure.

Yes, you could imagine someone playing a Fire Giant / Shadowdancer, but what if they wanted to play a Minotaur Shaman or a Necromancer from a Drow Great House? Those seem like pretty reasonable character concepts, but since neither Minotaur nor Fiendish Drow are 5th level monsters, your breakpoints schema doesn't actually work.

The breakpoint schema does require monsters to be pigeon-holed into slots, for which I would propose:
[*] Humans (Goblins and Kobolds?) who start with 2 kits.
[*] Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and etc., who start with 1 kit - so effectively, being a dwarf or an elf or whatever is your second kit.
[*] Fiendish Drow and Phreints who start with 0 kits.
[*] Minotaurs who start with -1 kits which means you can't enter play until 3rd level (when you would otherwise get another kit). PC Minotaurs and other ~3HD bogguns would still have all class levels instead of 3 HD of Monstrous HumanoidBruiser, although vanilla Minotaurs could go ahead and take the Bruiser class (the Minotaur captain could get a PC class, obviously).
[*] Fire Giants (and Ice Giants, and Hill Giants) who start with 1 heroic kit at 6th level, with 5 levels of monster classes, when you'd otherwise have 3 adventurer-tier kits and 1 heroic kit.
[*] Medusae and Trolls who have better powers than Fire Giants and who thus start with 0 heroic kits at 6th level.
and so on for Lordly kits (11-15) and Epic kits (16-20) if you want to be a Mind Flayer or something.

First off, we're going to let people play Fire Giants, Werejaguars and Medusas. Playtesting is not going to be comprehensive.

Yes we are. But we only have five monster classes: Brute, Controller, Harrier, Lurker, and Ravager.... A Fire Giant Rogue can be pretty similar to a Hill Giant Rogue who just happens to start at 9th level instead of 6th. There are a few minor changes involving being on fire instead of not, but that's relatively small potatoes considering.

I think it is much better to have both the Hill Giant and Fire Giant start at level 6, and then take levels of Assassin (which is what "more levels of rogue" are called for levels 6-10) even though common Fire Giants are 9th level.

Making hundreds of monster classes is not practical. You make a small number of monster classes and you give them some power selections and you call it a day.

You haven't fixed the problem so much as renamed it. Yes, Ghast and Werejaguar may be nominally the same class but if they have completely different powers it doesn't solve the balance issue. It also doesn't solve the issue of what combination of racial powers and class features a Werejaguar would actually get on entering play.

Sequential multiclassing without open-multiclassing doesn't actually let you do any of the things you'd want to do with multiclassing other than "Here's a new character concept that is level appropriate for where you are now."

Gosh is that all?

"How do I play a Drider Sorcerer?"

You don't, you play a Drider Dragonator instead.


I'm still not clear on what your proposal is on this? The Drider would sacrifice a bunch of lower-level class features? To me, Sorcerer-6(5 Lurker substition levels) is clearly worse and more fiddly than DriderLurker-5 / Prism Mage-1.

[DSMatticus]

Yeah, but I don't care about any of that shit, because fucking none of it addresses any of the issues involved in making people become Ghost Kings in the first place. Class feature replacement shenanigans presuppose that you have level appropriate abilities in the first place. By definition that cannot solve the issues of classes being inadequate in concept to deal with the challenges of some level or another.

If the Fighter class doesn't pull its weight in Lord level campaigns, and we all agree that it does not, then Fighter archetypes don't solve the problem. Can't solve the problem. Don't even address the problem. Your class concept is inherently inadequate to have any abilities that would allow you to be relevant against challenges of your level, so there's nothing to trade for because there's nothing to trade with.

Also the fighter class isn't really the fighter class because fuck that. It's something like the champion, and the theme isn't martial badassery, it's heroic legends. They can shoot mountain-cleaving rainbows out of their swords because that's the kind of shit that happens in legends and if someone calls it weeaboo bullshit you call them an uncultured swine.

I do not know what you're trying to discuss with me.

I made a side note that the fighter clearly needs replaced with thinly-disguised weeaboo bullshit, and namedropped the fighter in my example only because it currently exists and is an example of a thing that is a class. I could have just as easily said 'necromancer 6/ghost king 3 vs necromancer 9 (who traded some of the stuff he would have gotten from necromancer 7-9 to become a ghost king)' and my post would read the exact same and make the exact same point. But fuck it, forget that for now. There's an easier way to make my point if I'm addressing your proposal.

Right now, it sounds like your plan is to give everyone a main class and a subclass, and to let people give up their subclass to buy 'is a monster.' So some people are Shaman (Berserker) and some people are Shaman (Fire Giant) and both get the same Shaman abilities but one gets a smattering of berserker and the other is a fire giant. You already pointed out the problem with this when you called bullshit on Shaman (Dwarf) - not all monsters are worth the same investment. Shuffling the monster part of your character to the lesser half of an uneven gestalt doesn't actually change the fundamental problem we saw in 3.5; some monsters are worth more than others and open multi-classing is not a successful way to bridge the difference. You could add bullshit filler to stretch out the monster subclass to the same length, but that would be an unsatisfying solution when done with the main class and it's only slightly less unsatisfying when you do it with the subclass.

Obviously, you need being a monster to not delay your main class's progression. Levelling up is a non-linear increase in power, so even if fire giant 4/wizard 6 is somehow balanced with wizard 10, fire giant 4/wizard 7 will fall behind wizard 11. You simply *have* to have a class and you *have* to keep gaining levels in that class. But you also need a unit of currency smaller than 'ten levels of a subclass' (or whatever your breakpoint is for people graduating to 'Lord Tier' and picking a new class) because that is not granular enough to represent the difference in value between different monsters.

If you cut all your classes into neat little blocks 3-4 levels long, then it's trivial to describe the cost of archetyping within a specific block, and it's easy to describe which blocks archetypes belong in. I.e. if you archetype as a necromancer on levels 4-6, you lose abilities X, Y, Z. Fire giant is an archetype you can take on levels 4-6, and it gives you abilities R, S, T. Archetypes can be as class-specific or as class-agnostic as needed, and class-specific ones can obviously have more detailed interactions with their parent class.

[Emerald]

It kind of seems that for parallel multiclassing the elegant system would be to do what Legend did and make every character into a triple-classed character. So a [boring race] Paladin has all three aspects of Paladin-ness, while a Fire Giant Paladin lacks one-third of the paladin abilities (player's choice of one of the three tracks) in exchange for having Fire Giant abilities.

If you're just going to rewrite the base classes anyway, why not have every class has a Primary and Secondary ability track that each grant a level appropriate ability each level, and mandate that you're locked into each

The breakpoint schema does require monsters to be pigeon-holed into slots, for which I would propose:

• Humans (Goblins and Kobolds?) who start with 2 kits.
• Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and etc., who start with 1 kit - so effectively, being a dwarf or an elf or whatever is your second kit.
• Fiendish Drow and Phreints who start with 0 kits.
• Minotaurs who start with -1 kits which means you can't enter play until 3rd level (when you would otherwise get another kit). PC Minotaurs and other ~3HD bogguns would still have all class levels instead of 3 HD of Monstrous HumanoidBruiser, although vanilla Minotaurs could go ahead and take the Bruiser class (the Minotaur captain could get a PC class, obviously).
• Fire Giants (and Ice Giants, and Hill Giants) who start with 1 heroic kit at 6th level, with 5 levels of monster classes, when you'd otherwise have 3 adventurer-tier kits and 1 heroic kit.
• Medusae and Trolls who have better powers than Fire Giants and who thus start with 0 heroic kits at 6th level.
  and so on for Lordly kits (11-15) and Epic kits (16-20) if you want to be a Mind Flayer or something.

I like all three of these ideas. To combine them a bit and address both the "we want breakpoints" bit and the "not all monsters are worth the same investment" bit, maybe instead of three partial classes that all go 1-20, each character gets a primary class with 20 levels, then picks a subclass with 8-10 levels over the 1-20 level range plus several shorter tiered classes with 2-3 levels that interleave with the subclass, or the like.

Something like this:

	Level	Primary Class	Subclass	Tiered Class
	1	Class Feature 1		Heroic Kit Feature 1
	2	Class Feature 2	Subclass Feature 1
	3	Class Feature 3		Heroic Kit Feature 2
	4	Class Feature 4	Subclass Feature 2
	5	Class Feature 3		Heroic Kit Feature 3
	6	Class Feature 6		Prestige Class Feature 1
	7	Class Feature 7	Subclass Feature 3
	8	Class Feature 8		Prestige Class Feature 2
	9	Class Feature 9	Subclass Feature 4
	10	Class Feature 10		Prestige Class Feature 3
	11	Class Feature 11		Paragon Path Feature 1
	12	Class Feature 12	Subclass Feature 5
	13	Class Feature 13		Paragon Path Feature 2
	14	Class Feature 14	Subclass Feature 6
	15	Class Feature 15		Paragon Path Feature 3
	16	Class Feature 16		Epic Destiny Feature 1
	17	Class Feature 17	Subclass Feature 7
	18	Class Feature 18		Epic Destiny Feature 2
	19	Class Feature 19	Subclass Feature 8
	20	Class Feature 20		Epic Destiny Feature 3

So you can divide classes up into categories for "has broad thematic resonance from 1-20", "has some thematic resonance from 1-20", and "has narrow thematic resonance or limited shelf life" and give classes in each category appropriate amounts of support; all those prestige classes that only have one or two powers you care about locked behind six or seven levels of dreck can just be 2- or 3-level classes, and you can have Heroic and Prestige Fighter tiered classes (but not Paragon or Epic Fighter) if you want to cut them off at mid-levels. You might add an option to automatically "downgrade" a base class to a subclass or tiered class for sort-of multiclassing that lets you get a level-appropriate taste of another class's abilities, or you can stat out separate base/subclass/tiered versions of a given concept, whichever works better.

Some examples:

• A PC-classed elf character might have the Wizard class and Noble subclass to be off-brand Dracula, with either the Necromancer subclass to be more wizard-y or the Vampire subclass to be more vampire-y; a drow version of the character could also be a Wizard (Necromancer) [Noble], or could be a Wizard (Necromancer) [Drow] if they want the fancy drow racial benefits.
• A paladin/necromancer could be a Paladin (Necromancer) [Squire] or a Necromancer (Paladin) [Squire] depending on whether they want to focus more on smiting people with negative energy or raising skeletal minions, and later on after a few more tiers might end up as a Paladin (Necromancer) [Squire/Death Knight/Ghost King/Archlich] or whatever.
• Particularly branch-y classes might be represented by taking up all 3 slots; something like the 5e warlock, where you have both a patron and an implement that both heavily influence your abilities, might look like Warlock (Fiend Patron) [Tome Pact] vs. Warlock (Great Old One Patron) [Chain Pact], but equally would allow someone to be a Warlock (Cryomancer) [Tome Pact] or a Warlock (Fiend Patron) [Arcane Scholar] to diversify a bit.
• Similarly, boss monsters can take up multiple slots to reach their full potential; a red dragon might just be a Dragon (Chromatic Dragon) [Red Dragon] if you want to have the breath weapon, the crazy attack routine, the great stats, the spells, and the special abilities, and you'd have to give up something big if you want to be a green dragon druid or a black dragon rogue or whatever.

[Koumei]

5E evaded the problem entirely by not having any content.

As an aside, this is my favourite review or summation of 5E ever.

[Username17]

If you're just going to rewrite the base classes anyway, why not have every class has a Primary and Secondary ability track that each grant a level appropriate ability each level, and mandate that you're locked into each unless you retrain to take the entire secondary track from a different class, or retrain to change your primary class for those people who can't stop changing characters? This'll let the necromancer/necromancer, necromancer/paladin, paladin/necromancer, and paladin/paladin all play differently.

That is indeed pretty much what you're going to have to do if you want the Paladin to be a "Paladin/Paladin". As to "why not?" the drawback is clearly that this requires every character to get at least two abilities every single level, meaning that every character is going to be at least as complex as the Sorcerer, which is possibly a bit much. It also forces all classes to get pretty similar things in both tracks lest things go really off the rails as soon as you swap tracks around.


Consider two classes: the 3e Fighter and the 3e Warblade. Leaving aside that the first one is shit and the second one isn't, the concept of the first is that it gets a series of passive bonuses and makes standard attacks while the concept of the second is that it uses stand-alone super moves that are as good as if they had a full set of passive bonuses backing them up. In a no-multiclass system, those two classes can actually be balanced next to each other. It's just a math problem that requires you to know the strength of the expected encounters. But now imagine their two tracks: The Fighter's tracks say "Passive Bonus" in Track A and in Track B at every level. If you only take one of those tracks, you aren't making level appropriate standard attacks. The Warblade's tracks say "Super Move" in Track A and Track B. If you only take one of those tracks, you presumably are still making level appropriate attacks, just less different ones and might run out quicker. And if the Passive Bonuses stack with the super moves, then your multiclass character is making above-level attacks until he runs out and is then making below-level attacks, which sounds like it's probably bad for the game.

Now what you want is to have 15+ classes that have different resource systems and varying levels of complexity that have ability sets and mixtures of active and passive abilities that allow them to be relevant at each level that the concept is relevant in. This is actually far more important than getting your multiclass system working or getting your playable monsters subsystem off the ground. If you feel that you have to sacrifice the existence of a simple class in order to make your multi-track system work, you're probably letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Now let's consider another class: the Necromancer. The Necromancer has a small set of abilities that might not actually increase much over 10 levels. They have their pet(s), they have their personal forcefield, they have their fear blast, they have their dark bolt, and they have their healing pulse. As they go up in level, those tricks get better, and they have Essentia points to distribute between them so that if they want to use a good Fear Blast this turn, their Ghost Minion is less effective. Fine. How do you split that into two tracks without having neither track stand on its own? Possibly you can't.

My thought is: fuck all that. You make the classes and you make them work. That's job one. Job two is to make specifically gimped versions of the classes that could voltron with other gimped versions of other classes. And sometimes those gimped versions will have 20% of the abilities of the class, sometimes they'll have 90% of the abilities of the class, because it all depends on how it synergizes with the basic abilities of a Brute or Harrier of the same level.

So the multiclass version of the Necromancer isn't half the Necromancer abilities. It isn't "everything from Column A on the Necromancer," it's basically just the entire Necromancer class (albeit possibly it only gets either the Dark Bolt or the Fear Blast rather than both), and then it gets a generally smaller Essentia pool and also takes personal penalties when it transfers Essentia points to its Skeletons.

It's true that fewer concepts expire at this point compared to the number who expire when you want to rule entire hexes but I really don't think that's a sound argument.

I think that's the primary point. I could definitely be persuaded that every Berserker at 6th level needs to become a Bear Warrior or a Street Shark or something. But I'm overtly skeptical because the concept of Berserker isn't inherently obsolete when characters have 3e style Leadership. It is obsolete when people are conquering Hexes or fighting space monsters, but if people are doing small unit engagements it's perfectly permissible to just be a really tough dude.

-Username17