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Gotta say, it's almost funny reading all of the multiclassing is bad chat, because last week my players (all of whom have multiclassed for one reason or another) were talking for a good 15 minutes about how lackluster a lot of the level 20 capstone abilities are, and there feels like little reason to stay the course all the way through.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:48
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Also some character concepts are going to be hard to pull off effectively in a cooperative RPG, regardless of the rules set. Like the hybrid sorcerer/wizard mentioned above. Giving it all the powers of each spellcaster would obviously be too strong, so you have to make some kind of compromise. And at a certain point all PCs are rough models of actual people, so you have to accept there will be mechanical gaps you need to fill in with roleplaying and flavor.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:50
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whydirt posted:Also some character concepts are going to be hard to pull off effectively in a cooperative RPG, regardless of the rules set. Like the hybrid sorcerer/wizard mentioned above. Giving it all the powers of each spellcaster would obviously be too strong, so you have to make some kind of compromise. And at a certain point all PCs are rough models of actual people, so you have to accept there will be mechanical gaps you need to fill in with roleplaying and flavor. A hybrid sorcerer/wizard was possible in 3e and was actually meh to okay power-level.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:53
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pseudosavior posted:Gotta say, it's almost funny reading all of the multiclassing is bad chat, because last week my players (all of whom have multiclassed for one reason or another) were talking for a good 15 minutes about how lackluster a lot of the level 20 capstone abilities are, and there feels like little reason to stay the course all the way through. The capstones do tend to be fairly weak, not that most people actually use them. The power apex in 5e tends to be some form of a 1-3 point dip in another class to pick up key features. Going any further than that is generally not recommended. Part of that is because the capstones aren't that great, and part of it is that many classes front-load their features.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:56
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I think this is when you traditionally post nobody-plays-past-level-12.png.txt
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Aug 10, 2023 14:58
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The Greyhawk Supplement was a mistake. Spells should have stayed capped at 6th level and PCs should retire soon after levels 11-12.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:00
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goatface posted:I think this is when you traditionally post nobody-plays-past-level-12.png.txt there's a png? i want the png
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Aug 10, 2023 15:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm wondering if maybe there's a design "issue"* with 5e, whenever I google "How to Multiclass classes X and Y?" I for the most part, with most combinations I could think of that for narrative reasons sound fun, get the results of "These two classes conflict in fundamental ways." with most solutions/workarounds being unsatisfying. the design issue you are trying to identify is called "ability scores", more or less. you can poke around at other issues but so long as most classes have central power mechanics (and that includes "hit stuff with basic attack") that scale directly with specific ability scores, ability score dependency will govern what multiclassing decisions work well within the math. this is why all the CHA casters multiclass well in basically any combination (esp. with hexblade patron available) and only need to pay attention to spell level/ASI power spikes, while wizards can go gently caress themselves re multiclassing and barbarians would have huge issues even without the "can't cast while raging" problem. this is also why a lot of multiclass optimization guides boil down to "can you get access to shillelagh/hexblade" there are certainly particular design decisions that intensify the problem and give 5e its particular multiclass flavor (warlock and paladin are extremely frontloaded and don't need class levels to scale effectively; monk and ranger have multiple ability multiclass requirements and aren't similarly frontloaded, so the WIS classes don't get the same benefits despite there being so many; the aforementioned barbarian issue; there is only one INT caster; most capstones suck), but ability scores are the primary issue and most of the secondary issues as well. even 4e's hybrid system, which superficially looks like a ground-up "combine any class with any class", has combination effectiveness fundamentally limited by primary ability score selection Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 10, 2023 15:30
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Listen, if you want to play a character who's good at basically everything, just roll a bard (with a hexblade dip). 
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Aug 10, 2023 15:53
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yeah the character i play in a friend's campaign who intentionally exists as a gap-filler who doesn't steal the show is just warlock 2/bard X because warlock 2 gives you access to five million benefits (best and most reliable cantrip in the game that scales only with character level and offers CC as well; free war caster if you don't want repelling blast; medium armor, shield and martial proficiency; uses for bonus actions; a striker "+damage" mechanic in hexblade's curse) and all you really lose is a little bit of spell progression. you can spam eldritch blast in all situations and keep every spell slot for utility if you want.
Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 10, 2023 16:08
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm wondering if maybe there's a design "issue"* with 5e, whenever I google "How to Multiclass classes X and Y?" I for the most part, with most combinations I could think of that for narrative reasons sound fun, get the results of "These two classes conflict in fundamental ways." with most solutions/workarounds being unsatisfying. I liked the idea of Prestige classes, but in practice they contributed to the 3.5 "build your PC from L20 in order to play a new character" phenomenon and the balancing across them was terrible, just truly inexplicable. But the issue you're running into here is with online guides, which tend towards theorycrafting and lean in a min-max direction. In most campaigns, where the GM isn't out to screw the players for suboptimal PC design and the marginal difference of a -1 to hit/damage isn't going to make a difference between victory and defeat, you can do what you want and it will be fine. I played a Circles Druid in an Descent into Avernus campaign planning to multiclass into Warlock-Fiend Pact to become a Druid of Hell. Taking the higher CHA was suboptimal but made no difference in practice, and the Warlock dip was as powerful as ever. Eldritch Blast was great for a druid even if I was only getting +2 damage per shot instead of +4, and the loss in spell progression for a PC built around doing control/damage via spells was unnoticable. (Granted, all the resistant enemies in the adventure made force damage even better.) If there's a design problem with multiclassing in 5E, it isn't that it's too weak, it's that certain classes front-load a lot of their benefits, especially Cleric and Warlock, and make a 1-3 level dip look very effective, and that the classes working best for such dips seem thematically opposed to them. "I'm going to worship the war god so I can wear heavy armor" or "I'm concluding a blood pact with a powerful entity, taking two levels in the class, and then ignoring it for the remainder of my adventuring career" is at least potentially suspect. My Hell Druid did take the dip, but was totally aligned with his patron's agenda for the remainder of the campaign; I also played a conflicted Paladin/Warlock in another campaign and ended up with an even split in levels, 7/7 by the campaign's end. They were both extremely fun to play and sufficiently effective in combat. OTOH, a few classes really don't lend themselves to multiclassing and can work out poorly unless you're extremely careful. Monk's the obvious example. I'm not sure how many Ranger multiclassing builds are viable. Bards may want to dip another class, but few classes benefit from a dip into Bard. If you're playing AL, or online pick-up games with unknown DMs, multiclassing can be an issue. If you're playing with a regular group, it's fine. If you want to do something that the multiclass rules don't allow, discuss with your DM. 5E is an extremely plastic system and so long as you don't do obviously unbalancing things you can make a lot of modifications to it and only need a few changes to encounter difficulty to keep things fun.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:29
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Welp, after twenty years I'm finally gonna be able to play a thri kreen Friends invited me to a new group that needed a rogue Gonna get weird with it
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Aug 10, 2023 16:39
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pseudosavior posted:Gotta say, it's almost funny reading all of the multiclassing is bad chat, because last week my players (all of whom have multiclassed for one reason or another) were talking for a good 15 minutes about how lackluster a lot of the level 20 capstone abilities are, and there feels like little reason to stay the course all the way through. Beyond that, most classes stop getting interesting new abilities well before the top levels as levels just give more powerful versions of existing powers so even in campaigns that end at level 12, level 1 and 2 of a class are often way more powerful than level 9 to 11. PeterWeller posted:In short, multiclassing is another one of D&D's sacred cows that has long outlived its usefulness, but is now too baked into the game and players' expectations of it to get rid of. It has way too much usefulness to powergamers to go away. There's a big section of the playerbase that thinks it is the player's job to try to get one over on the DM (and vice versa) and broke af reddit multiclass builds are a critical tool for them.
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Aug 10, 2023 17:06
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Narsham posted:
Eeh, 2 damage isn’t a lot but 10% difference in hit chance matters quite a bit when missing means you’ve used your action to 0 effect. Bounded accuracy means this never really goes away. You can’t outlevel the monster’s AC.
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Aug 10, 2023 18:07
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Azathoth posted:It has way too much usefulness to powergamers to go away. There's a big section of the playerbase that thinks it is the player's job to try to get one over on the DM (and vice versa) and broke af reddit multiclass builds are a critical tool for them. Yeah I honestly lucked out with this. I had one murderhobo powergamer, a forever DM who, on finally getting the chance to play again, came to session 0 with an already-fully-planned-out-to-level-20 Sentinel/Polearm Master fighter/mastermind rogue that i KNOW he got from some "Irritate your DM" reddit thread. (I felt so vindicated when he had to drop the game for medical reasons and the rest of the players were just like "okay, cool, this is actually better and more fun. Now we can do more than just try to kill every single thing that moves.") But the rest are some really inspired concepts, like a Warforged Trickery Cleric/Echo Knight who is basically 'Multiple Man in Heavy Armor', using illusions and their Echo to create a one-man barricade, or the d&d newbie who cobbled together a swashbuckler rogue/gunslinger who is really, REALLY good at killing things, just so long as they're about 30 feet away from her.
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Aug 10, 2023 18:41
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Azathoth posted:It has way too much usefulness to powergamers to go away. There's a big section of the playerbase that thinks it is the player's job to try to get one over on the DM (and vice versa) and broke af reddit multiclass builds are a critical tool for them. But that's the problem! Because multiclassing exists, WotC (poorly) writes classes to try and prevent dips from being rewarding. If you couldn't multiclass, classes could have more unique and interesting abilities at lower levels. Also, nothing really beats straight level 20 wizard/cleric/druid/bard in power still, so it's not even that good at it.
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Aug 10, 2023 18:49
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Yeah, I don't like multiclassing in 5e very much. I remember working up a fey warlock and taking some thematic feats instead purely optimized abilities and it was a lot of fun. Everyone else was similarly just kind of playing what they wanted. One of the other people at the table had some rogue/warlock/whatever dip ( I think they eventually were planning on 4-5ish classes) and was just some optimized for combat weirdness and it just irritated me. I also spent a lot of time working out the story of the Pact and how my character felt about magic and how they would interact with the party He also took his warlock levels in the game and made zero narrative discussion of any kind of bargaining or patron, just got warlock powers somehow. E: and classes also get frontloaded powers to mitigate the level 1 issue where your toolkit is essentially nothing
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Aug 10, 2023 19:05
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Capfalcon posted:But that's the problem! Because multiclassing exists, WotC (poorly) writes classes to try and prevent dips from being rewarding. If you couldn't multiclass, classes could have more unique and interesting abilities at lower levels. Yeah, the best thing that Wizards could do is to drop multiclassing as a concept and add in some extra instructions to the PHB about how to do cosmetic reskins of the subclasses to let people play more niche concepts.
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Aug 10, 2023 19:10
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My last playgroup had a houserule that barbarian spellcasters could cast spells *only* while raging.
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Aug 10, 2023 19:53
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:My last playgroup had a houserule that barbarian spellcasters could cast spells *only* while raging. This rules and I’m stealing it
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Aug 10, 2023 20:14
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Con-based Sorcerer/Bard combo who is so mad that reality breaks before he does. Yes, this slaps.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:32
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:My last playgroup had a houserule that barbarian spellcasters could cast spells *only* while raging. Also, why did some type of arcane knight base class never get made? They made (and then further iterated on) cleric fighters and druid fighters and then just...never did wizard fighters. Why? Feels weird, especially since that combo is essentially what multiclassing was first added to fill. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 10, 2023 20:35
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Laser Llama’s homebrew Magus class is a from-the-ground-up hybrid spellcaster/fighter https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-Mslo6ktmq1Yg5WTSjDQ
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Aug 10, 2023 20:38
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Goods thoughts all around, I've always been a little enamoured by how Drizzt who presumably has a dip into Barbarian has his whole "Hunter" personality he lapses into whenever he's in trouble; so the idea of like, a Monk or some other character who occasionally goes into a blind rage seems kinda metal to me and it'd be fun to figure out their backstory as to why they're like that. Like an artificer with a barb dip who occasionally gets ticked off enough that they start beating monsters to death because they're hulking out and got really mad seems fun.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:53
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Raenir Salazar posted:Goods thoughts all around, I've always been a little enamoured by how Drizzt who presumably has a dip into Barbarian has his whole "Hunter" personality he lapses into whenever he's in trouble; so the idea of like, a Monk or some other character who occasionally goes into a blind rage seems kinda metal to me and it'd be fun to figure out their backstory as to why they're like that. The backup character I considered when I was starting my current campaign was a monk who remembered none of his past and didn't know that he had once been a barbarian, but every now and then would just fly into a rage that was out of his control. It's a campaign where we were starting at level 2 and something I discussed with the DM was the idea that until this character worked out who he had been in the past, the DM would be in control of when he went into a rage. There was a longer backstory involving fire ants, and ultimately it felt like it wasn't substantial enough to sustain a campaign, but I might bring him back for a one shot.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:48
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Ravenfood posted:I love this. gently caress yeah. I think it's because Fi/MU (sometimes called a gish) was such an iconic option that TSR never really tried to make anything that competed with it, and WotC probably assumed 3E players would just roll those if that's what they wanted to play. Then by the time you get to 4E, it's fallen off as an iconic build (probably because it actually sucks under 3E's multiclass rules), and the sword+spell dude gets covered by the Warlock. I'd argue that 5E is the Gish-iest edition what with your many melee Bards and Warlocks.
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Aug 10, 2023 23:18
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I mean 4e very much has a sword and spell class in the swordmage, which iirc showed up well before eldritch strike (i.e. the formal melee support for warlock gishes)
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Aug 10, 2023 23:28
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Valentin posted:I mean 4e very much has a sword and spell class in the swordmage, which iirc showed up well before eldritch strike (i.e. the formal melee support for warlock gishes) I mean 3.5 had a bunch of invocations for Warlock gishes between Eldritch Glaive, Eldritch Claws and Eldritch Stricken. And 3.5 in general had a ton of support for gish stuff across its billion splats.
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Aug 10, 2023 23:30
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sure? I'm just saying warlock isn't the gish in 4e, it's the class literally called swordmage (which was like, the first or second additional class released and got a ton of support over the editions lifetime)
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Aug 10, 2023 23:31
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Oh I was supporting that by pointing out a lot of the 3.5 support for Warlocks and Bards was geared to enable gish playstyles as well. Not to mention things like the BoS Swordmage. Basically disagreeing entirely with the assertion it was forgotten between 2e and 5e.
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Aug 10, 2023 23:32
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ah yeah absolutely. 3.5 and 4e also both include the bladesinger which was sort of an attempt to make the gish a specifically elven archetype as (I assume) a throwback to the old school dnd elf, but iirc no one played them because they weren't really good at gishing or anything else
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Aug 10, 2023 23:37
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whydirt posted:Laser Llama’s homebrew Magus class is a from-the-ground-up hybrid spellcaster/fighter This is an interesting class that is almost tailor made to show the problem with multiclassing existing. They have no abilities worth mentioning at level one. Arcane Armory is a attribute fix for being a caster that hits things and Spellsight is essentially free castings of detect magic. They can't *do* anything at level one, except pretend to be a fighter with no class features.
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Aug 11, 2023 00:17
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PeterWeller posted:I think it's because Fi/MU (sometimes called a gish) was such an iconic option that TSR never really tried to make anything that competed with it, and WotC probably assumed 3E players would just roll those if that's what they wanted to play. Oh, that’s interesting, the b/x elf level cost was about the same as doing Fi/MU. But when I started in 3e I never even considered something like that since they normalized all the level up costs.
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Aug 11, 2023 00:43
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Capfalcon posted:This is an interesting class that is almost tailor made to show the problem with multiclassing existing. They have no abilities worth mentioning at level one. Arcane Armory is a attribute fix for being a caster that hits things and Spellsight is essentially free castings of detect magic. They can't *do* anything at level one, except pretend to be a fighter with no class features. That’s the biggest fault in the class. LL admits they don’t playtest much L1 and focus on the higher levels. I’d just give take the spells/day & known from 2nd level and reduce each by 1.
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Aug 11, 2023 02:45
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PeterWeller posted:I think it's because Fi/MU (sometimes called a gish) was such an iconic option that TSR never really tried to make anything that competed with it, and WotC probably assumed 3E players would just roll those if that's what they wanted to play. Then by the time you get to 4E, it's fallen off as an iconic build (probably because it actually sucks under 3E's multiclass rules), and the sword+spell dude gets covered by the Warlock. Thanks for linking that Magus class too, it's neat and I like the variety of subclasses.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:19
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Valentin posted:ah yeah absolutely. 3.5 and 4e also both include the bladesinger which was sort of an attempt to make the gish a specifically elven archetype as (I assume) a throwback to the old school dnd elf, but iirc no one played them because they weren't really good at gishing or anything else The bladesinger originally comes from 2e where it’s stupid broken and really originated the idea. The 3e version just got power crept.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:47
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whydirt posted:That’s the biggest fault in the class. LL admits they don’t playtest much L1 and focus on the higher levels. Honestly, while that is a fine way to make level one marginally more interesting, the "Cool thing that makes this class unique" is the spell strike, and there's no reason to make them wait until level two for it. BUT, if it was level one, it would be a perfect one level dip for any wizard who wants to be a bit bulkier, as they get all the toys, but now can swing them while having a wizard spell list. In conclusion, multiclassing must be destroyed.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:47
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Valentin posted:I mean 4e very much has a sword and spell class in the swordmage, which iirc showed up well before eldritch strike (i.e. the formal melee support for warlock gishes) You're right. I forgot about them because I was thinking of only PHB classes. Swordmage showed up in the FR players' guide right?
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Aug 11, 2023 16:33
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That sounds right. It was a lot of fun to play too.
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Aug 11, 2023 23:02
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Swordmage was super smart because it took advantage of the tank role to give the class a great reason to add spells to swords beyond "it'd be cool and fighter/mage is like a fighter and a mage!" Using magic to do tank controlly stuff meant that instead of just replacing armor with a spell or sometimes shooting magic instead of a bow gave the class an identity that ruled. All teleporting right to people that violated your mark, etc.
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Aug 11, 2023 23:40
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