Multiclassing did exist in 4e, and it existed in possibly my favourite form: In order to get something from another class, it cost you. You needed to take the feats and if you took a power, you needed to swap out one of your own powers. And if you wanted to play a really silly blend of powers, you could play a Hybrid as described in PHB3. The whole 3.x multiclassing of "dip into something for a level to get the starting feats" just strikes me as cheesy and begging for abuse.
Not that I'm against armored wizards in principle. Elven fighter mages in chainmail and even heavily-armored warlords with arcane powers are quite cool, iconic fantasy concepts. I'd just like there to be a trade-off for doing so, so you don't look like you're punishing yourself by not doing it.
Pathfinder manages multiclassing quite well. You can do it quite easily, but as 90% of classes continue to gain new and useful abilities as they get to higher levels there's always an incentive to stay pureclassed too. It's far from perfect, and there's the usual "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards" issue of scaling, but the multiclassing is balanced well.
In 3.5, it was downright easy to cast in armour if you had access to a few books. Twilight ability, Blended Quartz (or Mithril if necessary), and possibly some Spellsword. If you were planning for Heavy Plate and a Heavy Shield, you might want all 3, but its totally possible to get by with 2. I often took this trouble with charisma based gish builds, often with Blackguard to take Spellsword. There are other ways too, but I often used this one. Mechanically in 3.x armoured casting isnt that powerful, but Heavy Plate +5 is +13 armour bonus, you can get 7 more for a +5 shield, which is a base of 30 for AC. Nothing super special, but you can boost still. +40 is enough to make PA a tricky call, and with a charisma base and Divine Channelling feats, your AC can be pretty stable in the 60s. This is what 3.x lets you do... great for a villain though!
In 3rd, stacking spells for AC only works if the types are different. Shield stays useful, Armour becomes useless later. The total bonus is nice, but you will be exclusively a tank at low levels, and at higher levels you should have better things to do in 3.x as a caster.
In 4e, you could swap powers from your class for those of another class by buying feats. If you got all the power swap feats, you had the option of taking even more abilities from the other class at level 11. It needed some work, but it was better than having a fighter who suddenly decides out of nowhere that he's going to be a wizard.
Then in the players handbook 3, they introduced Hybrid characters, who basically get half their powers from one class and half from another. It was at that time I basically stopped paying attention to 4e because it had reached peak powergaminess for me.
The one Pathfinder game I played was very much dominated by people talking about how powerful their characters were which got dull pretty quickly.
You know, I'm not a fan of gimped characters, but playing with powergamers in PnP must be awful.
Unless you DM, as they are usually overconfident and gimicky, and a good DM running a wise or intelligent villain would prepare encounters that seriously eff over a powergamed PC. Item munchkin? Antimagic. LOTS of antimagic. And of course, a good DM will just make the villain more gimicky in return, with irony that the villain usually chooses the fights.
Personal experience dictates powergamery is a pleasant form of rule wankery... its a solitary thing. If an entire group is into it, its not too bad, other than 'my PC is better!' arguments.
Hmm just thought of something else. Will 5th have most PC parties being of kinda similar power levels? 3.x kinda collapsed under the combined weight of CR based xp and the complete unpredictability of actual power level of a given party... a really well designed and run 15th level party should be able to take on higher than 15 EL opposition with no real risk of defeat, while an unusually weak one will be hard pressed by a 15 EL encounter. No real solution in a game that allows excessive customization.
In contrast, other than running more casters, a 2nd ed party had a much smaller range of what was a good, fair challenge. Because everyone wears their 'class straightjacket', they were predictable. A 2nd ed didnt need to be as good at judging encounters, which is a big plus for casual play.
I wonder if 5th will offer a happy medium on this.
"As a rule of thumb, the game assumes that characters of a particular level can defeat a total number of creatures with an XP value equal to two hard encounters before needing to take a long rest. "
Of course we need to see what the power creep's like.
Few thoughts on balance issues after letting it percolate:
1. Two-Weapon Fighting - it costs you your bonus action in a round, so I don't see it being that popular with Rogues, who'll normally want to use their bonus action to disengage or hide to get combat advantage. It's only an option if they're stuck going toe-to-toe, but I guess a handy one in that instance. Not sure if it's worth a level dip to fighter to get though, even if you have the stats to do it.
For Fighters it's slightly worse than Great-Weapon fighting at levels 1-4 (2 attack rolls, d6+stat damage vs 1 attack roll, 2d6+stat damage, reroll 1s and 2s.) As soon as the fighter hits level five and gets another attack, it becomes actually worse and never recovers.
2. Mountain Dwarf Mages - the only attractive feature of this build is the armor proficency, which basically saves you having to memorize and cast Mage Armor. Battle Axes and Warhammers are fine, but you have Cantrips that do at least that much damage at range. They'll be sturdier, but they still won't be that great a fighter and they'll be an objectively worse caster than any race that gets an Int bonus until around level 12 using the standard ability increase spread.
I do love 2nd Ed, but there's so many inconsistencies in the rules that were never errata'd even in the reprints. I'm just glad they got rid of 4th Ed's clunky combat.
Few thoughts on balance issues after letting it percolate:
1. Two-Weapon Fighting - it costs you your bonus action in a round, so I don't see it being that popular with Rogues, who'll normally want to use their bonus action to disengage or hide to get combat advantage. It's only an option if they're stuck going toe-to-toe, but I guess a handy one in that instance. Not sure if it's worth a level dip to fighter to get though, even if you have the stats to do it.
For Fighters it's slightly worse than Great-Weapon fighting at levels 1-4 (2 attack rolls, d6+stat damage vs 1 attack roll, 2d6+stat damage, reroll 1s and 2s.) As soon as the fighter hits level five and gets another attack, it becomes actually worse and never recovers.
To me this is kind of the way it ought to be, though. Fighting with two weapons should never be about dealing more damage; it should be about having a better chance to deal damage at all. The fighter with a heavy weapon should always be a massive damage dealer; the fighter wielding two shortswords should always expect to hit at least once per round.
2. Mountain Dwarf Mages - the only attractive feature of this build is the armor proficency, which basically saves you having to memorize and cast Mage Armor. Battle Axes and Warhammers are fine, but you have Cantrips that do at least that much damage at range. They'll be sturdier, but they still won't be that great a fighter and they'll be an objectively worse caster than any race that gets an Int bonus until around level 12 using the standard ability increase spread.
Again, this makes a lot of sense to me. A mage wearing armor, if that mage is proficient with armor, should be able to do anything that they could do without the armor within reason; it never really made sense to me that a cleric could cast spells while armored but a mage couldn't. Now, at least, it's based solely on proficiency.
And it also looks like armor doesn't provide as much benefit as it did in previous editions. I'll be curious to see how things progress with magic items, but at face value I don't see much imbalance from a mountain dwarf wearing a breastplate.
Pretty much, these things only appear broken because (in the case of two-weapon fighting) there's no obvious penalty because there's the game's removed most of the situational bonuses and penalties and (in the case of armored casters) you had to jump through a lot of hoops to do it before. In game terms the benefits are actually slight.
FWIW. I'm kinda glad the question's moved from "what unlikely combination of options will give me the most broken character" to "how can i make the cool character i see in my head".
The main thing about why mage armour use won't be as bad as on first impression is that magic protection doesn't seem to be as OP as it was in 3.5. While I lament the removal of different kinds of AC, at least it meandering mages won't be able to stack AC as easily as before (But this might also be to detriment of hybrid caster classes like Bards, for whom the ability to cast in armour was an advantage), and old AC adding spells like Shield has been changed. I am unsure how that design choice will remain intact though as more spells are added over time.
FWIW. I'm kinda glad the question's moved from "what unlikely combination of options will give me the most broken character" to "how can i make the cool character i see in my head".
That has never been the attitude with me while playing 3.5. Whether you're a powerbuilder or not relies on the player, not the game system, and whether it's allowed or not relies on the GM (Munchkin the RPG is an exception ).
I enjoyed the play testing, it's the best version ever IMO. $50 for any book is insane, and I have the patience of an elf. When that price drops to $25/each in a year I'll snag them all up.
I love AD&D 2E, and since now it was always the best system of Dungeons & Dragons. But for what I've already saw from 5th Edition, I think that this could be the ultimate edition of D&D. It combines the best of the worlds of 2nd and 3.5 editions. Still, it have a felling of Classic and Basic D&D.
And it is even better. It's simple and complete at the same time. Easy and adaptable to play. And the "bounded progression" is the trump card of this edition to redeem Wizards from the abysmal failure with 4th Edition.
@scriver Bards will have other advantages now I suspect, since all casting classes apparently use the same spell progression now. Their Inspiration dice mechanic in particular looks pretty interesting. And they'll at least probably start with armor proficency without needing to take a feat/multiclass/race that gives it to them.
Powergaming's a trickier issue. It's not an issue when I play with my friends, but when I play semi-public games in my local RPG community all it takes is for one person to min-max or abuse the rules and it spoils the game for everyone.
Overall though, I'm with @Vitor, this edition looks like the most mechanically streamlined version of the system, which combines the quickness of play from 2e with some of the fun customization from 3.x. I'm excited to start playing it next week.
I have been playing since 85' and honestly have been impressed with every edition. Though I am not saying it is my favorite, 4th edition rocks! Hoping it has some semblance to 4e tactics, I'm ready for something new, otherwise.
From what they've posted, their goal is to iterate on 5e as needed on an annual basis--not with a new system each year, but with (very minor) tweaks to improve the experience based on player feedback.
The reason they have those complications though is that 2nd ed suffered a lot from parallel characters... everyone's 6th lvl fighter was basicly identical. You couldnt customize anything without bending rules, and it was very hard to build the type of characters most people like... movies and literature as a rule end up much more like 3.x than 2nd. I would even argue that real life tends to result in more organic characters than 2nd ed allowed.
I abhored the Warlock in 3.5... it was like a more boring version of he evoker, and was really too good at low levels. And they did d6 damage at lvl 1. So this cantrip thing, which I havent looked at yet, sounds too similar.
Its easy to make a game like 2nd ed balanced, but incredibly difficult to make a more open one like 3.x balanced. Its possible to make very bad and very strong characters in 3.x, but this is a bit like reality; if you master a skill thatnhas no application in the real world, you're likely less effective at life than someone who specializes in something more employable. 2 people could both be high level experts, but those ranks in 'perform poetry', 'critical theory' and 'knowledge: middle english literature' are probably worth less than a low level expert that took 'profession: plumbing'.
I think the fact that there's a lot of options in the PHB is an great thing, but they've also gone out of their way to present a set of quick options where possible.
Every class write-up I've seen from the PHB gives you a list of options to take if you just want to run a quick, "default" character. Feats are less frequent and also totally optional as well, so you can ignore them for more of a 2E feel if you want.
All in all, this version seems to take the bits I like out of 2E and 3E and garnish on the thing I liked most about 4E: all first level characters should be able to act like you'd expect. Rogues should be sneaky right out of the box, Fighters should be the best with weapons and Wizards should have more to offer their group than one 1st level spell and some sling damage.
As for 2E fighters, well try playing a game with just the 2E PHB (which is what I've been doing at the moment) and see how distinct they look from a game perspective. They'll all generally wear the heaviest armor they can carry and afford because there's no reason not to. The difference will come down to what weapon they're specialised in and what stats they rolled at the start.
Comments
Could be that a (non Mountain Dwarf) wizard who wants to wear armor will need to pump their Str to do it, to the detriment of their other stats.
In 3rd, stacking spells for AC only works if the types are different. Shield stays useful, Armour becomes useless later. The total bonus is nice, but you will be exclusively a tank at low levels, and at higher levels you should have better things to do in 3.x as a caster.
Then in the players handbook 3, they introduced Hybrid characters, who basically get half their powers from one class and half from another. It was at that time I basically stopped paying attention to 4e because it had reached peak powergaminess for me.
The one Pathfinder game I played was very much dominated by people talking about how powerful their characters were which got dull pretty quickly.
Unless you DM, as they are usually overconfident and gimicky, and a good DM running a wise or intelligent villain would prepare encounters that seriously eff over a powergamed PC. Item munchkin? Antimagic. LOTS of antimagic. And of course, a good DM will just make the villain more gimicky in return, with irony that the villain usually chooses the fights.
Personal experience dictates powergamery is a pleasant form of rule wankery... its a solitary thing. If an entire group is into it, its not too bad, other than 'my PC is better!' arguments.
In contrast, other than running more casters, a 2nd ed party had a much smaller range of what was a good, fair challenge. Because everyone wears their 'class straightjacket', they were predictable. A 2nd ed didnt need to be as good at judging encounters, which is a big plus for casual play.
I wonder if 5th will offer a happy medium on this.
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140707
"As a rule of thumb, the game assumes that characters of a particular level can defeat a total number of creatures with an XP value equal to two hard encounters before needing to take a long rest. "
Of course we need to see what the power creep's like.
1. Two-Weapon Fighting - it costs you your bonus action in a round, so I don't see it being that popular with Rogues, who'll normally want to use their bonus action to disengage or hide to get combat advantage. It's only an option if they're stuck going toe-to-toe, but I guess a handy one in that instance. Not sure if it's worth a level dip to fighter to get though, even if you have the stats to do it.
For Fighters it's slightly worse than Great-Weapon fighting at levels 1-4 (2 attack rolls, d6+stat damage vs 1 attack roll, 2d6+stat damage, reroll 1s and 2s.) As soon as the fighter hits level five and gets another attack, it becomes actually worse and never recovers.
2. Mountain Dwarf Mages - the only attractive feature of this build is the armor proficency, which basically saves you having to memorize and cast Mage Armor. Battle Axes and Warhammers are fine, but you have Cantrips that do at least that much damage at range. They'll be sturdier, but they still won't be that great a fighter and they'll be an objectively worse caster than any race that gets an Int bonus until around level 12 using the standard ability increase spread.
And it also looks like armor doesn't provide as much benefit as it did in previous editions. I'll be curious to see how things progress with magic items, but at face value I don't see much imbalance from a mountain dwarf wearing a breastplate.
FWIW. I'm kinda glad the question's moved from "what unlikely combination of options will give me the most broken character" to "how can i make the cool character i see in my head".
And it is even better. It's simple and complete at the same time. Easy and adaptable to play. And the "bounded progression" is the trump card of this edition to redeem Wizards from the abysmal failure with 4th Edition.
Powergaming's a trickier issue. It's not an issue when I play with my friends, but when I play semi-public games in my local RPG community all it takes is for one person to min-max or abuse the rules and it spoils the game for everyone.
Overall though, I'm with @Vitor, this edition looks like the most mechanically streamlined version of the system, which combines the quickness of play from 2e with some of the fun customization from 3.x. I'm excited to start playing it next week.
Yep, looks like the same spell progression as Wizards and Clerics.
I abhored the Warlock in 3.5... it was like a more boring version of he evoker, and was really too good at low levels. And they did d6 damage at lvl 1. So this cantrip thing, which I havent looked at yet, sounds too similar.
Its easy to make a game like 2nd ed balanced, but incredibly difficult to make a more open one like 3.x balanced. Its possible to make very bad and very strong characters in 3.x, but this is a bit like reality; if you master a skill thatnhas no application in the real world, you're likely less effective at life than someone who specializes in something more employable. 2 people could both be high level experts, but those ranks in 'perform poetry', 'critical theory' and 'knowledge: middle english literature' are probably worth less than a low level expert that took 'profession: plumbing'.
Every class write-up I've seen from the PHB gives you a list of options to take if you just want to run a quick, "default" character. Feats are less frequent and also totally optional as well, so you can ignore them for more of a 2E feel if you want.
All in all, this version seems to take the bits I like out of 2E and 3E and garnish on the thing I liked most about 4E: all first level characters should be able to act like you'd expect. Rogues should be sneaky right out of the box, Fighters should be the best with weapons and Wizards should have more to offer their group than one 1st level spell and some sling damage.
As for 2E fighters, well try playing a game with just the 2E PHB (which is what I've been doing at the moment) and see how distinct they look from a game perspective. They'll all generally wear the heaviest armor they can carry and afford because there's no reason not to. The difference will come down to what weapon they're specialised in and what stats they rolled at the start.