Multi-classing house rule idea

[peterrco]

OK - I'm thinking of running a campaign where I want the players to have interesting non-optimised characters, rather than the fully optimised that reading these forum's are starting to breed. As a bit of background, I cannot remember seeing a multiclassed, or even a prestige classed player around our table for several years, although this is as much my fault as anyone elses.

I also want to encourage melee/skill classes, because casters are starting to dominate our games.

So here's the idea. You have to multiclass, and you can't let one class get more than 2 levels higher than any other class. If you decide to take a third class or a prestige class later in the game, when your other classes are higher level, then you have to level that class and only that class until you are back in equilibrium.

I anticipate that this will cause some minor issues for melee classes, slightly more issues for Rogue variants, and make casting at high levels a lot more difficult, although with mystic theurge and some heavy spending on traits and feats you could somewhat overcome this at mid to high levels for the players that truly love casting.

So the questions is: Has anyone else tried this or something similar? Are there any unexpected consequences? Does it work? And are there any pitfalls that a GM needs to watch out for?

[Liongold]

i support the idea of encoruging my players to steer away from min-maxing (optimised), playing chars with flaws, and multi classing. I'm agenst forcing build rules so strict.

once i did force a party to all take 1 level of sorc. that worked out ok, but keep in mind a fighter who allways has sheild and mage armor up can be hard to hit.

[Flak]

I did something rough to the players in my current campaign. I made six NPCs and told the players (there are four players) they could choose from them. Now that they're adventuring and such, they can level as they like, but they'll never be able to reassign the feats, ability scores, etc., that I gave them. I actually left a lot of the character-building to the players, and they're making interesting choices as they develop. One or two of them are multiclassing now.

The 'problem' with this is (and with your idea, peterrco) is that once you get into the high levels, if none of the PCs are optimized, you're going to have to be more judicious when putting together combat encounters. I can't measure exactly what impact nonoptimization has on APL, but it's something to be wary of. If the party is weaker, the party is, well, weaker.

That said, if your players are down with your rules, I'd go for it. I've always liked multiclassing and PrCing more than optimizing, personally!

If you want to be nice to your players you could even homebrew some feats that help multiclassed characters out (like, 'your levels in class x stack with your levels in class y when determining the effect/daily uses/etc. of class y's feature A').