We all know that the D20 sweetspot lies around 5-9 levels. Once you reach level 12, the spellcasters classes have a strong tendency to send most campaigns into DM's nightmare territories.
Plus, the game became unwieldy, characters sheets expands into booklets and so on.
But, on the other hand, as gamer, we LIKE to level up. A lot.
So, I'm toying with this idea, to be used in a very low magic setting :
- From level 1 to level 6, PC can only be martial, without magic nor supernatural abilities. No wizards, no clerics, but no paladins nor totem barbarians either.
6 is the maximum level a mere mortal can reach, period.
- Then, after some kind of quest or trial, they are able to unlock the power of magic. Or the power of Ki. New ennemies, more powerful and more sinister appears, and their old abilities are useless against them (outsiders, undeads, incorporeal and so on : stuff that would send a 6th rogue or fighter without magic crying). From this point, the PC can/must select "magic" caster classes, but no fullcasters. Paladins, bloodragers, kineticist, magus, monks... PRC could also be used as base classes. They use the gestalt rules, starting from level 1, and gaining powers, hit points, skill points and so on accordingly. Plus feats. But this stops at level 12, which means that they won't have spell higher than level 4.
At this point, they have, for example, a rogue 6/kineticist 12 abilities, but with only 12 HD and 10 BAB at best. However, they have 8 feats rather than 5.
- And then comes the third tier : high magic (probably after another quest). Cleric, Sorcerec, druid, wizard, psychic... But once again, the PC starts at level 1, like the old dual classed characters, except that this is their third class. They probably won't gain any new hit-point nor BAB before long, but they are able to learn new spells at an increased rate.
In the end, once they reach the equivalent of level 36 (in real life time), they have 18 HD, level 9 spells and twice as many feat as a standard level 18 character.
But, before that, you have expanded the sweetspot for many, many levels : basically, between level 3 and level 26, the PCs don't have access to 5th level spells or higher, while still being more powerful at each level. You can play for years without entering the realms of campaign-breaking spells (raise dead, scry/teleport and so on), and without having to freeze completely PC growth.
The main problems I see are the following :
- the challenge rating rules won't work.
- every character will end-up with martial abilities plus growing magic abilities. For team play, it's better to have different characters. Sure, a rogue/shadowdancer/necromancer is going to play very differently than a barbarian/bloodrager/druid or a fighter/magus/witch...
- magic items should probably be nearly banned or very, very rare.
Any thought, advice, remarks ?
Be careful what abilities you assume; a fighter 6 // magus 1 can probably handle a shadow, a rogue 6 // shadowdancer 1 without magic items can't affect one and has no chance.
Consider how you're going to have retraining work. Some feats and traits will be excellent at some parts of the game and worthless at others.
Allow for appropriate recovery periods. Whether it's just hp, or if they have to go on a month-long quest to get their blindness cured (few 6-level or less casters can cure blindness), build it into your plans.
One huge problem with gestalt is some class combinations are ridiculously more powerful than other combinations. Any combos that compliment (Barbarian + Inquisitor: rage+Bane+judgements+free teamwork; "yes, please") tend to get out of control, while those that broaden (Rogue + Cleric: skilled Healbot; "no thanks") tend to be just meh. It is also really hard to see all of the interactions of two classes without lots of system mastery or play testing. So, you end up with combos that seem alright at first, but become a problem later.
One solution would be to restrict the available classes, or to make pre-requisite or "tree" like choices...
Have you considered something like E6/E8/P8 or whatever the kids are calling it these days? Players don't get to level up after 6th/8th, but they do get 20 extra feats, which can feel like a mini level up. You'll lose the concept of "unlocking" magic, but get to keep just about everything else, including the CR system (5 feats ~= a level).
Yup, I did. And that's how I thought about the "unlocking magic" idea. That and 4e tiers of play. It's a common meme in a lot of fantasy stories (ok, especially in various shounen manga...) that probably translate well in RPG.