An off-the-wall solution to multiclassing, "required classes", class feat restrictions, character uniqueness and system attractiveness

[Mekkis]

Most of the time in my Playtest comments, I've highlighted issues that I have with the system, and how it fails to meet expectations in one way of another. I've typically avoided posting "fixes" or "solutions", as most of the proposals seem to only remedy those particular aspects of the system.

This is not one of those posts. But it does touch on issues that have come up here.

There have been complaints that Pathfinder-style multiclassing has gone. That certain classes (especially the cleric) are required for a party. That certain feats being locked to a particular class makes playing some concepts difficult, ineffective or impossible. That a given class' build is the same as every other build from that class. And that PF2 doesn't have any points in its favour to attract players over using other systems.

I propose a solution: 3.5e-style gestalt characters. By default. For everyone.

What does this give us?

Characters suddenly have much greater scope: You can play an effective battle cleric (fighter//cleric). You can play a gish (fighter//wizard (or sorcerer)). An arcane trickster is also opened up (rogue//wizard). If you have an issue with too few spell slots available, playing a sorcerer//bard gives you twice as many, bringing you back in line with the number of spells available to a Pathfinder character.

Under this system, many of the Hybrid Classes or their facsimiles can be created.

The limitations of class feats would feel less restrictive. And with the multiclassing archetypes, you can focus on your "main class" while still splashing around.

This also allows characters to get around the "unskilled fighter" trope.

It's something that would be unique to PF2 - that it offers as a point of distinction over other systems.

What would need to change?
In general, class hit points would need to be lowered. Probably by about half. Some classes might need to receive fewer skill trainings.

How would it work?

Characters would begin with a total number of HP equal to their Race HP, their two class HPs, and their constitution modifier. They would have trained skills equal to the sum of their two classes' skills, plus their intelligence modifier. They would gain all of their initial proficiencies.

They would get one class feat from each of their classes, and all the other abilities of their classes, as well as the first-level abilities from each of their classes. Similar abilities would, of course, overlap rather than stack.

As they level up, they would continue to receive both classes benefits (with the exception of skill feats, ability boosts and skill increases, which wouldn't double-up).

What are the downsides?

I can see two main downsides to this: It would somewhat - but maybe not excessively - increase the power-level of the PCs. Given that the monsters at the moment are in need of some rebalancing, I wouldn't be too worried about this: they need to be fixed anyway. And it will unfortunately make character creation a little more complex. I'm hoping that a lot of the character creation difficulties will be resolved by a revised rulebook layout, and ultimately, it should remain manageable.

Aren't those rules WotC Copyrighted?

The Gestalt Rules are OGL. There shouldn't be any licencing issues.

[LordVanya]

Doesn't a Gestalt have a distinct advantage over single class builds?
What with getting all the class features from both classes?

[Mekkis]

If it was universal for every character, there is no distinct advantage.

It would naturally be more powerful, but it would provide the same boost to every character, so balance is maintained.

[Isaac Zephyr]

I've never been a fan of gestalt at all, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt here.

This would open a new problem of essentially having a quadratic increase in "classes" through these combinations, and with it you'd end up with only a handful of good combinations. Look at the potential of a Rogue/Fighter, a Fighter/Barbarian, and a Barbarian/Rogue. Rogue/Fighter pretty much only exists for early AoO and access to fighting styles. The exact same is true of the Fighter/Barbarian, but the combination would be the highest damage dealer possible. Then the Barbarian/Rogue lets a Barbarian build full Dex with Dex-damage. It would be better to simply not have the basic building blocks of these character concepts locked behind class, since a Dex-Barbarian really has no use for things like Trapfinding or training in Society, a Rogue while they want the fighting sytles doesn't want training in all armor and shields, and the Fighter woukd be overwhelming with adding totems to their repertoire.

[Zman0]

This feels like a problem masked as a solution intended for a solution deemed a problem.

Gestalt for everyone pretty much means everybody is going to be a caster. Literally, even if you had a 10 in the casting statistic, the amount of utility say by picking up any caster is huge. That might be the right feel for certain adventures, but overall, as the default rule, no.

I am a big fan of feat based multiclassing, and have actually been running a variant of 5e for the last year or so that uses feat based multiclassing. IMO, its generally the most elegant implementation of multiclassing and avoids the pitfalls of multiclassing in 3.P/5e. As soon as we have multiclass dedications for each of the main classes, and start seeing some Prestige dedications, we'll really be opening up the versatility of that system.

On a tangent, personally, I kind of wish we didn't have "classes" and instead got to build our own characters that allowed us to pick and choose which tracks we wanted to explore etc. Balancing that system would be harder than balancing individual classes, and has some significant barriers for entry for new players, but that would be fun.

[LordVanya]

Mekkis wrote:

If it was universal for every character, there is no distinct advantage.

It would naturally be more powerful, but it would provide the same boost to every character, so balance is maintained.

How can it be universal for every character if I only want to play as a Fighter without a second class?

If, as you say, they would be more powerful, how is that not a distinct advantage over a single class character?

Or are you suggesting you would have Fighter/Fighter, Rogue/Rogue, etc.?

[Tholomyes]

This is I think an interesting idea, but I don't think it works as the official way of doing things, at least without a lot of changes to PF2e that would make it not feel like Pathfinder much any more. There are actually game systems that do this idea fairly well (Iron Kingdoms is a good example), but they are very different from pathfinder.

[swordchucks]

I would much rather see something more along the way 4e handled "hybrid" classes which was later refined by 13th Age. You pick two classes and get some portion of the benefits from both, but you can choose advances from both at some determined ratio. It works well.

Because you aren't getting full classes, it's possible to balance the hybrids against the full classes.