After returning from my trip abroad I was greeted home with a horrible flu. But I did manage to get that one post in before resigning myself to days of day-time TV curled up on the couch. Actually, in this day and age of streaming TV day-time TV isn’t quite the same curse it was to the cold sufferer of my youth. But, that’s all behind me, so what’s on my radar now?
Well, Carnage is this weekend and I’m woe-fully under prepared. That’s not really true, I did cleverly sign up to run stuff that I have run at other conventions so really I should be able to just dust off my notes from previous runs and off we go. The one bit of work I do need to do though is generate some characters. I’ve been doing this long enough that of course I have some scripts I wrote to automate the process, but as my house rules are ever morphing I find each convention that creeps up I have to revisit those scripts and make some minor corrections.
This time around I find myself thinking about my rules for multi-classing. First, let’s look at what I’m using in my home campaign right now:
IV. Multi-classing
Players may take on additional core classes (not including Ranger or Paladin) upon reaching 2nd level. They may never have more than three total classes, nor ever be both a cleric and a magic-user. A character’s second class can never exceed level 8, his third class is capped at level 4.
Must sacrifice single highest level of experience, XP is pro-rated at time of multi-classing.
Must have a 9 or higher in the prime requisite of the new class.
Must track all stats (XP, hit points, etc.) for each class. Always pick the current highest value as the actual value. May choose highest value for saves for each individual save.
Must choose at the start of each adventure which XP pool XP earned will go towards.
May use all abilities of any class. May not cast magic-user spells in armor heavier than chain mail. May not use thief skills in armor heavier than leather.
Elves may begin play as level 1/1 multi-class character, provided one class is magic-user.
That’s directly out of my 3-page booklet of house rules for my game, affectionately known as the BXCL (B/X Change List). So, how has this affected my home campaign? I currently have 7 players in my game, and they include 1 human fighter, 1 dwarf fighter / cleric, 2 paladins, 2 elf magic-user / fighters, and 1 elf magic-user / thief. As the paladin class is specifically proscribed from multi-classing, that leaves 5 players out of which 4 have decided to multi-class. In fact, the 5th one would have done so, but his stats are all so terrible that he doesn’t have the required 9 in any prime-reqs of alternate classes — likely why he chose fighter in the first place.
There are two things in play here that I’m not terribly happy with. First off, that’s a lot more multi-classing than I would hope for. I like multi-classing, but I prefer to see it in a minority of characters. In my mind it should be for support characters willing to sacrifice some power for more flexibility, not an obvious tactic that simply makes all characters better. Secondly, note how all the elves are first and fore-most magic-users. I do like that elves encourage multi-classing, as it harkens back to the original B/X concept that all elves were essentially fighter/magic-user hybrids, but what about a fighter/thief, or even a fighter/magic-user over the magic-user/fighter? It turns out that the rules above basically highly encourage players of elves to choose magic-user first, so that they won’t be level capped in magic-user and thus can conceivable obtain 5th level spells (available at magic-user level 9). Conversely, what you miss out on for limiting fighter or thief to level 8 is far less powerful – a third feat for fighters, and the ability to read magical scrolls for thieves at level 10. The choice to all my players has been obvious.
So, here are some alterations I’m considering:
First, I think maybe I should increase the stat requirement for multi-classing in general. Let’s make it a littler harder to obtain so we see a few more single-classed characters in the wild. The obvious choice for me seems to be to raise it to 13, as that’s the point where the related modifier increases from 0 to +1. That’s a pretty strong change in probabilities – according to this site the chances of getting a 9 or higher on any given stat is 74%, while the chances of a 13 are only 26%. Assuming that we don’t care about the prime req of your starting class, and we don’t care about the 2 stats that are not prime-reqs for any class (Constitution and Charisma), the chances of any given character being able to multi-class is the chance of getting a 13 or higher on any of three rolls. Or to make the math easier for me, it’s the inverse of the chance that you roll 12 or less on all 3 rolls — 74% x 3 trials is about 40%, thus 60%? Am I getting that right Delta?
Huh, that’s still higher than I expected. Should I go even more severe? I don’t know, I don’t want to swing the pendulum too far to the opposite side, and honestly, it’s taken many many months of play to observe the current trend naturally in my player base.
The other problem is probably simpler to tackle – to find a way to encourage a more even distribution of multi-class typed elves. Obviously whatever solution I find to the general rate of multi-classing will apply just as well to elves, so really the only problem here is that there’s no reason to pick magic-user as the second class when taking advantage of the free first level multi-class. I could obliterate that rule entirely, but I do still like the idea that elves are somewhat magical in nature and thus more inclined to at least learn a little magic. So perhaps I just need to restrict it a bit more?
Some of my players have suggested just changing it to a free second class in magic-user. That is, a starting out elf may start as a level 1/1 something / magic-user for free. This means players of elves that want to reach name level as magic-user will either be single classed, or have to pay for their multi-classing the same as every other starting character. The bonus will be restricted to players who wanted to play fighter or thief primarily, and happen to have a high intelligence and don’t mind have a little free magic on the side.
I kind of like that ruling, but I want to think over both of these a bit more before I make up my mind. I suppose that means for the coming convention that I will just stick to what I already have. I really should make decisions on this stuff soon though, as I’ve been promising my players to do so for some time now. Not that it’s hugely important, as obviously any already existing characters in my game will be unaffected. Though you never know when a poisonous snake might get in a lucky bite, and it’s time to roll a new character, right?
