this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Pretty simple, just treat it like spellcaster multiclassing. Wizard/sorcerer/cleric/ 1/1/1 translates to a level 3 spellcaster for the sake of spell slots. Rogue 3/3 translates to class features level 6 and archetype feature level 3/3
That doesn't work.
A Spellcaster multiclassing always gets something on level up, be it a feature, more spell slots, or higher level slots.
A rogue multiclassing into rogue and splitting the levels would have dead levels at each subclass level.
To explain what I mean: a Rogue gets its subclass features at 3rd, 9th, 13th and 17th level. By going with your math, a 9th level rogue would classify as a 4/4 rogue (by rounding down) as far as the subclass is concerned, which means that the rogue gets nothing at 9th level.
Not only that. A 50/50 split for the multiclass progression would imply that a multiclassed rogue is precluded from getting any subclass feature higher than the 9th level one. By comparison, a Wizard/Sorcerer/Cleric multiclassed character can absolutely attain 9th level spell slots (although not 9th level spells, confusingly enough).
That still sounds balanced-ish. If anything, it’s too front-loaded. A 9th level rogue would still have its typical kit of sneakiness, skill proficiencies, and sneak attack at 9th level, but it wouldn’t have a 9th level bump via archetype because it received a 6th level bump via archetype.
A more typical example- a level 3 fighter/level 2 paladin wouldn’t get a second attack despite being a level 5 martial character, and they have to live with that mechanically poor decision. But they can instead choose to play until they become a level 5 fighter and then branch out instead, if they care to min/max.
And what gives you the impression it has to be 50/50? A sportsman can be great at throwing or hitting a ball, but it’s vastly different between one sport and another. You can be an incredible baseball pitcher and a garbage basketball player. Level 3 arcane trickster/level 17 assassin makes perfect sense to me.
That's not a multiclass as intended in 5e rules. That's just a 20th level rogue that got all the features from one subclass and the first feature of a second subclass for free.
If you know anyone who has actually reached 20th level in a campaign, it might make a difference. I’ll put you in my will if I hit the lottery.
I ran a campaign that lasted several years and everyone went to 20. Technically past 20, though we never did any of the epic stuff.
It was 3.5 though
I've never touched anything beyond level 20. I thought that's what the epic stuff was? Are there regular class features and such published for those levels too, or were you homebrewing by then?
There's published stuff for after 20. We didn't use any of it, because the campaign was winding down. It all came to a nice ending, so wrapping up was more a matter of mutual storytelling than any dice rolls or challenges.
I've actually done it! I started at level 4, so I didn't quite do the full 1-20 journey, but I did indeed go to 20 on xp per enemy killed and not milestone levelling
How long did that take you?? The highest we’ve ever gone is level 11, and that took a couple of years.
About a year and a half. It was a game explicitly intended to just be full of difficult combat encounters all of the time, so it was pretty much the ideal circumstances for levelling quickly. Her last encounter had about 60,000 xp worth of enemies in it per player, without using the multipliers for multiple enemies
Oh, wargaming dnd? How’d you like it? Did 5e stand up well or did it need a lot of homebrewing?
I enjoyed it enough to play it for all that time, at least! I'm not particularly keen on D&D as a system (regardless of edition) and don't care for the Forgotten Realms as a setting, I just enjoy playing TTRPGs with people I like and D&D is the easy one to get people together for. Since I had a good crowd, I was having fun. There were usually plenty of interesting tactical decisions to make, and all of us know the game well enough to get through complicated turns smoothly. Everyone involved would still RP in combat so it wasn't just dice rolling. Gotta talk some shit to the hideous aberration that just deleted half your hp, right?
It was mostly RAW, but with some exceptions. For the sake of everyone being able to tailor their builds to combat, magic items could be purchased at will with prices agreed upon out of character
For war gaming, which system do you personally prefer, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m looking to molest some people with something fresh and pathfinder doesn’t always work out. I used to ask people on Reddit, but I’d rather not use that site again.
I'm not gonna pretend that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what's available, but my limited experience with Mythras 6E has been very positive and I really like how Lancer plays. Mythras has Runequest as its high fantasy counterpart, so if you want a D&D-ish experience that's probably where to look. I've not played Runequest though, I had been doing a worldbuilding project and grabbed Mythras as something that looked suitable for there being no magic involved. Lancer comes with a really cool setting, but it's obviously way off in a different direction to D&D and the like. It does at least have the benefit of outstanding art to get people interested, and it's very good at making players feel cool even at low levels
Lancer seems interesting but terrifyingly involved between the fresh setting, combat that feels like two legendary monsters fighting, and the host of new adjectives I’ll have to incorporate into my vocabulary. I’d only heard about it once before, from a zee bashew video, and it seems far more fleshed out than what I expected.
Mythras significantly cuts down on one of those, so I’ll probably try to figure that one out first. Multiple degrees of success and more gradation between the cost of actions seems pretty neat. Thank you for the recommendations! I’ll almost certainly need to chew on them for a while to really understand them, but I adore both setting and the mechanics behind them!
I will admit to being biased towards Lancer because I was already a big fan of one of the author's other work beforehand. Tom Bloom (ne Parkinson-Morgan) writes and illustrates Kill Six Billion Demons. I promise I do genuinely like the mechanics though. If you do decide to take a look at Lancer, there's a really powerful thing that makes it a lot simpler: COMP/CON. It manages character creation, initiative, tracking values in combat etc just like all the non-store parts of D&D Beyond, but it's a lot smoother to use
If you get a go at Mythras, have fun! I will have to quietly envy you because I don't a group to play it with
Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely going to read up on it after mythras. It will just take me so much longer to get the feeling for how to tell the story of benevolent armored core ostensibly set in Macross. And even longer to adapt the lexicon that it deserves.
Like, I can currently describe thundering annihilation and cleaving the landscape in only so many ways. The mechanics are simple in comparison to avoiding repetitive verbiage. This is prime brisket. Mythras won’t require months for me to fully immerse myself, which is why I’m checking it first. It’s just much less involved and I need something to fall back on in case “the thing I’ve been super excited to show you guys” doesn’t fly.
Edit: also, how dare you introduce me to another comic that I now have to read
That is an entirely reasonable position! I didn't mea to try to push you about it, I am just enthusiastic to share a thing I'm a fan of. Sorry if it came across otherwise. I wish you luck in your games
Oh no, you didn’t come across that way at all! I just felt obligated to explain the reason for where I’ll begin reading, given that you were my impetus, and I needed to affirm to myself that it was the right course after how miserable call of Cthulhu ended up being for one of my players. You are a lovely person with excellent taste in ttrpgs, and also very probably too hard on yourself.
I suppose an approach that takes the general intention of your design but is a bit omre mechanically rigorous could be to separate out subclass levels? You level up in one class as always, and every few levels the thing you get on levelling up is a subclass level. Subclasses then only get four or so levels, so you could be a warlock 11 (archfey 1 / fiend 2)
The difference is pretty minor either way. I’ve never had more issues balancing this than I have with sorcerer burst damage or creation bards collapsing economies.
I have actually personally done a subclass multiclass for a player in a game I run, but it was a very ad-hoc "okay it makes sense for your character to do this, so you're just getting the level 3 feature from that subclass and the level 7 from this one, and this is how they interact" deal
I suppose I'm trying to think of how I would present it for games that I'm not involved in or don't know the other players in. Something worded cleanly enough to stand up (at least a little) to situations when you can't necessarily fall back on trust between the people at the table