Quote Originally Posted by FaerieGodfather View Post
Those are actually my houserules. They're not very good, but I'm trying to make them better. The official Pathfinder rules are almost identical to the official 3.5 rules except the elimination of multiclassing penalties and Level Adjustment.

If you don't already understand thoroughly how the official Pathfinder rules work, I would not recommend screwing around with my house rules, or anything else in the Fan Lab section of the PFSRD.

Elysiume is giving you the real story and their analysis of the (intentional) shift in game balance for multiclass characters is pretty much correct. I would point out that they don't make multiclass characters strictly better, because they prevent characters from casually level-dipping. There are some ugly interactions with certain Prestige Classes, especially ones with less than 10/10 or 9/10 +1 caster level progression. Overall, I think I've suceeded in making it feel more like AD&D multiclassing... but I still need to get the balance right, and figure out a more elegant way to explain them.

edit: Those rules are also a couple thousand iterations behind my current model. But hey, I am always happy to try to explain how I'm trying to make them work.



Currently, unless you're stupid about the number of classes you take, characters using those rules become more powerful than single-class characters between 5th and 10th level. They're intentionally designed to be more powerful than your basic EK/AT/MT builds, and hopefully designed to be less powerful than moderately-optimized 3.5 characters. I am working on the Level Adjustment math to correct the former; my current thoughts are scaling Level Adjustment similar to the Bloodlines rules also from Unearthed Arcana.

I am also thinking of saying "just screw it" and replacing the Level Adjustments with an XP Modifier and crapping out an opaque chart for XP required for the combination of level and modifier.
Part of my confusion was that I thought that was the core rules (due to google and the off naming for pathfinders official rule location). Not to mention reading while inebriated.
But I did like your rules because I had some old ad&d books and tried to convince my friends to play it for a throwback game. They decided not to.... and we’ll now half a continent is full of nearly unkillable undead because they never stoped that event.