Quote Originally Posted by GeneralVryth View Post
It's not the same thing though, that is exactly my point. You can have both the ability to rage and cast spells, you just can't do both at the same time. The player/character still have a choice of which they want to use in a given situation. The bad design pattern I was talking about would if you have spell-casting, therefor you can never have the rage ability even if you had a level that should grant it. There is no choice beyond the level up anymore, which if you have another reason to want levels in the class (Barbarian in this case) a dead level is created (well mostly dead).
Eh. This is a symptom of how wonky level by level multiclassing is rather than a core design issue. You could easily have exclusive options because they just don't overlap anyways.