My house rule for multiclassing

So I've noticed some strong opinions on multiclassing on this forum, and I've been asked about it in my games as well, so I thought I'd try my hand at coming up with some rules for it. I call these house rules 'Retraining' rather than 'multiclassing', and I go over them in detail on my blog, but here's the short version:

First you have to find someone who can and is willing to retrain you, generally for a substantial sum of money. Retraining takes two months, plus one month for each level you have when you start; double that time for magic-users.

Once that period ends, you immediately become first level in the new class (in addition to your old class levels), improving saves if they are better than your old ones, and gaining hit points as if you had just leveled up in the new class.

You level up when you gain enough XP to advance as though all your class levels were your new class, so a magic-user 3/fighter 1 needs 16,000 XP to level (enough for a 4th level fighter to reach 5th level). Note that this will take some time as Retraining awards a class level with no corresponding XP gain.

Additionally, some of your old class abilities atrophy during the Retraining time. A 1st level fighter who Retrains only gets +1 to-hit or +1 to AC with Press and Defensive Fighting respectively. A higher level fighter retains the normal bonuses to those actions, but loses 1 point of attack bonus instead. A specialist who retrains has a maximum skill of 5 in 6, any skills with 6 in 6 lose a point. Also, the specialist loses one point any any skills of his/her choice for every odd-numbered level (lose 1 point at 1st, 2 at 3rd, 3 at 5th, etc.). A magic-user who retrains loses one spell slot of each level with two or more slots.

You can only advance in your new class after Retraining. If you want to go back to your old class, you have to Retrain again at full price, but the time is based only on the number of levels in the second class. If this happens, you regain any abilities lost to atrophy from the first class, but the second one atrophies as normal. You may also Retrain to a third class if you wish, using total character level to determine the time it takes. In this case, both of the first two classes experience atrophy as normal.

I don't use clerics in my game, but if you do, they shouldn't be allowed to Retrain as magic-users, and vice-versa. Demihumans, if you use them (I don't), should not be allowed to Retrain at all, nor should a human character be permitted to Retrain as a demihuman, because that's just dumb.

Last edited by DangeonDelver (2015-04-12 23:11:33)