Gestalt: Wraparound or Parallel?

[Drakevarg]

My intent with my current E6 campaign is to allow for continual broadening of skillset while curbing raw power by using gestalt rules. However, one thing that's occurred to me that I haven't seen specific rules for (since E6 doesn't have rules for Gestalting and Gestalt rules seem to assume you're doing it from the start) is how to handle multiclassing.

Now, I've always liked multiclassing; "no multiclassing penalties" is such a basic houserule of mine I sometimes forget multiclassing penalties even exist by RAW. But in the case of a gestalt campaign, my question is thus: should gestalting be handled as a wraparound of the 6-level span E6 occurs in (for example, a Ranger 4/Barbarian 2 taking another level in Barbarian becomes Ranger 4/Barbarian 2//Barbarian 1) or to avoid that getting too confusing, should gestalting happen in parallel: which is to say, the first level of a class ALWAYS goes on the first HD, the second level on the second HD, etc. This approach seems like it'd be a lot less paperwork, but has the downside of making it so multiclassing characters trade off magnitude for breadth. Which might be a good thing, might not be.

I'm not exactly sure how to handle it, myself, so I thought I'd get the forum's opinion on the matter.

[NomGarret]

Given that we're talking about both gestalt and E6, there's a limit to how official any answer could be. So, being left to our preferences, I would go with the parallel approach. This way, you keep the whole party on the same path, where they don't start gestalting until after 6.
You'd have to track your level by level progression, so you know whether to get more hp because you're pairing a level in ranger with a level in barbarian. Probably worth going with standard hp in this case, whether that be average, max, or some other number, rather than remembering what you rolled each level.

You still only get 6 levels of any given class, no matter where you spread them, so you're not breaking the power ceiling, just consistently raising the floor.

[Drakevarg]

I'm leaning towards the parallel levels as well, though not necessarily insisting on no multiclassing until 6th level (though obviously it'd be the better idea). My logic being the "jack of all trades, master of none" thing taken to its extreme basically turns you into Jones from MGDMT; a human Swiss Army Knife of abandoned hobbies. Or in other words: if you have two people, one of whom goes through basic to special forces training, and one of whom spends the same span of time taking a bunch of entry-level summer classes in a variety of skillsets, the two are not going to have the same degree of conditioning even if they spent the same amount of time training.