Gestalt rating system

[Urudin]

Hello,
Currently I am running a gestalt campaign. To rule out overlapping of roles and take out some complication for newer players I have decided to come up with a rating system. Currently it works in the way, that in gestalt, each character can have on both sides maximum of 1.5 of the points. The rating looks like that:
1 - Full casting classes such as sorcerer, psion
0.75 - Warlock, factoctum, TOB classes,
0.5 - some variants of ranger and paladin, monk
0.25 - usual ranger and paladin and classes similar to that

Currently, I am wondering about two things:
1. Is the system even useful? I am usually lenient DM, I allow to do a lot of things, so is there even a real reason I should be limiting my players (while we were starting 1 year ago, the 3 players had little to no experience, and the system was made to protect them from stepping into each other's shoes and have a bad feeling and from making some of the mistakes)?
2. whether to change the system to the one based on the tiers, considering the fact that the tier system is made by more experienced players
3. If I would continue using the system, how the incarnum based clases would be dealt with? Should they be 0.75 or 0.5? Where should the bard go?

What do you think about it?

[ExLibrisMortis]

A system like this is useful, but you have to be careful with your ratings. Usually, people base it off (a version of) the tier system, which has the advantage that you don't have to run through a list of classes yourself. Looking at your system, you're already using the tier system, but you've moved the monk up a tier, and the ranger and paladin down a tier. You're doing the following:

4 points - tier 1 and tier 2
3 points - tier 3 (bard and totemist go here)
2 points - tier 4 and monks (incarnate goes here)
1 point - tier 5 and ranger and paladin (soulborn goes here)
Up to six points at once.

I would suggest keeping the monk in tier 5, and ranger and paladin in tier 4, but explain to your players why (the reason is that spellcasting is amazing--the most straightforward example I can give is a wand of rhino's rush on a 4th-level paladin). I would also suggest increasing the point amount of each class by 1. Right now, you can have six different tier 5 classes gestalted together, which is an absolute mess. Increasing the point values gets you a system like this:

5 points - tier 1 and tier 2
4 points - tier 3
3 points - tier 4
2 points - tier 5
Up to eight points at once. If you have a point left, you can trade it for improved base attack, a good save, or 2-4 skill points/level (DM discretion).

Now, you can still have most of the combinations you could before, but not quite as many low-tier classes. This is not a power restriction, it's a complexity restriction. Soulborn//divine mind//monk//samurai//marshal//hexblade may not be more powerful than a simple bard//crusader, but it's a hell of a lot more work to put together, and you did mention having some newer players.

[Urudin]

Thank you for your reply. First thing is, that at the begining i wouldn't want to show new players anything like the tier system. Writing something myself and explaing it to them, with only a handful of classes (it started from core+binder and warlock) was way easier for them to understand. About the monk, originally it had even higher rating - 0.75, however it was later changed to lower one. The problem is, that 2 levels of monk dip actually offer 2 bonus feats, 2 feats, sub-par two weapon fighting and +AC from WIS. Actually, in my opinion, monk shines more in gestalt than in normal game.

The information that might be important for the problem is that since players were new, the vancian casters are almost completely gone (I haven't touched factoctum and chameleon). Instead of cleric you are sorcerer with turn undead and domains for additional spells known. If you are sorcerer, you have bloodline or some other stuff. Even paladins and rangers have limited spells known. I also have banned the prestige classes such as incantrix, Iot7V, limited polymorph cheese and other balance issues.

About the complexity restriction, the problem is that while when we started campaign one year ago, the players were new to playing, and I was new to DMing and I was afraid of dealing with players stepping into each other's toes. However, now the situation changed a little bit:
1. When we started playing there was issue of lack of experience, now it is more or less gone,
2. Because of the lack of experience I was afraid of both players stepping on each other's toes and me not being able to prepare adventures for non-standard party. Now I would not see that as a problem, as our grup matured a little bit.
3. I was also seeing lack of diversity problem, because we started from level 1. And at the beginning, there are a lot of more chances for similarities. Now we are at level 11, I do not see how for example, sorcerer/spontaneus cleric would be similar to cleric/fighter. While the former would probably be the caster-only, and actually less powerful in battle, but more in the diversity.
4. When our group started we had 3 inexperienced players, now I have recruited additional 2 more-or-less experienced players, so there will be 5 players with mixed system master, however none of them will be completely green.

So, the point is, that do I really need to care about the complexity of characters? Is it going to be an issue in party of 5, that they are going to be doing similar things? Isn't it just me tilting at the windmills? Or aren't those non-necessary restrictions at that point of campaign?

[gkathellar]

It might be useful, but I could also see it disorienting new players. The big thing to stress with gestalt is that if your classes both want your standard actions, you generally won't be able to use both, so a mix of passive and active abilities comes highly recommended. The name of the game is synergy, or at least avoiding action conflicts. That's also why (as you intuit) gestalt can make decent use of classes that are terribad in normal play. Action economy concerns can also have a chilling effect on the combination of high-power caster classes, although that varies (it's more true for offensive casters than buffers, and the druid comes packaged with strong non-casting abilities that easily make up the difference).

[HouseRules]

Do not necro my old post, but my Sub-Tier System (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?561611) tried to create more details to show the gaps of the tiers. Tier 1-3 have large gaps, while Tier 4-6 have small gaps. The largest gap is between Tier 2 and Tier 3.

My Tiering the Spells (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570988) is another attempt to create a reasonable rating system, but too many veterans on the site believe that the tier of spells should be obvious.

[Cosi]

Full Casting + Anything is generally still going to be better than pretty much any combination of things that are not full casting. I think giving gestalt to some characters is a good solution to some problems, but the typical systems proposed for this are simultaneously too simple and too complex. Gestalt really helps classes like the Warblade, which is reasonably effective in combat, but dead useless outside it. Combining that with the Factotum, which has a variety of utility, but doesn't do enough on its own, produces a reasonable character for a party of Wizards and Clerics.

My preferred solution would be to cut the absolute worst classes (Monk, Fighter, etc) and replace them with the feats from Unearthed Arcana's Generic Classes, take the classes that are at roughly Warblade level, and let people combine two of those. So like Bard//Warlock or Crusader//Incarnate or whatever. Maybe give full casters a small buff (like moving the Wizard to the Fighter's bonus feat progression). I think that does a better job of encouraging people to combine two weak classes, while avoiding doing weird fractional math.

[HouseRules]

Full Casting + Anything is generally still going to be better than pretty much any combination of things that are not full casting.

Healer (Tier 5) and Warrior (Tier 6).

[Cosi]

Healer (Tier 5) and Warrior (Tier 6).

Well, yes, that is why I said "generally". That said, even the worst of the full casters (Healer and Warmage) are still at least on-par with non-casters.

[ExLibrisMortis]

The information that might be important for the problem is that since players were new, the vancian casters are almost completely gone (I haven't touched factoctum and chameleon). Instead of cleric you are sorcerer with turn undead and domains for additional spells known. If you are sorcerer, you have bloodline or some other stuff. Even paladins and rangers have limited spells known. I also have banned the prestige classes such as incantrix, Iot7V, limited polymorph cheese and other balance issues.
You should mention this sort of thing before anything else, because I can't look at your houserules, and they're quite important when answering your questions. However, I think that my first reply still has my answer, so it's all good. I recommend not having too many "training wheels" houserules and moving away from them earlier rather than later. I don't think the tier system will be confusing for them; if anything, it will streamline their view of the game and provide additional background to the rating system you've devised.

On the monk specifically: assigning it a higher tier based on its first two levels is only fair if you are assigning lower tiers to the higher levels, or banning the use of levels 3-20.

[VladtheLad]

Hello,
Currently I am running a gestalt campaign. To rule out overlapping of roles and take out some complication for newer players I have decided to come up with a rating system. Currently it works in the way, that in gestalt, each character can have on both sides maximum of 1.5 of the points. The rating looks like that:
1 - Full casting classes such as sorcerer, psion
0.75 - Warlock, factoctum, TOB classes,
0.5 - some variants of ranger and paladin, monk
0.25 - usual ranger and paladin and classes similar to that

Currently, I am wondering about two things:
1. Is the system even useful? I am usually lenient DM, I allow to do a lot of things, so is there even a real reason I should be limiting my players (while we were starting 1 year ago, the 3 players had little to no experience, and the system was made to protect them from stepping into each other's shoes and have a bad feeling and from making some of the mistakes)?
2. whether to change the system to the one based on the tiers, considering the fact that the tier system is made by more experienced players
3. If I would continue using the system, how the incarnum based clases would be dealt with? Should they be 0.75 or 0.5? Where should the bard go?

What do you think about it?

1. I don't think you are limiting your players in contrast your system seems to do the opposite of limiting your players.

2. Maybe I don't your system is that different tbh.

3. Bard should go at 0,75

Personally I have 3 tiers.
Tier 1 is fullcasting classes
Tier 2 is semi casting classes like the bard, psychic warrior and even the duskblade
Tier 3 are all the rest (from fighter to hexblade/paladin/ranger)

Tier 3 classes can gestalt with other tier 3 classes at level 5 gaining 2 levels every level in the gestalt class until they reach level 10 where they end up 10/10 so 10 fighter/10 rogue. Then at level 11 they begin gaining 2 levels in a 3rd gestalt class. So they end up 20/20/20 at level 20 so fighter/rogue/knight 20.
Tier 2 classes start gestalting with a tier 1 class at level 8 and finish the gestalt at level 16 for example barbarian/bard 16/16.
Tier 1 classes dont gestalt at all

I like this because low tier classes are pretty ok at low levels no need to start out as gestalt.
You still need class specific fixes and certain spell nerfs. You should also be careful with what books you allow since now the combos can get crazier.


Your system seems to end with a bit too strong combos for my taste. Sorcerer/paladin/rogue, Psion/fighter/rogue or stuff like ranger/fighter/barbarian/rogue/knight/hexblade seem excessive to me.
It also seems that you allow some prestige classes even if you ban stuff like incantrix or IotSV which complicate things even further.
Or perhaps am i misunderstanding sth about your rating?

[liquidformat]

honestly it seems like a lot of effort that isn't actually going to make much of a difference for gestalt. the power of gestalt is typically nerfed when you try and do a combination like wizard/cleric. You are giving yourself a massive list of spells to choose from sure but you still are limited by what you can do in a round and how you can utilize those spells. In this case more isn't really better, my bab and fort save are better than a standard wizard but I really have made no change over a standard cleric and if I took cloistered cleric my bab still sucks.

The power of gestalt tends to come from things like sorc/swiftblade with paladin/blade dancer (could think of anything super interesting off top of head for this side) where you can leverage the two sides to utilize different class features and can even make otherwise bad classes pop because of interesting features that really shine when they can be used in tandem.

[HouseRules]

Tier Caster Spells and Powers Martial Maneuvers
1 5/5 Level 8-9 Not Applicable
2 4/5 Level 6-7 Not Applicable
3 3/5 Level 4-5 Level 7-9
4 2/5 Level 2-3 Level 4-6
5 1/5 Level 0-1 Level 1-3
6 0/5 Extraordinary Abilities 0 if available


Just remember that many abilities are weaker than their levels suggested, and others are broken powerful.

Partial Casters tend to have abilities at reduced levels.
Some of Bard's 6th Level Spells are Sorcerer's/Wizard's 8th Level Spells.
Some of Paladin's 4th Level Spells are Cleric's 6th Level Spells.
Some of Ranger's 4th Level Spells are Druid's 6th Level Spells.

Summoner's (Pathfinder) 6th Level Spell Summon Monster IX.
Summoner's (Pathfinder) 4th Level Spell Summon Monster VI.
Summoner's (Pathfinder) 2nd Level Spell Summon Monster III.

Supplement I Greyhawk
Summon Monster 1 is a 3rd Level Spell.
Summon Monster 8 would be a 10th Level Spell if we are to expand.
Summon Monster 9 would be an 11th Level Spell if we are to expand.

Pretty much everything that is on a 1-9 scale matches spell levels, with few exceptions. Martial Maneuvers are explicitly combat oriented, so they cannot deal with other aspects of the game. That's why they do not go so far. Soulmend Level should be treated equivalent to Spell Level, Essentia are more like any level Spell Slots? Chakra Binds not sure yet?

Subsystem Checklist

Spellcasting, base class Too Many to List all.
Meldshaping (blue pseudo-magic items), base classes Totemist, Incarnate, Soulborn
Invocation (at-will spells), base class Warlock, Dragonfire Adept
Psionic Powers ("mana point" system), base class Psion, Wilder, Psychic Warrior, Ardent
Initiate Martial Maneuvers (martial arts), base class Swordsage, Crusader, Warblade
Binding and Vestige (possession for powers), base class Binder
Shadow Magic, base class Shadowcaster
TrueNaming (skill-check magic), base class Truenamer
Auras (buffs), base class Warlord
Infusion (spells on items), base class Artificer, Psychic Artificer
Inspiration (1 inspiration point = 1 spell any level capable), Factotum

[VladtheLad]

honestly it seems like a lot of effort that isn't actually going to make much of a difference for gestalt. the power of gestalt is typically nerfed when you try and do a combination like wizard/cleric. You are giving yourself a massive list of spells to choose from sure but you still are limited by what you can do in a round and how you can utilize those spells. In this case more isn't really better, my bab and fort save are better than a standard wizard but I really have made no change over a standard cleric and if I took cloistered cleric my bab still sucks.

The power of gestalt tends to come from things like sorc/swiftblade with paladin/blade dancer (could think of anything super interesting off top of head for this side) where you can leverage the two sides to utilize different class features and can even make otherwise bad classes pop because of interesting features that really shine when they can be used in tandem.

His rules don't allow for a full caster combination though.

[Troacctid]

Right, and why not? Two full casters is not exactly the automatic best thing you could be doing with gestalt. And if it's what your player wants to do, why not let them? It's really hard to make a list like this that's actually balanced anyway.

[liquidformat]

Right, and why not? Two full casters is not exactly the automatic best thing you could be doing with gestalt. And if it's what your player wants to do, why not let them? It's really hard to make a list like this that's actually balanced anyway.

this is my point, in gestalt you aren't getting much return by going with two full casters since doing something like cleric/wizard or better yet wizard/archivist isn't really adding much power just more spells. I am not seeing the point of restricting it, there are much more potent things that can be done like making uber gish or doing something like making a MoMF that retains full casting. It is a lot of complicated effort to make this restriction that doesn't end up doing much.

[Urudin]

Your system seems to end with a bit too strong combos for my taste. Sorcerer/paladin/rogue, Psion/fighter/rogue or stuff like ranger/fighter/barbarian/rogue/knight/hexblade seem excessive to me.
It also seems that you allow some prestige classes even if you ban stuff like incantrix or IotSV which complicate things even further.

While for my game those combos are not too strong, unfortunately I see some of the prestige classes to powerful and balance breaking. While it is fairly easy to do some fixing of the mechanics and adjust it to Tier 2 of base classes and tier +1 of prestige classes, getting everything in the game world for players and for the DM side would consume too much time for me. Especially if we'd go to the point of playing tippyverse.


Right, and why not? Two full casters is not exactly the automatic best thing you could be doing with gestalt. And if it's what your player wants to do, why not let them? It's really hard to make a list like this that's actually balanced anyway.

I wrote about that in my previous posts - when we started I wanted to deal with people having every role covered, and we had only 3 people + I wanted everyone to have his precious moments of doing something unique with his character.
About the balance issues, the main problem I've had were with persistent divine power cleric gestalted with full casting and both sides full casting wild-shape druid or full-casting//MoMF.
Finally, I have decided that while i allow for almost any combination while the story of character is sensible, the ones using druid and cleric have to go through me. If someone wants to use cleric and fighter to be his diety's champion it is fine, but if someone wants to use persistent divine power in tandem with full casting, or worse, full casting + wildshap abuses, then I do not want to deal with that levels of power and balancing them.

[VladtheLad]

this is my point, in gestalt you aren't getting much return by going with two full casters since doing something like cleric/wizard or better yet wizard/archivist isn't really adding much power just more spells. I am not seeing the point of restricting it, there are much more potent things that can be done like making uber gish or doing something like making a MoMF that retains full casting. It is a lot of complicated effort to make this restriction that doesn't end up doing much.

Ah I assumed people though wizard/cleric was stronger than I don't know ranger/wizard. Then again I could be wrong its an issue i haven't though much about and I guess it also depends on what other houserules you use.

[HouseRules]

Ah I assumed people though wizard/cleric was stronger than I don't know ranger/wizard. Then again I could be wrong its an issue i haven't though much about and I guess it also depends on what other houserules you use.

Better BAB = Better Ranged Touch Attacks (Spells).

[Cosi]

Ah I assumed people though wizard/cleric was stronger than I don't know ranger/wizard. Then again I could be wrong its an issue i haven't though much about and I guess it also depends on what other houserules you use.

It is. Caster//Caster (particularly Caster//Druid or SAD Caster//Caster) is by far the best gestalt choice. You can get as much "passive class" as you need out of a second caster, because you can do things like casting more buffs or feeding more spell slots into celerity and the like. Ranger//Wizard or Rogue//Cleric are certainly good, but pretty much all of their advantages (particularly past low levels) are beaten out by a second suite of casting. However, that's not to say that gestalts like Warblade//Binder or Mystic Ranger//Dragonfire Adept are completely pointless. They're not as good as Caster//Caster gestalts, but they provide a much larger relative advantage by giving characters abilities in areas they don't normally have, while casters are generally all-around competent even without gestalting.